The Art of Web Analytics: How to Avoid Analysis Paralysis and Focus on the Metrics that Matter to Your Business

treatmentspecialist

May 5th, 2010
by treatmentspecialist

Web analytics can help you improve user experience as well as segment out characteristics of your most profitable site visitors so you can drive more traffic and boost your sales!

Web analytics can help you improve user experience as well as segment out characteristics of your most profitable site visitors to drive more traffic and boost your sales!

When we think of web analytics, most people think of data. Lots and lots of data. After all, the web is the most trackable marketing medium out there. So how do you avoid analysis paralysis and help ensure your analytics efforts are paying off?

While colleting data is defintiely a large part of web analytics, the artful part is figuring out what your data priorities are and being able to turn your data into actionable items for enhancing your user experience and boosting your business.

I recently had the pleasure of teaching a web analytics class at UCSB, and we talked about geeky things like Key Performance Indicators (KPI) – or simply put: looking at the metrics that matter to your business. And how do you know what metrics matter?

Before you even sign up for or log into your Google analytics account, think strategically about what you want to accomplish with your analytics efforts. Or as web analytics guru Avinash Kaushik says, just ask yourself:  Who cares?

To help boost your marketing efforts, here are 4 important things to do when reviewing your web analytics:

1. PLAN: Know what questions you want to help answer when you’re reviewing your web analytics and make a checklist of your goals.

2. MEASURE: Focus in on the metrics that matter to your business and avoid analysis paralysis by establishing data priorities so you’re not sidetracked by otherwise “interesting” data.

3. ANALYZE: Ongoing review and analysis is key. You will also need to contextualize data against your current marketing activities. And if you’re a visual person, presentation can help you monitor trends (think color-coded spreadsheets, pie charts – whatever floats your boat), and can help you view changes over time and help you know when you’ve hit targets that you’ve set.

4. TAKE ACTION: If your goal is to optimize your marketing efforts to some degree, you will need to be able to glean actionable insight form your data analysis.

Whether you are looking at unique visitors, traffic sources and referring keywords, top content, web site overlay or your top content – be sure to ask yourself if/how these metrics are relevant (who cares?) The metrics that matter most will help you improve customer experience as well as enable you to segment out characteristics of your most profitable users so you can drive more traffic and boost your sales!

To learn more about the art and science of web analytics, watch our free tuturial on the Power of Web Analytics.

For more web marketing tools and tips, follow me on Twitter @my_dog_ate_it.

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