Where to Start

Do you already have experience looking at metrics from pay-per-click advertising campaigns? Google Analytics is simply the widening of that report view, enabling you to see all referrals and behaviour of your visitors. If you’re new to web metrics reporting, the amount of information can feel overwhelming at first.

When you first implement web analytics, you’ll want to gain insight into the initial visitor metrics and find our your traffic levels and where your visitors are coming from. First-level metrics include:

• How many daily visitors you receive
• Your average conversion rate (be it sales, registrations, downloads, and so on)
• Your top-visited pages.
• Average visit time and how often visitors return
• Average visit page depth and how this varies by referrer
• Geographic distribution and languages of your visitors
• Are your pages “sticky” (do visitors stay or simply bounce off: single page visits?)

If your running an e-commerce area, you’ll also want to know:

• Revenue your site is generating
• Where your customers are coming from
• What your top-selling products are
• Average order value of your top-selling products

With these metrics you can draw a line in the sand as a starting point from which you can increase your knowledge. Let me warn you, Google Analytics gives you statistics so easily and readily that you may become obsessed with checking them!

As you move deeper into your analysis, you will want answers to more complicated questions from your data:

• What is the value of a visitor and how does this vary depending on where they came from?
• What is the value of a web page?
• How do existing customers user the site compared to new visitors?
• How do visits and conversions vary by referrer type or campaign source?
• How does bounce rate vary by page viewed or referring source?
• Is my site engaging with visitors?
• Is my internal site search helping or hindering conversions?
• How many visits and how much time does it take for a visitor to become a customer?

We can answer all of these questions with Google Analytics reports.

The above illustrates that the majority of websites have single-figure conversion rates. How can that be? Can it be improved? As with any product, there is always room for improvement from a user-experience point of view – including our own websites. Ultimately, assuming you have a good product or service to offer, the user experience of your visitors will determine the success of your website, and…web analytics provide you the tools to investigate this.

Remember that web analytics are tools – not ends in themselves. Your analytics cannot tell you why visitors behave the way the do, what improvements you should make. For that you need to invest in report analysis, and that means hiring expertise, training existing staff, using the services of an external consultant, or using a combination of all of these. Most of the time, you need to use multiple tools to gain an insight as to “why”. These include the use of voice-of-customer tools (surveys, customer ratings, and feedback) as well as offsite analytics (blog comments, social network mentions and sentiment).

Decisions Web Analytics Can Help You Make

Knowledge without action is meaningless. Web analytics give you the knowledge from which you can make informed decisions about changing your online strategy – for the better. Therefore it important to include change to your website or its marketing as part of your metrics strategy. Simple in theory, the larger the organization the harder it is to get stakeholders aligned and implementing changes is a project in itself. Build this in from an early stage or you may rapidly become frustrated at your unrewarded efforts.

When working on benchmarks, with any organization, spend time planning its key performance indicators (KPIs). KPIs provide a path to distill the multitude of website visitor data available to you as clear, actionable information. In other words, KPIs represent the key factors, specific to your organization, that measure success.

Google Analytics gives you data which KPIs are built and sometimes a KPI directly. Saying “we had 30,000 visitors this week” is providing a piece of data. Our KPI based on this could be “our visitor numbers are up 10 percent month on month” which is an indicator saying things are looking good.

Using KPIs, typical decisions we can make include those below.

Observation: We have a new top-selling product that is delivering 20 percent more by revenue than any other.
Action: Reward the web and marketing teams for a job well done!

Observation: The average visits per day from organic search has halved compared to last week.
Action: Call the SEO team. Investigate any changes in content, redirection, or site architecture.

Observation: Our last banner campaign cost $5,000 and generated four sales worth $1,000.
Action: Drop the banner campaign.

While engaging this process to improve your website’s performance, consider the changes as part of a continuous process – not a one time fix. Think in terms of the AMAT acronym:

• Acquistion of visitors
• Measurement of performance
• Analysis of trends
• Testing to improve

Website Measurement – Why Do This?

It’s an obvious question and one that has an obvious answer – but this question still comes up at meetings within organizations where website performance is being discussed. Every business owner/executive understands the importance of measurement, but “why do we need another measurement tool in our business?”

A common fear is data overload – collecting more information just because you can inevitably leads to more confusion, instead of clarity. This can easily be the case if your website is not integrated with the rest of your business – a common problem for non transactional websites. It is important to decide early on a website strategy, what value does web measurement bring to your business. This could be to track and optimize your online ordering or booking process, or identifying problems following the launch of a new site design.

If you website is an important part of your business strategy, then website measurement is also important to that strategy. The more valuable your website is to you, the greater the significance of your web measurement tools. These tools should be used to identify growth opportunities, measure efficiency improvements, and highlight when things go wrong.

Information Web Analytics Can Provide

If you want to do business effectively on the Web, continually refining and optimizing your online marketing strategy, site navigation, and page content (along with how your offline marketing, press releases, and communications interact with your website). A low-performing website will starve your return on investment (ROI) and possibly damage your brand. Of course, you need to understand what is performing poorly – the targeting of your marketing campaigns, poor reviews of products/services on the Web, or your website’s ability to convert once a visitor arrives. Web analytics are the tools for gathering this information, while benchmarking the effects.

You’ve probably notice the word tools in its plural form. This is because the term web analytics covers many areas that require different methodologies or data-collection techniques. For example, offsite tools are used to measure the size of your potential audience (opportunity), your share of voice (visibility), and the buzz (comments/sentiment) that is happening on the Internet overall. These are relevant metrics regardless of your website’s existence. Contrarily, onsite tools measure the visitor’s onsite journey, its drivers, and your website’s performance. These are directly related to your website’s existence.

The differences in methodology between offsite and onsite web measurement tools are significant, which leads to very different results. Even the numbers for the most basic website, such as the number of visitors a website receives or the total number of pageviews, the values can differ dramatically. This is a constant problem for site owners, media buyers, and marketers alike who attempt the futile task of reconciling the metrics. Now for the truth – metrics obtained from offsite methods cannot be reconciled with those from onsite tools. It’s like comparing apples to oranges. The differences can be large, for example +/-100 percent is not uncommon.

To summarize: Offsite web analytics tools measure your potential website audience. They allow you to see the bigger picture of how your website compares to others. Onsite web analytics tools measure the actual visitor traffic arriving on your website. Tracking the engagements and interactions of your visitors. Offsite and onsite analytics should be used to complement each other – not compete against each other.

Continue to Part 2