What is access analysis? *In Japan, website analysis is often called “access analysis. Why is it difficult?

Google Analytics is becoming more and more difficult and sophisticated, and it is a source of concern for busy web professionals. There are many people who say that they don’t know what to report and can’t keep up with the evolution anymore. However, why don’t we take a moment to calm down and reevaluate the “purpose of access analysis”? Here are some hints for your access analysis strategy.

The true purpose of access analysis that many people get wrong.

What is the purpose of access analysis in your company? When asked, “What is the purpose of your company’s access analysis?” many people answer, “To learn what’s wrong with the site and improve it. In fact, there are even books on access analysis that say so. This is not wrong, but strictly speaking, it is an overestimation of access analysis. First, let’s consider the definition of the term “access analysis. The general image of “access analysis work” is to produce reports using access analysis tools such as Google Analytics, but all that can be done is ” current status recognition. It is the role of subsequent regular meetings to come up with improvement measures.

Recognizing the current situation (access analysis tools)→ Gaining awareness (report sharing) → Thinking of ways to improve (regular meetings)

For those who do access analysis, the first goal should be to present “data that makes everyone aware,” not to come up with improvement plans. Without this awareness, the workload of access analysis will increase.

How to create a report with many insights

So how do you create an “awareness report”? The amount of data displayed by Google Analytics is enormous, and you may be at a loss as to how to put it all together. If you read books to get a clue, you will find “how to create a huge amount of reports” or “KPIs and hypotheses are important”. Many people give up at this point. If it were easy to create such things, they would have done it long ago.

So, in this course, let’s talk about something that is not often talked about in books: the professional.

To begin with, in order to create a report with many insights, you need to know the difference between a report with many insights and a report with few insights. And in order to know the difference between the two, you must know that access analysis originally had two different tasks: monitoring and active data collection.

To make it easier to visualize the difference, I call them “defensive access analysis” and “offensive access analysis”.

Defensive access analysis, offensive access analysis

There are two types of access analysis. One is defensive access analysis and the other is offensive access analysis. This difference is easy to understand if you compare it to an athlete who is trying to correct his bad points and train his strengths. Here is a table to help you understand the difference.

division	common name	Checkpoint	Objective.	If you compare it to an athlete…
keeping	Routine operations (daily, weekly, monthly)	Standard form (small)	Regularly monitor the current status of the site.	health checkup
	Overall analysis	Regular size (large)	We look at the current state of things and randomly search for anything that is wrong. Data mining is also a type of this.	Human checkup and overall checkup
	Checking KPIs	Regular shape (pinpoint)	Check the progress in the degree of improvement.	Monitoring the progress of reinforcement points
offense	Hypothesis-based access analysis	Any	Relying on hypotheses (intuition), collect more and more data, and let them identify causes and countermeasures.	Diagnosis by doctor/coach

Offense and defense are completely different in purpose and approach. In the context of access analysis, words such as monitoring, KPI, hypothesis, and analysis are often used in the same sentence, but that is like saying, “Let’s get healthy and strong! However, this is like mixing up a coach’s diagnosis and a medical checkup as one and the same thing. A health checkup and a coach’s checkup should be approached with different concepts, since they have different methods of operation and objectives. If you are aware of this “defense” and “offense,” you will be able to make your daily access analysis operations more effective. In the next section, we will cover defensive and offensive access analysis.

Defensive access analysis has little awareness.

Defensive access analysis refers to monitoring. We check certain indicators on a regular basis, as if we were measuring our body temperature or height on a regular basis. And when most people think of access analysis, they think of this monitoring. However, there is an unfortunate story. Monitoring doesn’t tell you what’s wrong with your site. I told you that monitoring is like a medical checkup. In a medical checkup, you may be able to notice abnormalities, such as a temperature of 38 degrees Celsius, but you can’t tell what’s wrong with it, can you? Similarly, with access analysis monitoring, you can notice abnormal values, but it is difficult to notice what is wrong. Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

What about KPIs? As you can see from the table, the KPI is like a progress indicator for the strengthening points. By checking these figures, you can be aware of the progression if your body is being trained well, but it still doesn’t tell you what’s wrong or where you can improve.

