Not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted.

- Albert Einstein

Adam Hodge, responsible for National Marketing and Communications at the Australian Red Cross Blood Service, had a fundamental response to my religious diatribe last month, titled Let There Be Light.

Adam deemed it “both entertaining and creative,” before he lowered the boom: "...yet to my dismay [it] offered absolutely no valuable advice or insight into solving the challenge of Web site reporting for marketing professionals."

Yes, the truth hurts.

Adam continued, "We currently provide a myriad of web effectiveness reports to our board and I am sure that 90% of them are not really that valuable. However, knowing which 10% to keep and what to discard is the hurdle I face.

“We have engaged several different external consultants to assist in this task and each and every one has a different (and seemingly logical) take on the issue,” Adam wrote. “This has resulted in what I consider to be management over-reporting. I would dearly love to read an article which compares valuable and not-so-valuable statistics...which measures are the most effective for tracking site success and which are just a waste of paper.”

First the bad news, Adam: I'm a consultant. To prove my assertion, the answer to your question is, "It depends."

The less we know, the more time we spend interpreting what meager details we can get. We started out with precious little data about what the Web server was doing. We hoped more data would be more revealing. But now, Web analytics tools and Web site review companies can crank out more reports than imaginable.

There is a wonderful story in Mark Graham Brown's book, Keeping Score: Using the Right Metrics to Drive World-Class Performance, about the new head of an overburdened financial reporting department who stopped the delivery of all reports for a week. This resulted in a very few phone calls from a small number of managers asking for a modest handful of reports.

Which reports are actually useful to your organization? It depends.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

image of Jim Sterne

Jim Sterne founded the Marketing Analytics Summit in 2002 and co-founded the Digital Analytics Association in 2004. He now advises companies on analytics strategy planning at Data Driven Leaders Studio and teaches AI and machine-learning to marketers.