8 most actionable metrics for self-service analytics
When I was studying at school my literature teacher told us that there shouldn’t be more than 8 thoughts in an essay. So, the trick was to formulate these 8 thoughts and only then start writing something. It was completely OK to have 5 or even 3 thoughts, but no more than 8.
Why is that? Communication is not an easy thing. You can’t communicate too much in one shot.
Isn’t it the same with dashboards and analytics? Companies invest money in implementation of tens if not hundreds Google Analytics events, expensive Tableau dashboards and ETL pipelines, more complex than a skyscraper water system. After it nothing usually happens. Nobody uses this data. It is tempting to say that people are too lazy or not educated enough. But do you need a special education to know that your car is running out of gas? No, it is the metric you know, understand and care. Why it should be different for marketing or customer analytics?
Every person within an organization probably has metrics they really care about. May be 3 metrics or 5, but not 20. There is also a very high possibility that these metrics are simple, don’t require AI and Python. These metrics shouldn’t be defined by data engineers or data collection experts. These are metrics that should be important for someone who look at them every day.
How to define such metrics? We can, of course, open Google Analytics documentation and see tens of metrics in there. If you work with GA a lot you will even memorize how they are calculated and can participate in intellectual discussions related to Bounce Rate calculations or sampling, but in the end of the day we need metrics we really care about.
Which user actions would you consider as an indicator of your website success? Bounce rate or engaged time spent on the product page? Transactions or LTV? Scrolled 75% or video watched 90%? Newsletter subscription or product list view? There are so many of them. Choose no more than 8, put them into a dashboard and see if it works better than 20+ complex metrics which were defined by a technical expert team 2 years ago and nobody remember why.
So to say 8 most actionable metrics in analytics are the ones we defined ourselves. There are no magic packages or ready solutions.
