Hello, this is Brian Lewis and I’m here today to talk about how your web analytics can be used for you to assess whether your website is doing a good job for you from a marketing perspective.
Before You Start
The first thing, before you dive into your analytics (and hopefully you are using analytics), is that you want to make sure that they’re properly set up and configured correctly. Out-of-the-box Google Analytics is pretty good about making sure that things are going to be set up for you all right, but there are some nuances involved with that. It’s probably a pretty good idea if you’re not sure about that to reach out to someone and we can help you with that. Because if your analytics isn’t set up correctly, then you may be measuring the wrong things.
What Are You Measuring?
Next, you’ll obviously want to be measuring your goals and actually even before you want to measure your goals, one thing you want to think about is, what is important to measure? You want to have a little bit of a strategy session to decide: what are the important considerations of visitor behavior that you’re going to want to be measuring, tracking, and helping you make business decisions as to how to change your site? One of those things is going to be conversions, whether you have an e-commerce website and you sell things on your site or whether your website is for lead generation, where people need to pick up the phone, call you, or fill out a form. A lot of web marketers will get really honed in on what I call a “macro conversion,” which is that purchase or that lead form fill. But you’re also going to want to set up your analytics for micro conversions.
Examples of Micro Conversions
Micro conversions will vary based on your business, but some examples could be: Whether they’re actually visiting a key, important page like a cart page or a page that has your form. Maybe it’s engagement on site. Are people spending more than a certain amount of time on your site? Are they visiting a certain amount of pages? Those are all micro conversions and micro goals. They’re very important because those need to happen first before the macro focus will happen. As a reminder, make sure your analytics are implemented correctly, make sure you understand what it is that you want to track and measure.
How to Dig Into Your Analytics
Analytics are great, but not so much in the aggregate view. Here’s another important distinction that you want to make when you’re looking at your analytics: forget about looking at the numbers as a whole. Because we know that visitors tend to behave differently depending on all sorts of different reasons and one of them is source. Your visitors may behave differently on your website depending on whether they’re coming from an organic search, whether they’re coming from a paid service, or they’re coming from social media, whether they’re coming from a referral, or content marketing email. You’re going to want to be able to assess that behavior in based on that particular source, so that you know how to adjust that particular marketing. And source is just one thing – I mean, it could be demographics, there could be a whole host of factors.
And the only way you really know for sure is you actually have to start digging in your analytics and kind of start weaving your way down to identify what you think of those important segments. Those are the key things you want to think about when it comes to how analytics are going to help you assess your website as a marketing tool.
If you’ve got any questions, please feel free to reach out to us at Tiny Frog. And this is Brian Lewis talking about the web analytics. Thank you.
