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Overwhelmed by Your Website Analytics Data?

A few simple things you can do to improve your website... without a PhD in Statistics or 30 dedicated FTEs

by Pete Gaioni, Strategist

Having worked in the web space for a number of years now, I have repeatedly heard - from both clients and colleagues alike - one statement. It goes something like this: “I look at our Google analytics and I’m totally overwhelmed. It’s so much data and the relationships among the pieces are so complex
that I basically end up just looking at how many unique visitors came to the site and our bounce rate. And even if I could make sense of it, how could I do all the stuff required?”

If you have a firm grasp on your organization’s website analytics, sincere kudos. For the rest of us slobs, however, using Google Analytics is like trying to earn a PhD in Physics while being simultaneously engaged in a full-time career. It’s just not happening, nor do we see it on the horizon. For those people, keep the faith - there are a few basic things you can monitor and do to keep your online presence strong, healthy and highly functional.

Let’s start by putting web analytics into some kind of context. They do not offer a magic formula for success on the web; taken out of context or misunderstood, they can even result in bad business decisions. What they can do is help you build a picture of your website and the behaviors of its users. While this picture is a snapshot from a particular perspective, it’s an important one.

If your bandwidth is limited in terms of the resources you have available to focus on monitoring web analytics and making good use of them, here are a few simple things you might consider so that you’re at least taking advantage of the low-hanging fruit that Google Analytics provides. (NOTE: If you have one or more Google AdWords campaigns, there are additional metrics related to your AdWords campaign you will want to monitor. We’re focusing on Google Analytics here, as opposed
to Google AdWords, which will be covered in another article.)

IMPORTANT VOLUME METRICS THAT ARE PRETTY STRAIGHTFORWARD

  • Unique visitors: how many potential new clients

  • Total visitors: how much your site is being visited
  • Page views, unique page views, and click through rates: these metrics are sometimes referred to as belonging to the category "impressions". They tell you where users are going on your site and can help you understand what content on your site is most relevant to visitors (so you can create more of it).
  • Keywords: This metric shows you what keywords people found you through and how each of those keywords converts for you. For example, you can see that people that search for "car dealership in Seattle" convert a lot better than people that search for "car reviews".
  • Entrance pages: This shows the content through which people find you. Identify this content and create more of it.
  • Traffic sources: It shows where your traffic is coming from. This is a great metric if you are trying (and you should) to measure how much traffic each of your campaigns is sending you and how each campaign is converting.

A FEW METRICS THAT COME WITH A CAVEAT

Needless to say, data taken out of context can be misleading. If that manager of a call center judged everyone by the number of calls completed, they might award one of their reps an Employee of the Year citation. But if that rep is simply picking up the phone and hanging up on the client immediately, suddenly they’re not looking like the model employee implied by their call answer rate.

In much the same way, some Google Analytics figures can’t be taken at face value without knowing their limitations. Here are a few of the big ones:

  • Bounce rate: This number indicates the degree to which people land on some page on your site and bounce off that page without going deeper into the site. Conventional wisdom says that a bounce rate of approximately 30% is quite good while a rate of 50% or more indicates a need for improvements to the site. The problem with this simplistic view is that bounce rates can be affected by so many other factors, such as bookmarking. If people use a bookmark to get directly to relevant information on your site, or if they simply manage to find what they need immediately upon visiting the site, your bounce rate increases. If this happens repeated, your bounce rate goes up significantly... but in this case, users are finding what they need. Therefore, the bounce rate could actually be an indication of good information architecture and site design.
  • Length of page visit/length of user views:

SPECIFIC ACTIVITIES WORTH TRACKING

With the addition of a little extra code by the webmaster or other technical person in charge of your website, you can learn about important transactions that occur (or not) on your site such as the number of sales conversions, total dollars associated with various transactions, number of downloads... and the list goes on. Here are the ones I suggest you focus on first:

  • Events: Events help you track specific actions that users take such as downloading information, purchasing products, filling out an online form, viewing a blog entry, etc. In somewhat oversimplified terms, event tracking allows you to find out how many users are performing specific tasks on your site.
  • Conversions: Conversions can be thought of as a subset of events. Conversions focus on determining what causes a user "take the next step" - whether that be buying, contacting a salesperson for information, etc. As an example... if 85% of all site users that actually buy your products online make their purchase immediately after seeing a 3D model of the product they buy, you have a pretty compelling statistic indicating your 3D product showcase is important to converting a potential customer to an actual paying customer. Conversions can help you understand the things that turn users from browsers to buyers.
  • Goals: Goals take conversions to the next step by associating dollar values with specific user actions. For example, if the 3D product tours cause X number of users to buy $Y worth of product, the value of the product showcase can be assessed over a period of time. Goals help you see the ROI of your site and of various actions taken by users.
  • Categories: In my experience, many companies view their analytics through the narrow lens of their website's structure. For example, how many users visited this page or viewed this specific video? Categories let you tag content types so they can be analyzed in the aggregate. In other words, how many users viewed all site pages that include testimonials or all videos having to do with virtual tours? This information can be very powerful because it tells you the kinds of content that are desirable and relevant to your customers. Ultimately, you need to be realistic about how much bandwidth you have to utilize this information to improve your website's performance. Companies - particularly small and medium ones - that try to look at every piece of analytics data and implement 200 ideas every time a number changes end up running in circles. Moreover, they almost inevitably get frustrated and stop actively using their analytics data to inform decisions about their website and their business.

Personally, I think it’s better to do fewer things and do them well. If you feel relieved to hear it, my job here is done.