Product Managers: Building Good Measurement into your Web Applications

With so much focus on appearance and functionality, web portal data decisions can be easily overlooked at a time when performance metrics are more crucial than ever.  As more functionality is added, good data collection is needed for product management.

Product managers need to understand how the site is being used to inform the product roadmaps and order website changes as needed.  There are two different building blocks for measuring the web performance and both are needed to achieve a complete understanding of the online customer: web analytics and web portal database.

Web Analytics

Web analytics tells you about the online behavior of the customer by painting a picture of the most popular content and how a customer moves through the website to accomplish tasks.  There is a wealth of information in the basic analytics reports found in web analytics packages like Google Analytics, WebTrends,  Site Catalyst, and CoreMetrics.  Even more information on fall out from web form fills, clicking to off-site links, and other detailed task and funnel behavior can be tracked with additional planning and page-specific javascript tags or URL parameters.

Web analytics is fundamental to all web properties, but is also commonly overlooked during the development process.  In order to determine the impact of the redesigned property, getting the proper code in place early in the project is essential.  The basic requirement is a snippet of code often referred to as a base tag.  Depending on the analytics package and the company policies, this is either a direct copy/paste or include to the page header or page footer.  This code is the engine that communicates page activity to the analytics package.  For advanced reporting and specialty metrics, a web analytics professional can provide code to be included within the content of the page to provide additional performance metrics.

Getting the basics is easy.  Often it only requires mentioning that you want the tracking installed, and in some cases, it is standard and automatically included with no effort at all.  For this reason, tracking is often taken for granted, and taking web analytics for granted is a huge mistake.  I have seen many cases at companies large and small where sites have gone live with no tracking because it wasn't mentioned in the business requirements. Without metrics, the product manager was not able to demonstrate the success of the product.

Add tracking requirements to the standard requirements template to be used in every web project and open discussions with web analytics professionals in your company at the start of the project.  This will ensure you can avoid KPI pitfalls when work is complete.

Portal Database

Make the most of the web portal database behind the application, used to deliver information to the page.  These databases run the application functionality of website, processing transactions, recording changes to user profiles, error messages delivered, logins, etc.  Because of this, they hold a wealth of information on how the site is being used.  While web analytics delivers web content and behavior details, the web portal database delivers information on adoption and usage at a transaction level.

The types of metrics you can expect to gain from the web portal database include: percent of users logged in in the last 90 days, login frequency, login duration, average transactions per person, total transactions, revenue, etc.   

The most common issue is overlooking the requirements for the performance indicators (KPIs) during the design and development of the database.  To be sure that the portal database will deliver the metrics you need, take an hour at the start of a project to brainstorm all possible performance indicators that my be needed in the future and discuss with the IT Architect and DBA on our team.  It is much easier to include these in the database design at the start than it is to make a change along the way.

Summary

The key to success is timing a three-step process: (1) consider the data you will need at the beginning of the redesign, (2) collect product management requirements early and (3) coordinate with DBA and Web Analytics professionals throughout the course of the project.  Early and continual involvement will ensure you are collecting good data from the start and can report your success measure KPIs along the way.