Avinash - beginner's guide to web data analysis - "...deliver some minor data-gasms of insights" -

The goal of my recent post on the Yahoo! Web Analytics blog was to pull us up 10,000 feet to do something we do less than 1% of the time in the web analytics world – look at the bigger business picture.
It was called: Secret To Winning With Web Analytics? Starting Right!
While that was a very strategic post, it got me thinking at a tactical level.
What if I was given the login and password to someone's web analytics data and asked to "find something interesting?" How would I start the process of web data analysis right? Even without any knowledge of the company's goals or help from a stubborn HiPPO or clients who just want data pukes? Can I add any business value?
A real challenge!
It turns out, astonishingly, that even with all those barriers (no objectives or goals or cooperation or business guidance), you can spend a couple hours and do decent enough analysis, sourced from your experience, to deliver some minor data-gasms of insights.
Not quite the real intense ones that you might experience if all the foreplay had been done correctly (see the YWA post above), but still never say no to even minor orgasms right?
Setting The Right Expectations
It is nearly impossible to find earth shattering insights that you can action from your web analytics data in just a couple hours. And yet finding some delightful starting points might be less hard than you might imagine.
Starting points to start valuable analysis from. (What data should I look at first?) Starting points for a customer centric strategy. (What are my customers telling me?) Starting points for gaps in your online marketing efforts. (Where am I wasting money?)
Secret To Winning Web Analytics: 10 Starting Points For A Fabulous Start!
This blog post is a starter guide that outlines the steps I personally undertake most commonly when handed the keys to the data for a website. 
I want to share where in your web analytics data you can find valuable starting points, even without any context about the site / business / priorities. Reports to look at, KPIs to evaluate, inferences to make.
I hope you'll benefit from my humble experience. Let's go!
Step #1: Visit the website. Note objectives, customer experience, suckiness.
My biggest beef with web analysts and consultants is how quick they are to jump into Google Analytics or Omniture or WebTrends. It's as if they have never seen a report with Visits & Conversions before. Jeez!
The very first thing I do, and I recommend you do, is visit the website whose data you are analyzing. See how it looks. Go to the product pages. Go to the donation pages. Go to the B2B dancing monkey video (what!). Go to the add to cart page. Go to the RSS / Email sign up page and sign up. Go read some customer reviews (if a ecommerce site) or visitor comments (if a blog). Go download the white papers. Go use site search.

