Google Analytics feature request…

For a free package, you cannot beat Google Analytics. But now surely we are getting to the point where the clever engineers behind the scenes are building a list of new features that will be bundled into a ‘premium’ package, where a subscription fee will be levied.

Personally, I would be over the moon if this were to happen, because then we would be able to request features with more of an expectation that they will take them seriously (not that they don’t now, it’s just that if we paid for it then they would have to take us even *more* seriously).

One of the good things about GA is that they keep your analytics data for a very long time. We’ve had our account with them since 2006, and being able to go back that far to analyse traffic and behaviour is very powerful. Sometimes though, it would be nice to be able to delete or ignore some data – for instance one particular institute in Tempe, US, decided to build a bot that executes javascript and then crawl all over our site. For the most part, we can happily use GA in the knowledge that most spiders don’t execute javascript, but this javascript-executing-bot now appears in my GA data (as GA data-collection is javascript driven).

So I’ve got this nasty spike of data that I’d just like to be able to select, then hit the ‘ignore forever’ button.

I guess, that when Google do decide to tap into the thousands of organisations that really want more features and are happy to pay a premium, this would be one of the many features I’d ask for… as well as more Goals, better page-flow analysis, page-rendering-time data, more than one custom dimension, the ability to break out traffic from Google across the country-specific domains, etc etc etc…

End-user performance monitoring

Gomez is cool. We’ve been using their “Actual XF” service for a while now – a service which lets us report on how long it takes for the user to see our webpages appear in their browser after they’ve clicked a link to get there.

You can do reporting to different levels depending on whether you want to measure the total response time, the perceived render time etc. Because the data comes from every single visit to your website from real website visitors (rather than an automated datacenter-based script) we get ‘real’ data on performance. Unfortunately they only keep data for 33 days, I’m working on them to increase that

Here’s a chart that shows the performance of our product pages over the last couple of weeks, segmented by region:

The good thing here is that each datapoint is the aggregate of all page visits during that time period, not just a single request from a monitoring station. I know now that this is what our end-users experience – a constant source of debate when management are experiencing (or told about) something different to what you are reporting…

http://www.gomez.com

Google analytics – zero visitors but 30,000 pageviews?

Surely something wrong here – look at the following graphs: circled in red are the visitors and pageviews for Monday – how have we got 30,000 pageviews with zero visitors?

Edit: Ok – this is me getting too keen to see the data before it is ready.  Apparently, the visitors number is updated less frequently than the pageviews number so it is possible that visitors hasn’t been updated at all for that day, but the pageviews has. So, if this is true, later on today I should see the visitors number climb upto normal levels…  Funny, I’ve been using GA for years and this is the first time I’ve noticed this.

Align strategy to organisation

All companies fall into line along an axis where at one extreme clear strategy is developed and at the other end no semblance of strategy can be found.  The first reaction is usually that it’s better to be at the end with a clear strategy.  Makes sense right?  Get all your brightest people together and thrash out that differentiating, revenue winning, cost effective, visionary, IP-rich all-in-all-damn-good-strategy.

I’m pretty sure this isn’t the whole answer.  There must be organisations everywhere doing this – boardrooms stuffed with execs ’strategising’.  So what is more important than the strategy?  You know the answer - The Strategy is worth nothing but hot air unless it can be executed.  And who executes the strategy?  The organisation.  Every single person.  If every person within that organisation doesn’t have a explicit link to the company strategy, then you don’t have control.  Consider this: you have this company with six departments.  Each department has a head and a bunch of staff – imagine a road-cone.  It should be just like a real cone – you pick it up by the top and the rest of it comes up as well in unison.  You move it across 1m and cunningly, the whole cone moves.  An executive team are those that set the strategy and should be able to pick up all six departmental cones with ease and move them in the direction of The Strategy.  The reason moving these cones about is easy has nothing to do with the strategy, but all to do with the fact that from the top down, each department is explicitly linked to whatever the strategic line is.  Each head of department has a grasp on their people such that when the company strategy shifts, the entire department can shift with it, just like the cone.

So what holds the department together – what is the glue?  Basically it’s the roles, responsibilities and objectives you give people.  But that’s nothing new.  Everyone does that.  The trick to achieving the cone is, again, obvious:  the role, responsibility and objective of that department must first be defined at the topmost level, before breaking into more detailed chunks and cascaded downwards through the ranks until every person in that department has their little piece to focus on.  This nugget of strategy holds great importance – it demonstrates clearly to the employee what their role is in the company, which particular strand of strategy they are contributing to and a ‘thing’ by which to measure their performance.  If that person performs and meets their objectives (of course the company does everything it can to incentivise them to do so), then that is one small step on the way to executing the overall strategy in a controlled and predictable manner.  In this model every manager in the department has objectives that are the sum of their subordinates’ objectives - all the way to the top, giving rise to this inexorable pressure pushing upwards to ensure that all objectives are fulfilled and hence, doing it’s job in executing strategy.

All companies would do well to be responsive and reactive to shifts in their industry or new ideas such that the executive team can bring about change quickly and as painlessly as possible.  This cascade method of distributing strategy is one way to achieve that.  Tweak a bit of the strategy at the top, and let the changes cascade downwards.  Focus automatically shifts, and the organisation understands what is going on.  I’ve been working on a model like this, and time will tell whether it is successful or not, but as I recall from one Harvard Business Review paper I read once, it isn’t so much the strategy that matters, it is whether you can execute that strategy effectively.  As soon as you can execute a strategy you have the tools to take any strategy and execute it – the glorious things about strategies is that you can dream them up in one afternoon – getting it done is an entirely different thing, and on another scale of difficulty entirely.