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You see, I’m 21 weeks now and already had my second-trimester ultrasound at around 19 weeks. Unfortunately, the baby played shy and they didn’t get a good enough view of all the things they needed to, so I had to go back for another ultrasound. What a difference a couple of weeks make! The baby was much more developed, and thankfully much more cooperative.

Now you might be wondering what redoing an ultrasound has to do with your data – but I promise you there is method to my madness.

You see, perhaps you’ve just launched your site, or a new campaign, and you eagerly go in to your analytics system and check your data. Perhaps the early results you look at suggest things are going swimmingly – or pehaps they suggest the opposite.

Just like my first ultrasound was a little too early to get really good pictures, sometimes a first look at your data can be too early to know the full story. The first data check can give you an indicaition of how things are going, but maybe you haven’t given the data enough time to mature and tell you that story.

If you’re doing an advertising campaign, then chances are you will get a good sense of how things are progressing sooner rather than later, but if you’ve just launched a site and perhaps don’t have a huge marketing budget to promote it, you might need to wait a little longer. You might find the first check shows minimal results, but then a mention somewhere gives you an unanticipated traffic boost.

Here are five simple tips to better analyze your data:

1. Set timeframes for data checks (daily/weekly/monthly – depends on what it is you’re doing and how much traffic you anticipate) and create benchmarks or goals for each data check.

2. Don’t be afraid to adjust the set goals once you’ve got some results under your belt.
 
3. Loweing your goals isn’t a bad thing if that’s what it calls for – but try to find the answers as to why you need to do so (too aggressive, unrealistic, smaller niche, not getting as many ad impressions as originally thought, etc.)
 
4. Look for a story – Data always has a story to tell, good or bad. You just need to look hard enough to figure out what that story is and how it is relevant to your site or business.
 
5. Learn from the results. Don’t just look at them and leave them alone, optimize where you can, or if you can’t optimize currently, write out points for the future of what you will do differently (or keep the same) based on the results.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 10th, 2009 at 10:39 am and is filed under Web analytics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.