Web analytics, simply put, is the process of measuring online behavior and communicating the results to some audience, with the intent of driving positive business outcomes.  The operative phrase being  “communicating the results”--that’s the hardest part of web analytics, believe it or not.  Do you remember those math teachers you had in school who were really good at solving math problems, but confused the whole class when they try to teach how to solve it?  Analysts, struggle with the same problem.  Most have a firm grasp of what’s important to measure, how they should go about measuring online, and what the data is.  Few have the ability to articulate what that means, and fewer can articulate it to an executive audience.  Communication is the ‘last mile’ of the analytics value chain.

The difficulty during the ‘communication’ phase is, IMHO, two-fold.   First, there’s a clear challenge communicating results to the audience in an accessible way--meaning that the narrative should create a compelling, step-by-step ‘story’ that a stakeholder can follow.  Think of it this way; even though the ‘punchline’ of the analysis is the first few paragraphs, the story leading up to the conclusion should be logical and sequential upon closer inspection.  Indeed, the more compelling the call-to-action, the more clear the supporting analytical ‘story’ needs to be.

Second, the audience typically needs additional context to any analytical content.  This has more to do with the detail found within the analytic ‘story‘ rather than the structure and layout.  I’m talking about more than just definitions to terms--stakeholders need to understand that the dip in graph 2 is seasonal and expected.  Or they need to understand that the increased conversion rate is actually artificial due to a decrease in corresponding site traffic.  These are the kinds of discussion points that are difficult to capture effectively in e-mail or within a traditional document.  A Wave could more easily include these contextual elements and be updated in real-time by both stakeholders & analysts.

At least, that’s the theory.

I get that wave isn’t a panacea for every ill associated with communicating complex analytical ideas.  I’m still not sure if there needs to be a custom plugin that can provide some of these features or if it can work out-of-the-box.  Further, I’m still not sure that a wiki, well implemented, would do the same job (albeit without the real-time chatty feature).  But I intend to play around with Wave enough until I’m convinced it’s the wrong tool for the job.

I agree with that assessment, up to a point.  I'm fortunate enough to do the whole analytics 'enchilada' at HP, including tagging & data collection.  Given the choice between doing tagging and actual analysis, I would choose analysis any day of the week.  So why present this topic, and why were there so many other attendees that were interested?

The short answer is this: everyone knows tagging determines how well analysis turns out.  The dirty-little-secret that never comes up during the sales cycle is that the 'tagging', or the method by which meta-data is marshaled into an analytics system, is a process that's easily botched.  If your IT team doesn't understand something; if you have any ambiguity in your definitions or technical specifications; if there are different stakeholder priorities--botching will likely ensue.  Even with the best specs, availability, and priority, it amazes me how different stakeholders interpret the same well defined standard differently.

Even when we get it right, beacons & tags tend to grow organically over time.  I know that sounds really cool as market speak, because organic is good--right?  Unfortunately, cancer also grows organically--and also with very little effort from your IT team.  Over time, we have the same site & customer meta-data being marshaled through an any number of vendor-specific variables that ultimately track the same information.

The reason "Universal Tag" was an attractive topic comes down to these basic principles, all of which were brought up during the two tagging sessions:

• Universal Tag as a Data Standard: the Universal Tag is an attempt to undo years of not having a common foundation for good metadata.  We live in a post-Babel analytics world where everyone speaks different "data dialects".  Some of our metadata languages are similar enough that you get the gist of what's being said--perhaps Coremetrics tagging & Omniture tagging are like French and Spanish.  Others are a farther apart -- compare your typical spotlight tag with any web analytics tag, for example.  Many attendees were interested in a Universal Tag as a type of data dictionary that enables a common metadata language.
• Universal Tags to Simplify Implementation: still others were looking at Universal Tags as a solution to manage the complexity of actual implementation.  There were specific solutions mentioned, such as Tealium and JSHub.  I think this is a bigger problem that, as one of the participants said, "relates back to an organizations ability to have strong analytics & governance capabilities", regardless of the overall tagging solution used.
• Universal Tags to Simplify Data Transport: others were looking for a single tag that reduces the number of physical beacons on the page.  Here, we're thinking about the customer experience--why should we have 10 different physical beacons send back ultimately the same 'stuff' and not just have one beacon ping them all later?  As nice as this sounds, this is a much more lofty goal given another key element that was brought up: can we rely on vendors to solve this problem?  The general consensus there is no, not really.  In retrospect, I think this was a harder problem to solve than the universal data dictionary.

So there you have it: the problems we discussed during our X Change huddle.  So what are we (collectively) going to do about it?

First, I believe we need further discussions on the topic.  This isn't something that we can solve after two meetings, regardless of how productive they were.    Michael Scherotter from Microsoft brought up the point that perhaps we're trying to solve the wrong problem when it comes to 'tagging' in JavaScript, which many currently take for granted as the main language of a Universal Tag.  Perhaps that will change as new platforms emerge, some of which may not support JavaScript.

Second, I believe this effort needs to be community sponsored and "open" in the most liberal terms.  Many side conversations after the huddle pointed out that there's a sense of wanting to 'take back' this data from the vendors.  That's not to say that we, as customers, don't 'own' the data in the first place--but rather, there's a strong desire to have various e-marketing & analytics vendors become smart enough to know "our" data, rather than have us constantly place our data in "their" format.  And that's a tall order for our analytics community at the end of the day.  I'll write more on that later.

So what did we miss?  Were there other topics or ideas that you would like to have seen?  Please post your comments and feedback so we can continue this discussion.

Finally, I'd like to thank all the participants for their thoughtful contribution to this subject.  Many of the ideas summarized here weren't even on the radar before the huddle--these are truly community driven concepts.  As with many of the X Change huddles, there were a number of ideas presented I hope to use  in the following months at HP.