Analytics

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“The goal is to turn data into information and information into insight.” – Carly Fiorina, former chief executive officer, Hewlett Packard. A beautiful website optimized for your ideal client with strong calls to action is an essential tool to promote your business. What can be just as powerful if not more is the insight that can be gained through analytics tools. The ability to understand the demographics of your visitors, what they are most interested in, what they spend the most time looking and how they are finding you can be at your fingertips when you have analytics installed. The most popular software used is Google Analytics, which Google offers for free. You can even take analytics courses offered by Google to gain certification. Although there are other competitors in the market, for most businesses the standard version of Google Analytics provides exceptional insight and covers almost anything you may want to track and probably things you had not thought about. Enterprise users have more options and service level guarantees with premium versions available both through Google and other analytics software. Some of the key metrics most analytics professionals track for most sites are: 1. Users – How many unique users is your site getting in a given period and which times are most popular 2. Bounce Rate – Do a high percentage of users leave quickly (typically under 30 seconds) without interacting. This may be an indication that visitors are not finding what they are looking for or the site wasn’t what they expected. 3. Sessions – sessions represent how many times a visitor has interacted with the website and has 30 minutes of inactivity. One user may have many sessions over the course of a days or weeks. If you are selling advertising, you may want to see many sessions across your user base. If you are providing technical support, it may indicate people have to keep coming back to resolve their issues. If your website is qualifying sales leads, it may indicate something is not enticing the visitor to take the next step. Depending on your website goals sessions can help understand user behavior. 4. Average Session Duration – tells how much time a visitor spends on your website. If your goal is to provide a content rich experience and have the user stick around for as long as possible you will want to see an increase in this metric. In certain scenarios this may lower, like a restaurant website that provides directions and hours of operation. 5. Percentage of New Sessions – tells how many of your users are new. This can be used to see if most of your traffic comes from a dedicated base, or if a new marketing campaign successfully generated traffic. 6. Sessions by Channel – Social (media), organic search and referral are at the core of this metric. It will tell you if your visitors are coming to your site through social media, through a search engine, or if visitors are bookmarked/typing the domain name straight into the browser. From this you can determine which channels are doing well and which ones may need improvement. 7. Pages Per Session – As the name suggests this metric tracks how many pages a user will visit in each session. If your goal is to have lots of immersive content a high number may be good. In other scenarios this may reflect the user having difficulty navigating and finding the information they are looking for 8. Goal Completions – These are unique to each website. You may want someone to fill in a form, to download a PDF, to watch at least 5 minutes of a video, or nearly any other thing that can be done from a web site. If your primary goal is to get people to sign up for a mailing list, but not many people are completing this (converting) there may be opportunities to improve the flow and call to action 9. Pageviews – this will show you how many times a page was viewed during a given time period. This provides insight to what people are doing on your site. It can also help identify popular content which allows you to 10. Device type – find out how most of your users view your site. Knowing if your users primarily use phone or desktop may help inform key design decision. 11. Geography – this will allow you to know where your visitors are coming from. Depending on if you operate locally, nationally or internationally you can see where the majority of your users are coming from.