Get a feel for the company's vibe. Get a feel for the information architecture and cross sells and font size and buttons and tab structure and user experience etc. What's hideous? What's awesome?
Bonus points for visiting one competitor's website. Do all of the above.
Take out a note pad and write down your thoughts. What did you like? What did you hate? What frustrated you? What was obviously broken? What's the site trying to do?
At the very minimum your notepad should contain answers to these two questions: What is the macro-conversion? What are two or three micro-conversions? Remember those terms apply to ecommerce and non-ecommerce websites.
The site owner / client did not help you, but you've not got super valuable context. You're ready for data!
. Step #2: How good is the acquisition strategy? Traffic Sources Report.
This is the very first place I end up because the first thing I want to know is how savvy the company is about online marketing. All other site data comes second because if you stink at online marketing then there is not much of a victory to be had by torturing website data.
No company in the Milky Way has succeeded without having a balanced portfolio of acquisition channels (fancy word for source of traffic). How's yours?  
What to look for:
I am really looking for a balanced portfolio of traffic sources. Search, Referring Sites, Direct, Campaigns. Which one is strong? Which one is missing?
Based on my own humble experience the site on the left is what approximates the kind of "best practice" (note the quotes) you are looking for.
Around 40% to 50% Search is normal. If the number is too big (site on the right) it indicates an overexposure to search rankings and algorithm changes (not good at all). If it is too low you are simply leaving money on the table. And of the search traffic, you want a big portion to be Organic so you are not just "renting" traffic or suck at SEO.
20% or so Direct Traffic. If the web analytics tool is implemented right these are all your existing customers or people from offline campaigns. You want a healthy amount of both. If direct traffic is low, I worry if you are any good at customer service / retention (the latter is so often just an afterthought).
20% to 30% Referring Sites. You can't just rely on search engines or spending money on campaigns. A healthy web strategy includes a robust amount of traffic from other sites that link to your products and services, and praise (or slam!) you, or promote you on Twitter and Facebook and forums and otherwise link to you. Free traffic (usually) and you do want that (for many reasons).
10% Campaigns. Google Analytics (sub optimally) calls this Other. It is email campaigns, display / banner ad campaigns, Facebook display campaigns, social media campaigns etc. You want at least 10% of the traffic to be the ones you invite to your site deliberately, after solid analysis and great targeting. Outside of Paid Search. It's a sign of a healthy business that has a diversified customer acquisition strategy.
Consider the above as broad guidelines, again based on my online marketing experience. YMMV, certainly for esoteric types of businesses.
What to do next:
I'll make note of where the company is overleveraged and make a note to dig deeper with the client / HiPPO. Expose the dangers to them, brainstorm how to diversify.
For each bucket I'll look at least the top ten rows. Additionally, for at least one of the four buckets I'll dig deeper by looking at the standard report for that segment to identify some strengths or weaknesses. Surprising keywords, missing sources of traffic, trends in campaign vs. direct visits etc.
At the end of this you'll understand how sophisticated the client is, where you'll attack acquisition first (if you get the time and money to do more analysis).
Step #3: How strongly do Visitors orbit the website? Visitor Loyalty & Recency.
I have a sense for the site and I have a sense for the client's acquisition savvy. Time to focus on the Visitors!!
Most people create sites just for themselves and with no obvious purpose in mind. Furthermore the content publishing schedules, perceptions of "engagement" are all out of whack.
So what I (and you, dear blog reader) want to do is get a sense for how strongly attached are the Visitors to the site. This is of course crucial for any type of content site, but you'll be surprised at how important it is even for an ecommerce website (retention, support, repeat purchases, yada yada yada).
The report I'll look at is the standard Visitor Loyalty report. It would show how many times in a given time period the same person (persistent cookie actually) visits the website. Or, how tightly the Visitor orbits the site!
All tools have this report, Here is how it looks like in Google Analytics:

What to look for:
For site number one it is clear there are a lot of one night stands (47%). But notice that bottom, an astonishing 40% of the people visit the site more than 9 times a month! You get a sense for content consumption patterns, you get a sense for your next task (segment the 40, learn what's working there, apply to the 47!), you get a sense for whether the site's delivering on its business objectives.
If the data looks more like site two, cry. Ok, most of the time cry. This site simply engages in one night stands, and while I can think of some sites where that can still be the basis of a long term sustainable business model. . .  I can't think of a lot of them.
Not a tight orbit. So what? Remember the notes you took in step one? What's the impact of the loyalty pattern on the objectives you noted? With some solid data you are ready to have a discussion with the client / site owner / HiPPO. Take a tissue.
While I love Loyalty the most, I also take a quick peek at Visitor Recency. This is specific to content sites (newspapers, yellow pages, hospital, "I am the next facebook-killer" sites, etc).
Visitor Recency measures the gap between two visits of the same visitor. Or, When was the last time you saw the same person (cookie really). Here's the report:

How amazing is it that 37% of the traffic on the site last visited less than 24 hours ago! Talk about orbit!
Segmenting this data is best (by content, source, campaign, outcomes, etc), but even a cursory review will help you understand how people behave.
What to do next:
I always review two more reports that give me a sense for content consumed. No, no, not the silly reports that show mostly useless metrics like Average Time on Site and Average Pages Per Visitors (averages stink!).
I am talking about Length of Visit and Depth of Visit:

With Loyalty and Recency we measured visitors visiting, but once they are here what are they doing? That's what you are trying to get a sense for with these two reports. [Remember visits with just one page view, bounces, will be in the first bucket 0-10. For why, see: How time on site & time on page are computed]
If you have some time segment out the bigger buckets (beyond 0-10) and analyze the data. If you don't have time just knowing Loyalty, Recency, Length, Depth tells you a lot about how tightly Visi[…]