Working for multiple companies and various company types, from small to enterprise, does not always create the best scenario in terms of openness to suggestions and offered insights.
I once suggested to some people in a certain company that all data, both apparently pertinent and questionably unnecessary, should be shared across all their social networking and commerce channels. They frankly told me, “We don’t do that here…” Another old-fashioned client of ours said that Project IN:FUSE is trying to do too much. I was stumped! Are we not supposed to do more than what clients expect from us?
Some people’s thinking processes are really difficult to follow. The pretentiousness that is a low but constant buzz in any business analytic field makes me yawn, more than watching a re-run of the “Soup Nazi” Seinfeld episode.
Look at something like this:
It is a simple and straightforward engagement formula by the Web Analytics Demystified Team, which most of us have probably seen. Now, it is smart yet palatable, and that is my point. The science of engagement analytics becomes approachable when there isn’t some geek spouting unintelligibles about eVars this or latency that. That is the other piece of the rub: We analysts always think that we are so smart until some client challenges us to present our technical ideas in layman’s terms.
No matter how complicated it gets, the Web is still the purest form of the unadulterated and predictable science of audience responsiveness. Hence, it is a worthy ongoing battle to convince clients of the power of capturing every click path and of paying attention to what any customer does in the Web. We may not always know the answers to the what or the why in terms of customer activity in the Web, but to not look for the answers at all is like throwing money away.
