Web Analytics in a lot of ways is my favourite field. SEO, Adwords and web design may cause actions, but they can only be measured and acted upon using analytics. It is a field full of insight, but requires doggedness to extract and implement true value.
With any website you must install Google Analytics tracking code on your site. Without this you’ll never know how many people visited your site, what caused them to visit, what they did on your site and why they left. In fact you’ll know nothing and there is no point carrying out any marketing without measurement. The data takes time to collect, so install it even if you don’t plan to use it for six months.
Once you’ve got some data you need to know what to measure and more importantly what to do with the results. This is the difficult part. It’s kind of unique to each website so feel free to give me a call and maybe I can help you with this decision.
The important thing to remember though is that the measurements could, and should change over time. The reality of a website and all the data you have access to is that you cannot analyse all of it, all the time. So break it down into manageable sections and just start trying to figure out what it is telling you.
Here’s an example of what you do –
Take a manageable chunk – e.g. traffic from one source such as Google Adwords
Analyse that traffic – for example look at the bounce rate from a campaign
Find that Insight - is it higher or lower than traffic from another channel e.g. natural search?
Act upon it – change the landing pages to more suitable ones
Review – Go back one month later, is the bounce rate higher, the same or hopefully lower?
Suddenly it doesn’t sound so difficult! Remember though - one of the core skills with web analytics is the judgement to appreciate which core measurements are likely to prove most insightful and applying the analysis in that order. This type of understanding comes with experience. The golden rule is that if you don’t believe you’ll be able to make any conclusion along with an actionable insight from a piece of analysis – then don’t bother with the analysis.
