Somebody asked me this question the other day over email, and I wanted to write back a 5,000-word essay on the fun and enjoyment and power of audience evaluation.
When analytics come up, I tell this story:
A few years ago, I started a contract with a communications team at a research organisation that was re-developing its website. At one point, I asked to look at the website’s recent analytics reports to see who was visiting the site, what they were doing when they got there, which content was most-viewed, and which parts of the site were not being visited very often.
Someone said that the communications team was not receiving the analytics reports, which were probably with the IT team.
So I asked the IT team to start sending a PDF copy of the analytics reports to our email inboxes, and the team realised something unexpected.
Roughly a quarter of the entire website audience was visiting one particular part of the site: the Jobs section. They were not donors, not research partners, not people signed up to the newsletter, not fellow research organisations, not people that the communications team considered part of its ‘target audience’. They were just folks who wanted to learn more about job opportunities at a great organisation.
This is a great example of the difference between perceived audience and actual audience.
That’s why analytics are important, not only for a website, but for anything that a communications does or produces. Sharp awareness of an audience (and adaptation to that audience) should be priority number one.