- Do you really know what your site traffic is doing?
- Are you running web analytics?
- Has it been configured to give you the evidence you need to make informed decisions?
I’m a big fan of Google Analytics (GA), the upsides of which are that it’s free, it’s powerful and, most importantly, it’s customisable.
The downside to GA is that it’s incredibly easy to slap the tracking code on a site, capture reams of unfocused data and miss crucial gems that will allow you to understand whether your site hits its objectives.
This, unfortunately, is how most people use it, with designers and developers not responsible for KPIs and clients outsourcing build it is easy for Analytics to fall through the cracks…
…which means many people don’t really know how their sites perform.
5 steps to making Analytics work for you
- 1. Take the ‘Analytics Pledge’
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“I will put understanding the performance of my site at the centre of my online activity, and use Analytics to do it.”
- 2. Develop a clear plan of what site outcomes are of value to you.
- Once you understand the KPIs that will define success, and gained stakeholder buy in, you have a format for communicating site success internally (great for getting the boss to buy into site development) and externally (great for allowing suppliers, such as designers, to understand what you are trying to accomplish).
- 3. Implement the right Analytics approach on your site.
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Do you use subdomains? Do you connect to a 3rd party back-end? Do you need to track ecommerce? Do you need to track multimedia?
All these will require tweaks to the Analytics. Ensuring that your Analytics profiles, and the tracking code implemented on your site, are all present and correct is crucial at the outset of a project. This level of customisation needs setting at the start of a project, once the site is live any changes made here will throw your numbers out badly.
- 4. Track everything you ‘own’.
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The first step of this is to make sure all your incoming campaign activity should be tagged.
Managing a portfolio of links, developed alongside your media schedule, allows for clarity and consistency when you need to compare and contrast what worked and what didn’t.
As well as tracking what comes in completely, make sure that you track the whole site. Make sure you build a complete picture of what visitors do on your site… What I call closing the gaps.
Especially track the following:
- Links out to your other web properties
- Do you have a link to your intranet, social media profiles or sister sites? Track these outbound links so you can distinguish them from site exits.
- Downloads
- Track all downloads, these are measurable conversions, even if shallow.
- Multiple routes to the same goal
- Do you have more than one way for visitors to access the same goals? If so track them separately so you know which calls to action/badges/widgets are really getting the response you want.
- Interaction
- Forms, email links, click to call links – all of these interactions need to be tracked. You want to know when, where and how people are getting in touch.
Tracking key elements within the page, as well as just the page itself let’s you build a complete picture of what is happening on your site. This way you are making decisions based on real, complete information.
- 5. Get the reports you need and use them.
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Analytics offers an array of reports and a few default reports as part of your dashboard. Bin these and start again.
Earlier versions of GA allowed you to define your dashboard based on roles – Executive, Marketeer or Webmaster, giving goal-biased, campaign-biased or platform-biased reports respectively. The current approach is a jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none approach that does non of these well.
The reason for this is that the dashboard is completely customisable. Any report in the system can be added to the dashboard of your profile (upro a maximum of 12).
So get rid of what is there by default and put in place the reports you need.
Each user can have a customised view so every stakeholder can get the info they need.
It is easy to get lost, distracted and misled by the vast amounts of information. Go back to your plan from step 2 and make sure the reports you’re getting support the decisions you’re making.
