Should I outsource my web analytics?

If you are a small business owner and has lots of work running your business, then web analytics is probably a long way down on your list of takst that you must do.

So a logical step would be to outsource the task. This article aims to help you understand if you should outsource your web analytics or not. We will let you know how you could do it, and what are the pitfalls are of making someone else do your web analytics.

Why outsource web analytics?

There is plenty of good reasons why you should not do web analytics yourself. If you are an entrepreneur, then your skills and interest are most likely focused on your customers and your products. As a person, you are probably an extrovert with a high energy level.

This clashed with the skill set that is required to be a proper analysis. You will probably never be comfortable spending your time looking at numbers and trying to make sense of them.

Even if you could do the analytics, and perhaps also enjoyed doing it. The question is, do you have time to do your own analytics regularly?

And even more important: Is your time better spend doing analytics or on the part of your business that has to do with products and customers?

Your two options

So there is it plenty of reasons why you should not do your own web analytics. So what is the alternative? For many there are two options:

– Don´t focus on web analytics
– Outsource the task to a specialist or an agency

Not to do analytics

The first option – not to do analytics – is perhaps not an active choice that you decide to go for. However many experiences that it is just a consequence of having lost of tasks, and then analytics falls so long down the to-do list that you never ends up doing it.

Not having access to analytics is not a situation that you would like to be in. Your business is most likely dependent on you getting the right kind of traffic to your site and to get a user on your website to convert to specific business actions. Such as filling in a form, signing up for a newsletter or buying your products online.

If your site is like a regular website then you lose 90% of your potential customers, so you need to make sure that your site performs as it should make the most of your online marketing activities.

You need to have the analytic findings to know how to improve this setup.

Outsource your analytics

The other alternative is to outsource your analytics. This means that you get someone else to do your analytics for you. They will look at your data and make sense of it. You will then get a report to send to you regularly.

Most such reports will be a more understandable way of showing your Google Analytics data. Some more advanced solutions can also include SEO components and perhaps data from your Social Media accounts.

The two quality levels of outsourced reports

There are two quality levels of the reports that you can get. Ether the reports is an aggregated collection of data from Google Analytics. This kind of report makes it easier for you to understand your data because it has boiled it down to the musical.

But there is no understanding and interpretation of your findings. This means that you must be able to conclude what the results actually mean for your business. And you must be able to understand what action is required to take the appropriate actions. In other words, you still have to have the knowledge and some degree of web technical understanding, if you were to make the right decisions based upon the findings.

For many people, this type of report does not work, for the obvious reason that they do not have the time or competencies to know how to take actions of the report. You can say the report only solves one of their problems, and that is to give an overview and sort out the essential data.

The bespoke report

So they need some more from their report supplier. They need to know the business meaning of what the reports actually mean. To get this information, they go to an agency and ask for a more advanced report. The agency can then prepare a bespoke report that contains findings and interpretations of what the data means.

The quality of such a report is much higher. It has valid business reflections, and it makes it easier to know where to focus.

High quality with a price

However, the high-quality report also comes with a price. Agency staff is often paid $100 per hour, and such a report will take them 2 to 3 hours to prepare.

You as a client will allways end up paying for this service. Either as an actual charge for the product. But in many cases, the agency uses the reports to pith for a specific project that they want you to have them buy from them.

It would be doubtful that an SEO agency did not advise you to do more SEO, regardless of your sites findings, But how do you know if SEO really is your sites most significant problem?

No agency is a master of all digital disciplines, and as an agency customer, it can be challenging to know when an agency is giving you advice and when it is pushing to sell a service to you. The risk of biased advice will always be there.

A new outsourcing option

But there is now a new outscouring option. That is to get automated web analytics. In a way, you will get the best of both worlds. You will get a report with high-quality business findings, and it will be delivered to you in an unbiased way.

Canecto has developed an automatic web analytic report that is based upon AI and advanced business logic. This makes it possible to make the same high-quality reports that you can get from bespoke agency reports.

But at the fraction at the cost. And the advice and findings are all unbiased and transparent. You get them delivered to your intray as PDF files either on a monthly or weekly basis, depending on your preferences.

More than 20 AI models work for you

The report uses more than 20 AI models to look for patterns in your user’s behaviour, and this makes it possible to zoom in on the areas that are most important to your business.

The report applies a “business logic” layer that looks that the findings and explain in real human written language what this means for your business and gives you recommendations on your best actions.

The three ways to get analytics

In this way there are now three different ways you can get your web analytics:

Manage your web analytics yourself: Great if you like to do so, and has the time and competences to do it

Outsource the task to an agency: Can be an easy option. However it will cost you, and you risk getting advice that is actually them pitching in new jobs from you

Automated your analytics: Get the same quality of information as from a bespoke agency report. But at a fraction of the cost and independently and transparently.