BradPace.com

Web analytics is one of the most valuable tools for making business decisions available to an Internet business today. But all to often they get used only for reporting. Analytics is not reporting! Here are a few suggestions to make sure you are getting what you need from your web analytics:

1) Take a step back and look at the numbers as visitors. What are they thinking? What are they really doing? Often usability problems are not captured in the stats. And if they are it is often easy to come to the wrong conclusion. For example, say you have a product that is not getting any page views. You may conclude that people are not interested in that product. When in actuality it may be a problem with your search engine. If your visitors can’t find it, it is not there.

2) Only worry about looking at stats that have ACTIONABLE results. Meaning if you can’t come up with an action that can be made from monitoring a stat then it is not worth monitoring. Page views is once such action. It is interesting to watch overall site page views from day to day. But what can you really conclude if page views drop? What stats that are key performance indicators (KPIs) of your site.

3) Have specific goals and or questions in mind before you go digging through the numbers. It is very hard to find actionable site improvements by just “browsing” your numbers.

4) Companies have a tendency to group actions into large buckets. I want my uses to first take step 1, then 1, then 3 then they will buy. But in reality each user is different. Remember the saying “there is no average user”? So think of your site as being made up of many “micro-actions” that hopefully lead the user down a path to a purchase. Users can’t be pushed but must be lead. The real question is which micro-actions are most persuasive!
5) You must use segmentation in your stats. Segmentation is the idea of breaking users into groups. This may seem like I am contradicting my previous point but I am not. Here you are not trying to force users into taking a few specific actions. But you are breaking what they actually did into segments to better understand what they did in the process. This can be by referring source, by site feature, by user status, or by content. It is very important to track conversion rate by segment. (I don’t do this yet, but I will!)
6) One trick is to assign money to the various micro-actions on your site. This way you can see which ones are most important to your business.
7) Follow the 3 C’s of understanding analytics. Context, Comparison, and Contrast. Look at the numbers in context. Then compare them to something. This can be a comparison to itself over time or a comparison to itself in an A/B or multivariant test for example. You can also contrast it to other areas of your site to prioritize changes. When making changes to your site make sure you get at least a 10% change in your KPI. If you are doing an A/B test you need to beat the original version by at least 10% to declare a winner and a change that is worth making. This is just a general rule of thumb. But usually if it can not make a 10% change go back to the original.
9) You can’t automate marketing profitability! You just have to go through the numbers.
10) Track spider activity.
11) Track the latency of your site.
12) Track your competitors.
13) Understand your bounce rate. A bounce is when a visitor only hits one page and leaves. The updated google analytics shows bounce rate very well.

Just one more note. I visited the booth of a company called ClickTracks. They have a web analytics system that tries to display most results graphically. I really liked some of their reports. They have a funnel report that show many different pages and each is shaded with a different color. The darker ones are more “persuasive” than the lighter ones. It made it very easy to see which pages are working best.