The only possibility is a physical examination. If you analyze the data at random, you may be able to get some great insights. That’s why many books introduce access analysis for this human checkup system.

However, just as a physical examination is expensive and time-consuming, it is very time-consuming to go through the data at random. It can’t be done that often.

In summary, what most people imagine as “access analysis” is weekly/monthly monitoring, but that monitoring is unlikely to reveal what’s wrong with the site that you were expecting. The only possibility is a human checkup, but for that, you have to check as much data as possible at random.

Is it possible to create “insightful reports” more efficiently? ”Offensive access” analysis has the answer.

Offensive access analysis can lead to great insights

Offensive access analysis refers to “proactive data collection”.

Let’s compare it to a doctor’s diagnosis. The doctor relies on the patient’s report and data, and trusts his own “intuition” to examine more and more parts of the body. When he is convinced that his intuition is correct, he gives a medicine or an injection. For example, if you have a headache, you can take a CT scan and find nothing abnormal. Then, I measured the fever, but still no abnormality was found. So I asked the patient for more details, and he said that he had a very stiff shoulder. Since that was probably the cause, I prescribed some medicine for stiff shoulders. Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

That sounds like a bush doctor but I think you will find that by trusting your instincts and collecting more and more data, you will be more accurate in identifying the cause of the problem.

In other words, if you rely on your intuition and collect data proactively, you can acquire data that can give you very big insights. It’s the opposite of defensive monitoring. In defensive monitoring, you look at a fixed place, whereas in offensive access analysis, you rely on your ” first instinct” to decide what data to look at. Many books on access analysis say that it is important to “formulate a hypothesis first. This “making a hypothesis” refers to the ” first instinct”. If you look at the data based on your intuition, you will notice a lot.

Which is more important, offense or defense?

So far, I have talked about offensive and defensive access analysis. I think that what most people expect from access analysis is “to know what’s wrong or to get a big insight”. If that’s the case, then defensive access analysis, or monitoring, is hardly However, this does not mean that offensive access analysis should be more important than defensive access analysis. Both are important.

Just like human health, if there is something wrong, it is better to have a doctor diagnose it and do offensive analysis, and when there is nothing wrong, defensive monitoring is important.

The offense and defense are inextricably linked, and both should not be neglected, but should be used according to TPO. In particular, if you are a webmaster for a small or medium-sized company that has to spend a limited amount of time, you need to combine offense and defense in an efficient manner.

Summary of this chapter

There are two types of access analysis operations: monitoring (defense) and proactive data collection (offense).

• Monitoring: Checking certain indicators on a regular basis, like a medical checkup.
• Proactive data collection: Like a coach’s diagnosis, it is a hypothesis-driven check. to do.
  • The main purpose of defensive access analysis is to check for anomalies, and awareness is relatively small.

Busy SME personnel should combine this offense and defense efficiently.

Supplemental [Web TIPS]

This chapter describes the offensive and defensive aspects of access analysis.

It is important to be aware of these two when performing specific access analysis work, but if you ask which data should be checked specifically? If you were to ask us, “Which data should we check?” we would answer, ” Offensive data,” according to our experience.

There are three main reasons for this.

• Fewer types of data to acquire, but more insights to gain
• Anyone can do it.
• It’s easy to come up with specific improvements.

What you should definitely acquire for aggressive access analysis is data called “heat maps”, “customer feedback”, and “monitors (user tests)”. User testing can be done for as little as a few bucks, such as the service provided by Pop Insight https://usertesting.jp/express/), or even for free if you ask someone you know. You can also do it for free by asking someone you know. You’ll be surprised how many improvements you can come up with.

The logical explanation for this is that numerical data such as Google Analytics can help us understand overall trends, but it does not represent the detailed concerns of users. User testing, on the other hand, allows users to voice their frustrations as they are, making it easier to understand the countermeasures. Both are important data, but companies such as Beebit, which is famous in the web industry, have achieved a lot with user testing. User testing is great data that can easily lead directly to results. I encourage you to take a broad view of the scope of data and use it to improve your business.