101 Tips to Improve Your Business with Analytics

Why Web Analytics?

The task of marketing your company can be very complex.  Business owners must find the balance of promoting and attracting new customers while continuing to deliver on good products and services.  It is critical to every business to capture the data to analyze what customers are doing online with web analytics.  To learn more about how to get started with web analytics don’t forget to watch my short video or read how to get started quickly.  Below are 101 tips to business web analytics.

Tips to Improve Your Business with Analytics

1. Install Google Analytics or another web tracking tool
2. Install analytic tracking code on every page of your website
3. Determine which page of your website gets the most pageviews
4. Determine which page of your website gets the lowest bounce rates
5. Set up custom conversions to track when a customer purchases
6. Set up custom goals to track how well customers are doing what you would like them to do
7. Create multiple custom dashboards
8. Schedule automatic weekly updates from your reporting tool
9. Track and tag online campaigns that drive traffic to your site
10. Measure and compare web performance from different time periods
11. Create an advanced segment of people who view your site more than 3 times
12. Create an advanced segment of people who come from Facebook
13. Determine which keywords are bringing in the most traffic organically
14. Analyze path reports to see how customers are navigating throughout your website
15. Measure how social media is referring traffic to your site
16. Track your social media efforts
17. Schedule time to review Facebook insights
18. Sign up for bit.ly to track social link sharing
19. Sign up for hootsuite to track social
20. Start a newsletter and collect email addresses from your readers
21. Track open rates and click-through rates from people opening email
22. Set up tracking for visitors who search your site
23. Study visitors who immediately bounce to improve your site
24. Set goals to improve time spent on site
25. Set up A/B testing to experiment with what type of message your visitors respond to
26. Share insights with other people in your company
27. Look at Click map to see what kind of things people are clicking on the most
28. Look at demographics to see where your visitors come from
29. Pay attention to what Operating System visitors are using
30. Pay attention to the different types of mobile devices
31. Pay attention to mobile growth
32. Have a balance of sources of traffic ie: Organic, Paid, Social, Referrals
33. Make sure to have fast page load performance
34. Isolate how people are behaving when they land on the homepage
35. Track engagement on your site ie: comments or social sharing links
36. Monitor what people are saying about you on the web via: blogs, forums, or social
37. Discipline to improve one metric week after week
38. Understand how to data capture important items that affect your bottom line
39. Understand how you acquire a customer online
40. Track the performance of online campaigns in relation to purchases
41. Isolate your campaigns to track success
42. Pinpoint peak web activity
43. Nurture your most important referring traffic
44. Compare your data against site averages
45. Segment everything
46. Correlate everything
47. Don’t settle for pre-defined variables
48. Extract insights not numbers
49. Annotate known site improvements
50. Test and double check custom implemented tracking
51. Block internal employee traffic that might skew data
52. Subscribe to web analytic blogs to keep up to date with best practices
53. Experiment with different tracking tools
54. Measure to improve revenue
55. Determine your top landing pages
56. Measure against your competition
57. Study pathing to see how visitors get from Entry to Checkout
58. Study why visitors are dropping out from Entry to Checkout
59. Measure your data against your company KPI’s
60. Identify your site goals
61. Identify what product makes the most money
62. Identify what content contributes to making the most money
63. Learn analytic definitions between pageview, visit, dimension, metric, etc.
64. Set goal, conversion, traffic targets to hit
65. Understand the data before reacting to the data
66. Join analytic discussion forums to receive help and lessons
67. Create a word cloud for your content or search terms
68. Analyze direct traffic to determine brand strength
69. Focus on loyal and repeat visitors within a short timeframe
70. Track user-generated content
71. Nurture your most loyal repeat customers
72. Determine your top 5% customers
73. Strive to review analytics on a scheduled routine basis
74. Determine what metrics you know
75. Determine what metrics you know you don’t know
76. Seek to discover metrics that are unknown
77. Get in the mindset to be driven by data
78. Keep a log of what works
79. Keep a log of what doesn’t work
80. Use analytics for guidance and not an end-all be-all, always experiment
81. Network with other web analytic professionals
82. Join analytic meetups
83. Find ways to implement custom variables
84. Explore different ways to visualize data
85. Don’t be confined by the reporting tool
86. Play with data in Excel
87. Don’t settle for incremental improvements
88. Strive for triple digit improvements
89. Get an analytic book
90. Take an analytic class
91. Get a web analytic certification
92. Practice web analysis on your site as well as your friends’ or family’s sites
93. Make and discuss analytical decisions as a team
94. Pinpoint weak web activity
95. Annotate changes that might skew your data
96. Correlate different metrics and dimensions to get new insights
97. React to large peaks or dips in data with passive caution rather than aggressive
98. Determine which keyword phrases drive traffic to your site
99. Track web growth from foreign languages and countries
100. Set up custom alerts and notifications in large data spikes
101. Allow multiple analytic access to key people in your business