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
- Install Google Analytics or another web tracking tool
- Install analytic tracking code on every page of your website
- Determine which page of your website gets the most pageviews
- Determine which page of your website gets the lowest bounce rates
- Set up custom conversions to track when a customer purchases
- Set up custom goals to track how well customers are doing what you would like them to do
- Create multiple custom dashboards
- Schedule automatic weekly updates from your reporting tool
- Track and tag online campaigns that drive traffic to your site
- Measure and compare web performance from different time periods
- Create an advanced segment of people who view your site more than 3 times
- Create an advanced segment of people who come from Facebook
- Determine which keywords are bringing in the most traffic organically
- Analyze path reports to see how customers are navigating throughout your website
- Measure how social media is referring traffic to your site
- Track your social media efforts
- Schedule time to review Facebook insights
- Sign up for bit.ly to track social link sharing
- Sign up for hootsuite to track social
- Start a newsletter and collect email addresses from your readers
- Track open rates and click-through rates from people opening email
- Set up tracking for visitors who search your site
- Study visitors who immediately bounce to improve your site
- Set goals to improve time spent on site
- Set up A/B testing to experiment with what type of message your visitors respond to
- Share insights with other people in your company
- Look at Click map to see what kind of things people are clicking on the most
- Look at demographics to see where your visitors come from
- Pay attention to what Operating System visitors are using
- Pay attention to the different types of mobile devices
- Pay attention to mobile growth
- Have a balance of sources of traffic ie: Organic, Paid, Social, Referrals
- Make sure to have fast page load performance
- Isolate how people are behaving when they land on the homepage
- Track engagement on your site ie: comments or social sharing links
- Monitor what people are saying about you on the web via: blogs, forums, or social
- Discipline to improve one metric week after week
- Understand how to data capture important items that affect your bottom line
- Understand how you acquire a customer online
- Track the performance of online campaigns in relation to purchases
- Isolate your campaigns to track success
- Pinpoint peak web activity
- Nurture your most important referring traffic
- Compare your data against site averages
- Segment everything
- Correlate everything
- Don’t settle for pre-defined variables
- Extract insights not numbers
- Annotate known site improvements
- Test and double check custom implemented tracking
- Block internal employee traffic that might skew data
- Subscribe to web analytic blogs to keep up to date with best practices
- Experiment with different tracking tools
- Measure to improve revenue
- Determine your top landing pages
- Measure against your competition
- Study pathing to see how visitors get from Entry to Checkout
- Study why visitors are dropping out from Entry to Checkout
- Measure your data against your company KPI’s
- Identify your site goals
- Identify what product makes the most money
- Identify what content contributes to making the most money
- Learn analytic definitions between pageview, visit, dimension, metric, etc.
- Set goal, conversion, traffic targets to hit
- Understand the data before reacting to the data
- Join analytic discussion forums to receive help and lessons
- Create a word cloud for your content or search terms
- Analyze direct traffic to determine brand strength
- Focus on loyal and repeat visitors within a short timeframe
- Track user-generated content
- Nurture your most loyal repeat customers
- Determine your top 5% customers
- Strive to review analytics on a scheduled routine basis
- Determine what metrics you know
- Determine what metrics you know you don’t know
- Seek to discover metrics that are unknown
- Get in the mindset to be driven by data
- Keep a log of what works
- Keep a log of what doesn’t work
- Use analytics for guidance and not an end-all be-all, always experiment
- Network with other web analytic professionals
- Join analytic meetups
- Find ways to implement custom variables
- Explore different ways to visualize data
- Don’t be confined by the reporting tool
- Play with data in Excel
- Don’t settle for incremental improvements
- Strive for triple digit improvements
- Get an analytic book
- Take an analytic class
- Get a web analytic certification
- Practice web analysis on your site as well as your friends’ or family’s sites
- Make and discuss analytical decisions as a team
- Pinpoint weak web activity
- Annotate changes that might skew your data
- Correlate different metrics and dimensions to get new insights
- React to large peaks or dips in data with passive caution rather than aggressive
- Determine which keyword phrases drive traffic to your site
- Track web growth from foreign languages and countries
- Set up custom alerts and notifications in large data spikes
- Allow multiple analytic access to key people in your business
