Depending on your situation, getting leadership buy-in for digital analytics can be a challenge. Resources are needed (people, time, money) to really do it right. But, resources are hard to get until it’s really done right. This isn’t a unique position to be in – to your organization or the industry.

What’s the best way to get buy-in first for using digital analytics and second for getting more resources for digital analytics? First ask yourself a question – it’s a tough one to ask, but it’s essential. Is there a culture of measurement and improvement within the organization?

Digital Analytics helps 1) measure the performance of marketing campaigns and 2) optimize websites. Both of those are about improvement. Digital Analytics helpsimprove. That’s the goal.

Just as important as a willingness to want to improve is the ability to actually do the improving. Taking action may be challenging for different reasons. Discussing improvement is easy, but doing it is hard. Or, it may be a resource thing – “we want to improve, we just can’t get our head above water long enough to do what it takes to improve.” It might be a little bit of both.

Adding to the challenge is the fact that when most people hear the phrase Web or Digital Analytics, they are really only thinking about Google Analytics (GA). But, hopefully you’re probably using (at least some of) the following:

• Google Analytics (or Omniture, Webtrends, Coremetrics, etc.)
• Usability testing (Usertesting.com, Loop11, etc.)
• A/B testing (GA Experiments, Optimizely, Visual Website Optimizer, etc.)
• Click Tracking (GA In-Page Analytics, CrazyEgg, Mouseflow, etc.)
• Customer feedback (Foresee, iPerceptions (4Q), etc.)
• Benchmarking using heuristic evaluations
• Social media analytics (GA social reports, SumAll, Hootsuite, or Radian6, ExactTarget, Sysomos, etc.)
• and hopefully your CRM!

Common Mistakes

Because there are so many aspects of Digital Analytics it can definitely be overwhelming. Making the case to leadership that it is important and that you need help doing it can be even more overwhelming. Start small, but remember first impressions matter.

With that in mind, here are some common mistakes:

1. Forcing too much when the organization isn’t ready (start small).
2. Focusing only on Google Analytics.
3. Not telling a story (for example, just showing numbers and trends week/month after week/month).
4. Not tying campaigns as close to the customer as possible. This can be very difficult to do, especially for higher education websites. It’s worth it to really brainstorm options here.

So – walking into the boss’s office with a session report is probably not the right first impression. The only exception might be if something amazing or catastrophic happens – and then it should be accompanied by a lot more than just the canned Google Analytics session report.

Time to try another angle. Here are a couple examples.

Example 1 – Getting to the “why”

You launch campaign X and you see some big spikes in traffic, but not in conversions. That’s easy to see quickly, but this is just the beginning. It gives you a “red flag”, but shouldn’t make you immediately stop or change that campaign. You know you don’t have enough information yet.

This “red flag” should lead to a process to try and find out “why” (and Google Analytics is a first step, but probably won’t be the only tool you’ll use to figure out “why”):

1. Are the Users from Campaign X bouncing immediately? If the bounce rate is high for that traffic, it could mean a couple things – not the right audience, mismatch between the ad and the landing page, etc. Is it obvious? If not, run a test.
2. Is the campaign getting people who are ready to make a decision?Go to Conversions >> Multi-Channel Funnels >> Assisted Conversions. For the campaign that is driving traffic, but not conversions, is that campaign assisting in any conversions? The campaign could be bringing in people that are still in “research mode” – they aren’t ready to convert just yet.
3. What else are these people doing on the site if they aren’t converting? Create a segment for people coming in from Campaign X. See what else they are doing on your website. Just like in #2, they may be researching more (watching videos, using internal site search, reading a lot of content, etc.). Check to see what else they’re doing.

Step through the possibilities. If these uncover more questions than answers, it’s definitely time to try a test. Sometimes (actually most times) there is no way to know “why” without testing.

Show your boss this analysis (and the decision that was made based on the analysis). It will make a much better impression!

Example 2: Get into your customers shoes

What if you walked into your boss’s office and asked him or her to watch a couple video clips. You’ve been using Usertesting.com to do some usability testing. You have a couple great clips of people really struggling to get to fundamental information on your website.

It’s compelling to watch people struggle.

Benchmarking is a great tool as well – use a heuristic evaluation. Go through a series of tasks on your website and the same on your competitors websites. Get leadership involved in this process if you can. Putting yourself (and leadership) in your customer’s shoes can be very powerful.

No magic bullet

Unfortunately there isn’t a magic bullet – especially if the culture isn’t ready. Start small and really think about how you may approach things in a different way.

I’ll leave you with a list and summary of techniques to try. Hopefully one of them works! Good luck!

1. Start small. What makes the influential people tick? Tell that story.
2. Get out of Google Analytics. I don’t mean not to use GA – it’s awesome. But don’t limit yourself – it’s rare that it will tell you the “why”.
3. Bring in outside help if you can. This can save a ton of time.
4. Get influential people involved in the testing and evaluations.