Applied Web Metrics Blog

Business Continuity for Web Analytics

From the moment that your company start doing some serious web analytics, it will become more and more dependent on WA information. And that has some profound consequences:

• your role will become more and more steering and in time you will giving feedback on online strategy proposals
• the company will become more dependent on you and your job
• trended numbers and comparisons with the past will gain in importance
• data safety becomes a crucial issue, but is mostly overlooked
• permanent data availability should be in the SLA that you have with your WA vendor
• continuity of the web analytics business process must be ensured

Data safety and availability

• Do you own your WA data?
• Is your data hosted by the vendor, or by you?
• Either way, are there frequent backups, and how long does it take to restore a backup?
• Is historical data preserved? If so, are very old data compressed or reduced in any way, or are they just as easily available as current data?
• Is 24/24 7/7 data availability guaranteed in your SLA? If not, what response times do you want to enforce with your vendor in case of data unavailability?
• And what if you switch vendors….

Business continuity

Imagine that, from one day to the next, you suddenly are unable to do web analytics:

• is there documentation describing WA business requirements per site?
• is there documentation describing the WA implementation per site (wich tags are placed where)?
• is there technical documentation describing per site in which wCMS templates for instance the tags are implemented, which include files are all involved, where the .js master file is stored and who has the rights to update it?
• is that documentation up to date?
• is there a changes log per website? (when you see sudden differences in historic data, can someone still tell you what changes where exactly deployed at that time in the past?)
• does the changes log include screenshots, before and after (a usability evolution analysis is useless without)

The keywords here are per site and up to date.

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