Starting out in Web Analytics
You’ve heard about web analytics, and you know that it’s something you should be doing to gain more control over your online presence.
Question is, where do you start?
The first thing you should do is approach the stakeholders of your website with a rock-solid argument for web analytics. Your key selling points may include:
- Performance assurance – it’s a proven way to measure whether your website is doing what it’s meant to.
- Customer insights – learn things about your customers that you cannot learn anywhere else, for example, what they are looking for, the language they use when searching for products, how well they know your brand.
- Site optimisation – web analytics gives you actionable insights, which you can use to fix issues with and improve performance of your website.
Once you’ve got their support, you’re ready to start.
Web analytics in six weeks
Six weeks or less. That’s how soon you’ll start to see the benefits of web analytics. And the good news is that some of the steps below take an hour at most to complete.
Step 1. Implement a tracking tool.
Use Google Analytics as your starting tool. It’s free, and functionally rich enough to give you valuable metrics you can use right away. Down the track you may want to look for a vendor that offers enterprise-class web analytics, but Google Analytics is a great place to start.
Step 2. Look at popular pages and engage others.
Using Google Analytics, identify the popular pages on the site and set up a meeting with relevant stakeholders from your business to discuss what is popular and how this information can be used to benefit the business.
Step 3. Ensure search engines are sending traffic your way.
Search engines play a huge role in the online experience, and you should be aiming for a large portion of traffic coming from searches. Of course, variables such as email traffic or strong offline marketing may impact this figure. If you’re not happy with the percentage of traffic coming from search engines, either engage an SEO expert or implement some SEO strategies yourself. Your starting point is the study of search keywords. You should also discuss with relevant stakeholders to ascertain the suitability of keywords in terms of targeting customers to your website.
Step 4. Optimise pages and forms.
By about the fourth week, you’re ready to start implementing valuable changes to your website. Focus on frequently used pages and the pages with high exit rates. Understand how people find these pages and what actions they take after visiting the page from the Navigation Summary report in Google Analytics. Use Site Overlay feature to study click-through statistics on these pages. Engage your web team and marketing with these discussions to explore how the pages could be improved upon.
Step 5. Fix your site search.
Web analytics, coupled with site search, offers powerful insights into your customers. Make sure that your site search is tracked with Google Analytics. See Site Search feature in Google Analytics to learn about how to set up site search tracking. With this feature, you can measure how often a person searches for something on your site; you can look at the language used in searches to identify how people think of your products; and it may show you where new pages need to be added to the site.
Step 6. Optimise email programs.
If you use email marketing, make sure it works. Use Google Analytics URL Builder tool to generate tracking codes for your email links – you’ll know how much traffic is coming to the site from emails.
Where to from here?
Once you’ve completed those six steps, you can start reporting to other people – top tier management and business line managers – about the performance of pages within the site. You can also start to make recommendations about the changes required to improve metrics.
Be aware that you may face roadblocks along the way. Interpreting the data is hard. You have to be diligent and look at the numbers again and again. You have to be ruthless and eliminate the metrics you won’t use. You have to be practical and create reports that contain actionable insights.
If you keep these things in mind and adopt a healthy attitude towards web analytics, you’ll notice the positive difference it can make to your website in no time.
Learn more about Bienalto’s web analytics services
