Most organisations I’ve worked in have ample access to data and, usually, spend at least some time a month producing a report for senior management to skim over.

The real issue is not access to that data, as between google analytics, webtrends, nielsens etc you have all the data you’ll ever need. The real issue is being willing to take time to do more with the data than produce a report that shows your pageviews slightly increasing every month (and yes, I’ve worked in places where others have fudged the figures or ignored inconvenient data so the report would look good).

Getting out of “to-do list” mode and taking time to understand what the data is telling you and then using it to inform content creation, measure audience engagement and (shock horror) perhaps to even remove some of the “sacred cow” content areas of the site that people don’t care about or which are costing the business to maintain but aren’t performing. This is where the data really starts informing business decisions.

Website analytics are the most overlooked area for business improvement and hold an absolute goldmine of data. Laziness and fear, in my opinion, are the only things stopping us from harnessing their full power.

Marketing and PR is at an interesting crossroads. Many of the leaders made their way through the ranks in the era of push and pray. Some of these folks struggle with adopting digital concepts and, as a result, fail to cultivate a data-driven culture. If the boss doesn’t care about data, why should the average employee?

What do you think the root cause to data aversion is? Is it a lack of passion to find the answer? A lack of knowledge on how to find the data? A lack of appreciation and top-down embracing of data? Something else?