In his keynote at the inaugural SEMPhonic XChange Conference, Eric T. Peterson said he was going to be controversial, that he wanted to stimulate the discussion. That he was tired of the ‘me too’ and ‘that’s exactly what I think’ commentary. Fast-forward a bit and Eric goes ahead and lobs a controversial bomb my way…

"Reporting Is Evil"

You might as well say Seeing is evil.

Seeing, after all, is just your eyes reporting received electromagnetic stimuli to your brain.

I can understand the sentiment behind it - I really can. It comes from a frustration with organizations and people who think web analytics is nothing more than regurgitation of data. A frustration with people and organizations that don’t "get it" and can’t "grok it". The frustration comes from web analysts within those organizations (I’ve felt it, believe me), from consultants trying to help companies get to the next level and vendors trying to sell their wares.

The problem is that reporting is NOT evil. It is vital to the web analytics process.

Analysis, web analysis, is a process - or at least it should be.

Analyses, like any process, have outcomes. The outcomes might be changes to the website, changes to advertising creative, changes in SEM strategies, changes to the web analytics implementation itself and many more that I’m not thinking of at the moment. One of the over-arching deliverables of a process is communicating its results. If the results of the web analytics process are not communicated, then no outcomes are possible. How can recommended changes to the website be made if they aren’t communicated and substantiated with an analysis of the data?

Yep, that’s my way of saying that reporting is an expected outcome of the analytic process. A process that doesn’t communicate its results is a failed process. Thus, if we excise reporting from web analytics because it is evil, we are left with a process that can give us no insight because there is no way to extract information from it. What is the point of going through the process at that point? We might as well use ‘Pin the Tail on the Donkey’ in all its blindfolded glory to make a decisions.

There are many definitions of reporting, but in this context I think that there are two that are most important:

1. Reporting is a required outcome of the analytics process
2. Reporting is a communication tool

The frustration that leads people, Eric included, into thinking and saying that reporting is evil derives from organizations treating reporting as the whole analytics process.

So, if you are spending time, money and resources on web analytics and all you are doing is reporting the data, then you probably feel like you’re not getting nearly enough value out of your investment.

Heck, without reporting there is no feedback loop in analytics and then your just running one blind test after another - throwing spaghetti at the wall as it were - until something sticks.

Reporting without analysis is just a regurgitation of facts. Analysis without reporting is impossible because then there is no mechanism for creating the feedback loop within the process.