on target

How to identify missing clients and visitors

What do a web site, a barber shop and a supermarket store have in common? Recurring visitors: no web site, and few business can survive without a constant flow of returning visitors. Find here some simple but effective formulas to identify missing visitors ASAP to prevent what is usually called churn or attrition.

Posted at 12:00AM Feb 09, 2010 by admin in Sales & Marketing  |  Comments[0]

How to Measure Business Performance in Two simple Steps

To create business performance dashboard you can read a lot of books, text and articles about performance, KPIs and dashboards but none of them presents a complete example from conception to implementation. Moreover the approach is usually “cascade”: good for large, corporate project but not enough agile for departmental and medium business realities.

Posted at 07:44PM Feb 04, 2010 by admin in General  |  Comments[1]

3 Great Web Analytics Books, 2 are free!

Analytics are a very hot topic today, and the term analytics itself was initially applied to Web measurement. If you have a web site and no analytics you are walking into absolute dark. In this post I suggest three great books on Business Analytics, two can be freely downloaded.

Posted at 12:42AM Feb 02, 2010 by admin in General  |  Comments[0]

User Analytics: How to visualize information

In previous posts you have seen how to collect User Analytics. In this post you will see how to analyze it through OLAP by mean of simple but illustrative Inquiry. You will see how to generate a relational Data Warehouse to capture User Analytics data and how to create inquiries that satisfy your needs.

Posted at 12:00AM Jan 28, 2010 by admin in IT  |  Comments[1]

An Effective Performance Dashboard Template

Dashboards are the preferred user interface to monitor performance. Every day new dashboards are created with different layout and style.

Why reinventing the wheel? Here is a dashboard template that will match most needs. It is simple and effective and adheres to good design principles. You can use it as a guide or simply as source of inspiration.

Posted at 12:00AM Jan 21, 2010 by admin in General  |  Comments[2]

User Analytics: How to Collect Data

User analytics can be used to know how your users employ your application: what they usually do, how much data they manage, how they perform different tasks, the difficulties they face ...

In previous posts we have seen the importance of user (usage) analytics and a flexible data model to support your information needs. In this post I will show you how to capture the usage data you need.

Posted at 12:00AM Jan 19, 2010 by admin in IT  |  Comments[0]

Charts & Graphics: 10 excellent books

Charts and graphics are a key component of any business application. Visualizing numeric data let user understand evolution, spot trends and take corrective action when needed.

Here are 10 excellent books that can help you to produce great graphics for your applications and some hints to help you in choosing the best for your profile.

Posted at 12:00AM Jan 14, 2010 by admin in General  |  Comments[6]

User Analytics: the Information Model

In previous post I explained the importance of User Analytics and I promised a flexible model to measure application usage. This post is about such model and how to implement it.

Posted at 12:00AM Jan 12, 2010 by admin in IT  |  Comments[0]

User Analytics: Why you need them

No, I am not talking about Web Analytics (used to optimized web pages). If software is your business, User Analytics are as important as Web Analytics and, implementing them before competition can give you a differential advantage.

User Analytics (UA) refers to the skills, technologies, applications and practices for continuous iterative exploration and investigation of software application usage.

Here are some typical answers you would expect from UA:

• Who are the users of my application? What are their profiles?

• How often they use my application?

• How much data / information they manage through my application?

• Which are the most usual tasks?

• Which are the most common error?

• Which is the actual learning curve, which are main obstacles?

• How long does it take to become proficient with my application?

• Which users are defeating? Why?

Posted at 12:00AM Jan 05, 2010 by admin in IT  |  Comments[0]

How often shall I update my KPIs?

Shall you measure your KPIs weekly or monthly? Or possibly daily? And sales evolution? And user satisfaction? Maybe quarterly?

Strategic information update of one of the common dilemma of any decision support system and is usually the subject of lengthy discussions. This decision is still more sensible when you combine measures with different frequencies in a single dashboard.

Here are some practical considerations and an innovative suggestion to make your dashboard more dynamic by increasing low update frequencies.

Posted at 11:19PM Dec 30, 2009 by admin in General  |  Comments[0]

Two different ways to cascade KPIs

When a KPI values do not reflect expectations, you shall determine what went wrong. There are two ways to do that: cause-effect and drill down.

Posted at 11:15PM Dec 17, 2009 by admin in General  |  Comments[0]

From strategy to KPIs - which tool is best?

KPIs shall reflect business strategy and positioning. If you position your business for an elite client, you will prioritize certain KPIs like, for example, client status or satisfaction. If, on the other side, you position your company for mass consumers, other KPIs like price over competition will take precedence.

Strategy maps were originally conceived and used to visually represent business strategy, and are usually bound to Balanced Scorecard approach.

What if you do not use the Balanced Scorecard approach? What if you need a simpler way to design a small number of KPIs for your department?

Posted at 12:00AM Dec 10, 2009 by admin in General  |  Comments[0]

How to consolidate multiple KPIs

Can you combine different KPIs in a single measure? Would such measure make sense? I have seen this question so many times I decided to write a small post about it.

Posted at 03:43PM Dec 07, 2009 by admin in General  |  Comments[0]

How to check lead KPIs

We all know that a good set of KPIs is composed of lag and lead measures. Lag measures refer to achieved result, lead measures are predictor of future performance.

Financial results (such as sales) are typical lag (or lagging) KPIs, while client satisfaction is a typical lead (or leading KPI): if customer is satisfied today will probably buy again tomorrow (customer satisfaction is the subject of a future post).

Lagging KPIs are someway intangible or abstract. We can figure many of them, but we always keep asking ourselves is that KPI predictor of a lag KPI or measure?

Posted at 12:00AM Dec 03, 2009 by admin in General  |  Comments[0]

KPIs: How many do you need?

With the growing importance of KPIs and performance dashboards, this question has become so common that I decided to write a little post about it?

Posted at 01:28PM Dec 01, 2009 by admin in General  |  Comments[2]