Changes in digital leadership, Part 3
Editor’s note: In the third part of our series on leadership in the digital age, Ken addresses the impact that changes in analytics have had on leading digitally.
Part One: Changing how we relate
Part Two: How to cut through the noise
The Gift of Analytics
In digital space, especially in distance leadership using digital tools, we can now measure impact way more than we did 5 years ago through analytics. Analytics tell you what your visitors are doing on your digital properties – geography (where are they?), behavior (what did they do on your app or site?), and disengagement (when did they leave?).
If I’ve created a site assuming that a visitor will view page 1, page 2, page 3, and so on, but analytics reveal they go from our About page to our Home page and leave, we need to change something. Analytics helps us ask better questions. We can tweak something and watch things change overnight.
Before, you could post some content and think, “That’s nice. That must be having an impact.” But was it? Did it connect with my audience? Did it influence my audience to see or do something differently?
Now we can see more clearly. When we launch something globally, and we wonder – did it get to 250 countries — we can see the answer.
I think of the apostle Paul languishing in a prison, longing to get to Spain. Now we can know tomorrow morning if we got to Spain.
We can’t always tell the qualitative impact over time – is this beneficial? Is it inspiring? But we have way more input now from which to draw conclusions.
Editor’s note: If you want to get started with Google Analytics and don’t know how, check out Indigitous SESSIONS: A Thoughtful moment on Google Analytics.