That’s a neat little framework — his Trinity mindset. But we must not forget Avinash’s ultimate goal — to achieve better results on the web. More leads, higher conversion rates, and greater revenue; these are just some of the real metrics for measuring website effectiveness (especially from an executive perspective).
[...]

We don’t really ask that much of our web analytics software. Just tell us what’s happening on our websites and what we should do about it. Count what people do, tally it up, create pretty little tables and graphs for……

[...] here is a fascinating site, which specialises in web analytics. I just love it about Internet that you can always find someone who totally specialises in anything. Source:  Avinash Kaushik [...]

I say this because while I might agree that the trinity is an excellent goal, it will never happen all at once in reality, and there is a process to follow in looking at the data. If one was going to start building this trinity from scratch in a comopany, one would have to start somewhere–all parts of this triangle are not equally important all at once.

Of course given my questions, I should present a better analogy, but so far I am coming up blank and I apologize for that. But I have a feeling that you’ll chew on this feedback and find something even more compelling, or compliment it with a brief explanation in the presentation.

Your blog is incredible, by the way, I’m so glad someone is thinking about these issues at a high level. I really appreciate your insights.

Sincerely,

Melinda

I do agree, that’s why I offered two examples instead of three. The triange thing sorta lends it self to your post - but it’s not a perfect analogy.

a² + b² = c²

where a and b are the two sides of the right angle triangle. Of course if you know c and b you can compute a and so on.

But in the Trinity there is one absolutely necessary part of the “triangle” (where a Pythagoras’ theorem type inspiration won’t apply).

You are right, if you have Experience and Outcomes I think you can live without Behaviour (sub-optimal but you can).

If you have Experience and Behaviour you can hypothesize that if those two are doing great then Outcomes must be good as well (again sub optimal but if clickstream is good and Customer Satisfaction is high then sales have to be high, or atleast normal).

But if you have Behaviour and Outcomes then you can’t say for sure that Experience is ok. For one simple reason: With 2 to 3% conversion rate Outcomes represents a minority of site visitors and with the limitations of clickstream data you won’t really know that you are solving for all your customer segments (that you have high Customer Satisfaction across all customer segments and high Net Promoter scores).

So Experience is absolutely killer and if I had to pick only one element of the trinity to have that would be it.

Would you agree? Thanks for reminding me of my geometry lessons!! : )

Avinash Kaushik has another great post on how to approach web analytics  that just Wow’d me, make you want to think.   You need to read Avinash’s post yourself - I’m not going to rehash it here.  However, I did……

Using Trinity is a very helpful way to represent what is happening on site and what it means. While your talking about segmenting traffic to the nth degree, Trinity is a segmentation, it and of itself, your putting certain parts of web analysis and insight into one leg of the triange, and some in another. In that sense, Melinda’s comments are also valid.

Aside from what type of site you have, or if sessions are the right way to measure interaction, it’s more likely than not that most sites will not have all the tools needed to do all three parts of the Trinity equally as well.

For my current employer, I don’t think we do step 3 as well as we could, and I think our web analytics hampers us for step 1.

Sure, Trinity is an ideal, after all, I know that, but we don’t have all the right tools to get to the Trinity approach and make it fully work - the way you have outlined it. I wish I could make bread out of water and make analytics out of nothingness - but if you don’t have the right tools and there right organizational setup - the Trinity approach is going to be very hard to actualize, analysts will have to work it out, for themselves, as best they can. That’s what I do.

What this post reminds me of is that the journey is the goal. You know, from geometry that if you have two sides of a triange you can get the third side by induction (if that’s the right term - it’s been a long time since 9th grade Geometry). As long as your analysing web experience as Trinity, get two sides and you figure out the third. Here’s what I mean - but maybe my approach is a bit simplistic

case 1: You have ClickStream analysis plus Customer Satisfaction (but you don’t know how many orders you got)(that’s hard to imagine, btw). Can you figure out the order part, pull it out of the analytics somehow? Probably.

case 2: You have Clickstream Analysis/segmentation and the number of orders but no survey data on customer satisfaction - can you derive that from the analytics and customer behavior on your site? Probably.

