Joe Procopio

Narrative reports vs dashboards

A deconstructed web analytics report shows what the dashboard missed.

We can all agree that in 2013 web analytics is still a nightmare, right?

The last few years have brought about an enormous expansion in the top of the web analytics information overload funnel, and today I can discover just about any aspect of my web traffic that piques my curiosity.

I know how much traffic I’m getting, who told them to come here, how they got here, how long they’re staying, what they’re looking at, what they’re using to look at it, where they’re from, and just about anything else I want to know about them. If I don’t like what I’m looking at, I can customize everything from my dashboard to reports to parameters within those reports.

What none of this tells me is how I can be more successful at turning the words I put on the Internet into dollars in my pocket.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: “It’s all there! More information than you could ever figure out what to do with.”

The problem with that is that it’s all there. It’s more information than I could ever figure out what to do with. Read more…