How to Run an Incredibly Effective Post-Mortem Analysis

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – George Santayana.

The only thing worse than making mistakes, is making the same ones again and again.

We know. We’ve been there.

Integrating post-mortem analysis into the end of a project helps you learn from your failures and, most importantly, your successes.

In this post we’ll map out how you can use post-mortem analysis based on digital intelligence to learn from the past and get better results for your future projects.

Post-mortem analysis in business

In medicine, a post-mortem is conducted to determine the cause of death. In business, we don’t deal with such grave events. We want to identify the causes of whatever it was that happened and to understand why it happened so we’re better prepared for future projects.

Successful post-mortem analysis in 5 steps

1. Decide on relevant metrics and collect data at the end of a project to determine if goals were met. Based on your deliverables, you can answer post-mortem questions to pinpoint wins and losses.
2. Pick out the specific items that produced success.
3. List the shortcomings, drawbacks, and what could have been better.
4. Identify factors that pose a challenge or stumbling blocks. You can use questionnaires to get feedback from different stakeholders and team members.
5. Recap and draw conclusions: To wrap-up, compile your findings and draw key takeaways. For example, you might outline steps you took that streamlined the process, kept you agile, or improved your workflow. This way you can incorporate your wins into your next project.

The 5-whys-analysis

For the first four steps above, you should review data-based results. In order to do this, ask yourself why this outcome occurred. Your answer then becomes the starting point for your next question. We recommend doing this five times. The 5-whys-analysis can be critical to the post-mortem process in order to determine the root cause of any project failure.

For research, this means analyzing how your website or app performed before a specific event or project, how it functioned during, and any changes that may have occurred since, both for the good and the bad.

You can use this type of retrospective analysis following significant events, projects, and webinars in your area of reporting. It could be elections in politics, the Oscars ceremony in entertainment, international trade shows in economics, and any small or local event relevant to your audience. Your goal is always continuous improvement.

Timely post-mortem analysis example

Let’s look at a general example. You’re a project manager for a top publisher tracking the Olympics. You’ve created an interactive dashboard as part of your project plan showing how many medals each country earned. You discover that only 6.5% of your traffic to these pages comes from social media, which is significantly less than other news sites reporting on the sports results. You expected more so you start asking.

1. Why do you have less traffic? Because you posted less frequently on your Twitter account than your competitors.
2. Why? Your social media manager didn’t prepare tweets in advance and relied on real-time updates.
3. Why? You didn’t consider Twitter as an effective marketing channel, and your priorities were placed elsewhere.
4. Why? Your data analyst did not identify the market trend of increasing traffic from social media networks to news apps.
5. Why? You’re not using advanced research intelligence software.

See how this can get you to the bottom of any issue? Do some research and find the best analytics software to support teamwork and your overall needs.

Conducting a post-mortem analysis as a publisher

One day after Simone Biles dropped out of the competition, every news and media site ran its own story or opinion piece. But it was clear the drama had only begun.

Events like this are a feast for publishers and media outlets, and a story’s success often depends on your audience.

How do you know if your audience is supportive or angry? Do they want to see footage of the athlete or read professional comments? Do they prefer to get the reactions of her teammates, her adversaries, or experts? You immediately do a post-mortem leveraging insights such as those from Similarweb’s digital suite for publishers.

Audience analysis meets post-mortem analysis

When you assess your website performance, analyzing demographics allows you to segment your audience and improve your targeting strategies. That’s a good start. But you’ll need to understand a lot more about your target audience.

You analyze the audience behavior to understand who accessed your coverage of the event and what other sites they engaged with the most.

Audience analysis helps you to target your audience more effectively.  It’s to really understand your audience. For this example, the story isn’t only sensational, it’s also sensitive. Posting the wrong piece in the wrong place at the wrong time can hurt your brand in the eyes of readers.

Consider the 5-whys analysis.  It can help you answer the questions more precisely, especially if you add engagement metric benchmarks into the mix. These will reveal how many visitors you had from social, which posts were most popular and drew the most traffic, how much time visitors spent on your website or app, and how many pages they viewed on average.

Pro-Tip:  Compare your performance to other sites in your category to see if there are similar trends. Were your numbers high or low in comparison? Without these insights, the post-mortem in our example would have gotten stuck after the first question. Similarweb’s analytics to see your performance in context.  

Engagement metrics to hit

Now that we’ve established what to look at, we can move on to the how.

The following metrics give valuable insights into the quality of your content and your traffic. Based on this data, you can find answers to why the outcome was good or bad and move on to the next why.

1. Bounce rate

Monitoring your website’s bounce rate helps detect how well your content met visitors’ expectations. Understand if the traffic-driving channels had a clear message matching the content of the page they lead to. Note that bounce rates in the news sector are generally high; the U.S.’s average is ~50%.

2. Average visit duration

Similarweb’s analytics software measures the time visitors spend on your site and compares it to the competition. Benchmark against the average visit duration in your category or against specific publishers. Choose a country or region to analyze and the period to calculate.

3. Session duration

Review session duration, then examine how many pages a visitor viewed during the session by checking the number of pages visited. Did they zap through headlines or read background articles thoroughly? If so, check the time spent on the page to find out which articles were more popular than others.

4. Daily active users (DAUs)

Readers consume news daily and are generally very loyal to their news source. During a significant event, you can expect daily unique visitors to increase over the average DAU. If not, you definitely need an in-depth post-mortem analysis and understand why.

5. Industry benchmarks

Our cross-industry benchmarking tools reveal how you are performing compared to others in your market. By mapping your market, you’ll get an idea of where you can improve, and in which areas you are leading.

6. Compare with similar events from the past

Keep the findings of your post-mortem on record. Compare outcome to other similar events. For example, if you’ve covered the Olympics in the past, you could use a new post-mortem to see where you improved this year. Similarweb can help you compare data from different periods – going back to anywhere from a month to two years.

The digital event post-mortem checklist

As a digital marketer, or publisher, consider these four factors when analyzing a story’s performance to make sure that your content strategy is performing as well as it can.

FAQ

How do you conduct a post-mortem in marketing?

Determine relevant metrics, select successful items, note down shortcomings, identify challenges, and finally, review and make conclusions.

How can I grow by stealing market share?

Conduct website, web industry, and app category analysis and identify traffic sources of competitors.

What is a post-mortem analysis example?

If you discover that you’re receiving significantly less traffic from social media to your site than your competitors, ask yourself the five why’s to get to the bottom of the issue.

by Daniel Schneider

Director, Content Marketing

Daniel brings over 10 years of content marketing experience, specializing in both B2B and B2C audiences. He thrives at managing delivery of content projects, consistently developing concepts that drive impact.