Elizabeth (AbleReach) recently asked me to contemplate writing guest posts for the Cre8asite blog. We discussed topics on web data analysis and creativity, and how to get people excited about playing with their web data. I felt brave and bold, and promised to deliver.

About three days later, a conversation in the Website Hospital compared analyzing website data to “shoveling water.” Soon afterwards a great thread about if links should be underlined and blue touched more and more on measuring web site traffic to analyze results. Finally, Sophie Wegat’s new thread asks, “Analysing Your Data, How do you do it?” Yet again, opportunity knocks!

I know that most people don’t get the warm, fuzzy feeling I do from gazing on raw web logs and pretty graphs. Most web analytics tools drown people in reports, and drowning is never a good feeling.

Here’s the deal – my most precious insight from 10 years of playing with data:
Don’t start with the reports. Start with what you want to know.

Here’s an exercise I recommend to anyone with ownership for a website. Assume that the data genie is going to arrive and grant you three questions. You can have the answer to absolutely anything you want to know about your website. What are your questions?

What makes a good question? A good question is one where if you got an answer, you would know what to do with it – the answer would inspire you to action.

• Where does my best traffic come from?
• What are people expecting when they get to my website?
• How do I get people to buy more items in a single visit?
• If I only have time to fix two pages on my site, which two should they be?

Once you have chosen and saved questions, you’re ready to play with data. And I can promise you, looking for answers to your own burning questions won’t feel nearly as much like shoveling water.

As Ammon Johns says, (measuring your success) is “really all about finding and using ways to measure things that are important to you.”

My next post will help you start using actual data to answer your burning questions.

This is the first article of a series about web analytics by forum member Deborah Geary: