I can finally reveal the project that has been keeping me up at night, keeping me at work late and keeping me super busy. We’ve just completed the new Cape Town Tourism website.

It’s beautiful and huge, and packed with content almost all of which went through my spreadsheets at one point or another, as I’ve been managing the flow and uploading of content, and I also wrote quite a bit.

It boasts an itinerary functionality and a creative commons flickr feed which are quite exciting and innovative (particularly in terms of South African websites).

Obviously I welcome feedback, but be gentle with me – it’s been 5 hectic weeks and I’m still suffering from the post-production-“labour pains”.

What is the value of knowing the bounce rate across your whole site, rather than one specific page? Or that visitors spend 2 min browsing your pages? How can I use that info to shape my web strategy?

Or rather, what I’m really asking, is “Does providing non-web savvy clients with analytics data have any real value?”

Analytics has became a bit of buzz word with middle managers in off line companies in SA, and they are either demanding this info to feed back to their boards, or web companies are using the existence of these reports to further sell their services.

But I think that some of this info represents both wasted time (on the part of the report writer) and false value to the client. If you have a purely information focussed site (small, seldom updated, “this is us, now contact us in the real world” type site), wouldn’t you just want to know, “am I getting visitors?” or “are we growing?”.

I would argue that automating this type of reporting is the way forward, especially since it frees up time to spend on valuable reporting, the kind that looks at user journeys and their relative success or failure. Or is the lack of “analysis” too controversial?

Do you do reporting for your clients / organisation? What is valuable information to you?