Avinash Kaushik has recently published a marvelous article about “business questions” vs. “reporting requests” in his blog.

While quite a lot of people (those who are requesting things from Analysts) seem to see Web Analytics as a means to provide the right answers Avinash points out how important it is for the Analysts to deal with the right questions:

“I have to warn my budding Analysis Ninja that what you will typically hear is:

+ I want to know how much traffic is coming to our website
+ I want a conversion rate
+ I want a path analysis for our visitors (oy vey!)
+ I want to the list of top exist pages on our website
+ I want to know how many leads we got on website this month
+ Or give me a report that shows click-through rates of our home page promotions

All of these are requests I am imploring you to rebel against. They are not business questions.”

A bit further down the article he provides a litmus test which brilliantly marks the difference that makes all the difference here:

“Business questions have these three simple characteristics:

#1. They are usually open-ended and at a much higher level, leaving you room to think and add value.

#2. They likely require you to go outside your current systems and sources to look for data and guidance in order to measure success.

#3. They rarely include columns and rows into which you can plunk data you already have.

If what you hear fails any of the above tests then you have to go back and try again.”

‘Nuff said. Chapeau!
Read more from Avinash’s blog