Is Google Analytics the solution for non-use of web analytics?

What would you do in this situation?

 

You manage an international deployment of Omniture SiteCatalyst with about 2000 stakeholders, but a lot of these folks don’t use the reports.  In fact only about 200 are really active SC users.  Not only is this frustrating, but it is costly from a resource overhead perspective to develop and maintain report sets that aren’t being used. So you think, maybe you should deploy Google Analytics for the non-active stakeholders. They’d be able to get the basic set of reports with no intervention from you, and you could concentrate on managing requirements for the 200 power users.

 

This was the scenario someone presented to me at one of the “one on one” sessions at the recent X Change.

 

I asked whether there was much in the way of current interpretation or education provided to the report stakeholders. There wasn’t. Based on this I said, “I don’t think that deploying Google Analytics is going to resolve the issue; I’d focus on stakeholder education.  Besides, deploying Google Analytics won’t necessarily cut down on your support issues if you need to customize the Google Analytics tracking code to do more than basics. You’ll likely be needing to answer lots of questions, or dealing with confusion about what people are seeing, and so forth.“

 

We continued to chat…even if Google Analytics was deployed, the need for stakeholder education would still exist.  Thinking about this now, a 2000 stakeholder deployment is quite a staggering figure, and I’ll admit to never having faced anything of that scale, but I’d approach it with an emphasis on communications and education, and take a phased approach. This is how I have deployed web analytics, content management, email, web and other software throughout my career, and it seems to help ensure acceptance and result in value for the people using it.

 

With that in mind, I wanted to share the third book of my Summer Reading series…the others being Mental Models and Multichannel Marketing. This last book, Words That Work was written by Frank Lutz, known for his political pollstering work. I listened to an interview with him some months ago, and was pretty fascinated by his take on communication, and speech, and how people relate to what they hear.  It’s interesting to me that while we talk about Voice of Customer being so important for our external audiences, we sometimes forget about our internal customers…web analytics stakeholders and what makes sense to them. Pick up the book and read the first chapter…you’ll get most of what you need there. The rest of the book is ok…sometimes a bit repetitive and heavily emphasizing the nature of political communication, but the first chapter will be a good foundation for how to communicate web analytics to people in your organization.

 

So, what would you? Throw the masses Google Analytics? Spend time on education and training? Both? Neither?