A lot of times, just organizing your experience will create the questions and the answers - that’s been my experience.

I understand completely your point on using the continuous improvement cycle visual or the pyramid (this one is a bit more compelling). But it’s the “equal-ness” yet dependent existence that seems to keep me away from the pyramid.

Long Answer (to your multi-faceted question):

Here is the first line of a wikipedia article that comes close to why I might have choosen the name: The word “Trinity” comes from “Trinitas”, a Latin abstract noun that most literally means “three-ness” (or “the property of occurring three at once”).

I do believe that while there are dependencies between each, and there are very strong ones, these three are equally important and exist all at the same time and they can’t be silos.

I’ll give you an example: In our case we can measure Customer Satisfaction and if we are increasing “Net Promoter” or “likelihood to buy” over time and that in of itself is valuable and golden (because if you are not doing well the open ended VOC will be illuminating). But we can also take all the “unhappy” people (low CS) and see what they did on the website by using ClickTracks (behavior) or measure Navigation or Content ratings for people who buy different products (outcomes).

On your other point…..

In my mind Behavior is mostly your “what’s happening” and just a smidgen of “why it is happen”.

Experience is mostly “why it is happening”. You can get some causality of Why from ClickStream or Outcomes but the Why I am interested in, and advocating, has all to do with people and perceptions and their needs and complex reactions etc. So the Why is almost all Experience in the Trinity.

Ok hopefully I have done enough to challenge your challenge to my challenge to your comment. Your turn now. : )

No worries about midnight blogging. :) Your response challenges me to present my thoughts more clearly, however.

Is it really possible to influence outcomes without understanding why things are happening? Is it that my 1&2 are combined as sub headings under your 1?

If that’s a correct assessment, I respectfully suggest that trinity’s not the right word for what you’re talking about. Calling these a trinity (definition: the sum of one and one and one, e.g. all equal), and representing these concepts as a 2-d triangle implies that there are equal relationships between the three concepts, all equally important. In reality that is not true of course, because there are dependencies here. One must understand customers before making decisions, etc.

A couple of ideas with the goal of making the relationships between these concepts more obvious visually: Perhaps This is more like a circle, the classic continuous improvement cycle of measure, test, measure, iterate, ad infinitum; or a pyramid, where the base is understand experience (i.e. What happened and why?) and then make changes, get results.

I offer these suggestions because I’m a huge fan of your posts on selling your ideas interally so I suspect you’ll appreciate the nuances of this kind of discussion. If not, just tell me to bug off. :)

Sincere regards,

Melinda

Our Trinity here is Behavioral Analysis, Attitudinal Analysis, and Testing. I always thought of the latter as being in response of what we discoved in the first two, so I never felt 100% comfortable with making it the third pole.

I like your second one, “Outcome”, even though it is still pretty much bahavioral, but at least it has the merit of distinguishing amongst behaviors (here put as “valuable actions” I would say).

From what I have been reading lately, it seems that the Web Intelligence/Insights field is on the verge of producing its Novum Organum… Keep up the good work!

I think you can start anywhere you want and jump into a mine field of questions.

But, akin to the yellow arrow in the last image, the process tends to be:

Understand Experience
Influence Behaviour
Leading to (right) Outcomes

Rinse and repeat.

This would line up with your 1,2,3 nicely I think.

Thanks for posting your comment. I appreciate the tip about Ms. Minto’s book, I’ll check it out.

Thus, presenting the issue in this order:

1. What’s happening
2. Why is it happening
3. So what?

leads directly and without any hard leaps in logic to the most important question, namely,

What are we going to do about it?

This could be exactly what you mean, but by referring to the Outcomes as “so what” I get a bit confused when you jump back to “why”.

Just my $0.02.

Meanwhile,

If you haven’t already looked at it, you might enjoy Barbara Minto’s book, The Pyramid Principle. I had the opportunity to attend a multi day training with her personally when I worked for a previous employer. I can see that you would very much understand and agree with her approach to logic in speaking and writing. :)

Best regards,

Melinda