A Web Analyst's Guide to the Degurgitate Methodology

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Stop Regurgitating all of your Web Analytics Data - Start Degurgitating

This is a classic mistake. The analyst in the room wants to show people how much work they did and they show people all the things. 

"Here are all of our page views and sessions for the quarter"

"Here's the chart of our bounce rate by top pages viewed"

"Check out this dashboard of our top traffic sources and the conversions from them"

You get the picture? Do any of these kinds of activities ring a bell in your organization? If so you need to rethink it all. Any analytics platform with the most basic set up alone gives you a regurgitation of about 80% of everything you will ever want regarding your user behavior, but if your analyst just regurgitates all of that in a spreadsheet or powerpoint to you monthly then clearly you are not getting any value from that. You're also not allowing the analyst to really use their brain. They have one, but it's laid dormant due to your need for all the things. 

This is why I use the term Degurgitate. You have to have a great analyst or analysts review your data based on the overall digital strategy of your website. Here are the steps to the Degurgitate methodology: 


1) Create a clear digital measurement model that adheres to your company's goals:
This means to get the vision for your company, the objectives it has, with the help of your higher-ups and other team leads, find out which goals are part of those objectives, create quantifiable KPIs that can be measured regularly, and finally isolate the target audience within your data to ensure you are hitting your marks.

2) Data to Insights: You have the right data, finally, hooray you! What good is it though if you don't use the remarkable brain of your analyst. This is the 80-20 rule of Web Analytics. Spend up to 20% of your money on the tool, but invest 80% on the analyst which means most of their job is deriving insights and thinking clearly about the goals of the company. As the analyst deeply reviews the data they can provide meaningful insights that can start to form ideas on how to improve or create opportunities for the future.

3) From Insights to Impact: Insights have been created, but what to do with them? The last step of the Degurgitate model is to move to solid recommendations based off of the insights. As you create them around your goals which lead to your objectives of the company, you now have something definitive to present to your management and the rest of your teams. At this meeting, you can actually decide what to prioritize, and how to implement.

Conclusion: 
That's it - from Data to Insights which lead to Impact. That's the Degurgitate model. Find your cadence of review, but this is a very proven process in how to grow your digital business. Good luck in your quest. For great resources around some of the things I shared, please look up Avinash Kaushik

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