Avinash Kaushik recently wrote a series of fun articles on his blog, Occam's Razor, in which he investigated what would be the best single desert island Web analytics report. First he described his own favorite report, then he looked at the best reports as suggested by his readers.

This is interesting for several reasons. For one, it’s clear that not everyone has the same favorite report. Part of this is likely due to the many different types of Web sites / businesses that are represented. A content site like lifehacker.com surely has different goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) compared to an online retail site like zappos.com. But even accounting for different types of Web sites, there was a broad range of favorite reports. In general, referrer tracking reports seemed to be popular, but there was quite a range in the details. Some people were interested in looking at referrers by geographical region, while others were focused on paid search referrals.

Another thing I noticed is that while these favorite reports are all great, none of them are entirely sufficient on their own (I guess that puts a damper on the desert island marketing job openings). This goes without saying, perhaps, but I think it’s worth mentioning. As I read through the examples, I kept thinking about other data or reports that would enhance the reader’s suggestion. For example, campaign tracking reports are great but would really be complimented by a funnel report to investigate how people use a site in order to refine the navigation or the user interface (UI).

Finally, I noticed that almost all of the reports that were mentioned could be made more useful and actionable by segmenting the visitor data. Many of the reports did have some level of segmentation - i.e. on site search terms segmented by user registration - but there are many questions to ask through visitor segmentation.

After reading through these report examples, I started to think about the key metrics that are measured and reported in Web analytics. Conversion rate and ROI get a lot of attention (as they should), but there are some other metrics that have a lot to offer as well. In my next post, I’ll go into a little more detail about a couple of the more humble Web analytics metrics.

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