Web Analytics – Why You Should Be Peeking Under the Hood

Google offers tons of free tools to do all kinds of things like create online spreadsheets, find directions to a local restaurant, manage your photo collection, or share a family calendar. Whether you have an established web presence or are looking to launch your first site, there is one free tool from Google that everyone should be using. That wonderful tool is called Google Analytics.

Google Analytics provides very detailed insight into how people are interacting with your website. By just placing a small piece of code within each page of your site you will start receiving answers to questions like:

• How many people visited my site during the last month?
• What state (or country) do most of my visitors come from?
• What search terms do my  visitors use to find my site?
• Is my site getting any traffic from social networks? If so, which ones?

But answering these questions is just the tip of the iceberg. With some understanding of what your trying to accomplish with your web site there are a number of ways to dive deeper into these numbers and glean valuable information about just how effective your web presence might be.

That brings me to a discussion I recently had with a fellow by the name of Massimo Paolini. Massimo is the principal of MPThree Consulting where he helps businesses make sense of one of this unseen and often forgotten elements of their website. Massimo explains “What you want to do is understand why people are coming to your site. What is their expectation and how well is your site meeting that expectation?”.

As a Web Analyst, Massimo shared with me a few initial tips that all businesses should consider thinking about when establishing a web site of their own and using analytics:

1. First Establish Goals:
   What are you trying to accomplish by having a web site? Are you simply trying to get more visitors month-over-month or do you have a way for visitors to turn into paying customers by purchasing something on your site?
2. Install and Set Up Analytics:
   As I mentioned previously Google Analytics does many things right out of the box, but if you really want to tap into the power behind the service your going to want to customize and tweak a few things. Google Analytics has an entire section dedicated to setting up what they (coincidently) call  “Goals”. Examples of goals might include when a visitor makes a purchase, registers for an event, or downloads a white paper. Not all goals have an immediate dollar value associated with them, but in many cases you can apply an actual dollar value to them and see how effective your site may be at bringing in sales. You may also find that you want to slice and dice the data that Google Analytics provides you and create your unique report to fit your needs. You can do exactly this by creating a “custom report“. This essentially enables you to combine or simplify reports to give you insight into what is most useful for your business needs. Custom reports might tell you things like “Should I target my site to users of other languages?” or “Which from visitors from which state spend the most time on my site?”.
3. Revisit and Review:
   All this work is useless unless you set aside some time to review your analytics and see how your web site is performing. The purpose is to not only observe, but also react to the information being provided. Your site may need tweaking or your adwords campaign may not be attracting the right visitors to your site. The only way to know is to pay attention to all the juicy information that Google Analytics provides you. It’s all there.

Some of this may sound daunting, but with some help from someone like Massimo (or us) you will be able to more clearly see what is going on with your site’s traffic. If your serious about using your web site effectively for your business or organization you will want to spend some time understanding your analytics. Need some help? Let me know. I know a guy or two.