| I reluctantly but wholly agree with everything polote wrote: Currently analytics is a fraud, analytics is useless, it is what you do about that data which is important. Most of analytics/ab testing software are just giving data (which is sometimes not even accurate) to customers, so that the people in the analytics team have a job to do. But the reality is that only a very small fraction of those teams know how to use the data to drive more revenue. So if you want to work in analytics there is this HUGE market which today is not addressed by anyone, its how to make more revenue from a website. * I've searched high and low for analytics software that will let me A) Measure the key things and come up with 80/20 Pateo Principle insights B) After implementing changes, help measure the impact
Yet all analytics software seems designed to just capture stuff That's all they do - 'capture stuff' There are no provisions to leverage that data to actually make more money, or make your product better, or anything of substance |
Each business is unique, offers its own (almost unique) products or services, has a (sometimes hard to understand) user segment on the market, and each visitor is unique too. It is very hard to make some generic software that automatically gives useful tips on how to improve conversions, it can not tell "hey, reduce your price by 10% and start advertising towards cat owners instead of dog owners".
What analytics software does is exactly the point B you mentioned: allow you to measure impact of changes and take (yourself) decisions accordingly. You can decide to A/B test two different pricing strategies and see (based on analytics) which one converts better, but the software won't tell you what the A and B variants of the pricing strategy should be. You can test hypothesis and take decisions based on the resulting data.
> There are no provisions to leverage that data to actually make more money, or make your product better, or anything of substance I think this is due to, as mentioned by polote, the misunderstanding of the point of analytics: its purpose is collect and display data in such way that it can be analyzed (by a human or an external software) which can then take, based on this analysis and hypothesis testing, decisions that will lead to higher conversions. It's the same with people saying ads don't work and are useless: if you just create a poor ad, with wrong targeting, that leads to a shtity landing page trying to sell a bad product, you probably won't give a positive ROI and then blame it on the ad platform because it doesn't tell you why things are not working, but there are so many factors outside their control, it would be impossible for them to give an answer. You can only get an answer by looking in detail at the data of each step and understanding WHY something happens or doesn't happen. This WHY is very hard to tell even by experienced humans, so it would be very hard to have a computer automatically answer this WHY for us.