How to turn analytics data into actionable business insight

In this series of posts, we’ll show you how to unlock actionable business insight from your analytics data. This first article looks at the three step process for data processing.

A definition of web analytics

Many people define analytics as being the ‘process of collecting data about users visiting a website’. For example: where they enter; how long they stay on the site and what pages they visit.

However, this is only a very small part of the process, and analytics can play a much larger part in your business strategy

At DEPT®, we consider analytics to be ‘the process of turning data collected from web analytics tools into actionable business insight, enabling organisations to make informed decisions regarding their digital proposition’.

Data processing: a 3 step process

The whole end-to-end process of turning data into insight can be summarised into three key phases:

1. Input
Data is collected into a web analytics tool.

2. Analysis
Data is reviewed by a web analyst, who segments, compares and benchmarks data to reveal insight.

3. Output
Analysts summarise their findings into reports that provide Key Performance Indicator (KPI) movement, as well as the key underlying trends, changes and activity causing said movement.

The ‘analysis’ phase is the most labour intensive part of the process, and also the most important. It’s in the analysis phase where raw KPI data is translated into meaningful stories behind the data.
In our next post, we’ll be looking more specifically at the analysis phase of the process, exploring how insight can be revealed through data segmentation, benchmarking and comparative analysis.