Digital analytics has done a great deal to transform modern advertising. Gone are the days when companies would run a simple print advertisement and hope for the phone to ring.
Today with sophisticated web analytics, we can measure almost everything that happens. From the paid search link a customer clicked to reach our website, to the detailed pathways the visitor navigated before adding the product to the shopping cart, digital analytics create new opportunities for insight.
Regardless of the level of sophistication of digital analytics tools, these 6 keys are ones I use across every digital project. Though analytics tools change, these principles are timeless. I’ve used them for intranets, for websites, and for successful Mobile Apps.
1. Record everything
You can never record too much data. So from the start you should aim to capture all the essential measures for your website or mobile app. Page Title, Section of Site, Visits, Unique Visitors, Time on Page….all of the standard measures could be important. Whether you eventually use all of these measures or not, if you aim to capture everything up front, this will be the historical reservoir of data for you to draw upon in the future. And you never know when you will have very specific questions to ask of your data.
2. Take time up front to plan your measurement strategy
Too often digital analytics is the very last area that’s considered in a project. This is too late. I’ve seen many projects change direction, just because a bright spark asked at the start of the project, ‘how will we measure success?’ Inevitably, this simple question forces businesses to answer other important questions, like ‘what is important for us to measure’, ‘what would be the baseline of our measures’, and ‘how will we setup systems to capture these measures’. These are all important questions, and its far easier to plan a digital analytics strategy when we have answers for these questions up-front.
As an example, for a recent project we wanted to measure the activations and deactivation of a particular online service. When we looked at this, this required some custom analytics. If we hadn’t looked at this at the start of the project, we may not have captured one of the most important metrics for our work.
3. Measure the key conversion points
For any online initiative to be successful, it has to produce an outcome. This is usually measured in terms of ‘key conversion points’.
A key conversion point is simply the final outcome that represents success for the specific online site.
In eCommerce, this is the ‘number of products added to a shopping cart’ and ‘successful checkouts’. In financial services, this is the number of ‘started online applications’ and ‘completed online applications’. If you’re running an editorial site, this might be the ‘number of times an article’ was viewed within a period.
Every successful online business will have a list of its key conversion points, and will have metrics that track these measures overtime.
4. Track the contributing points
If key conversion points are the final outcomes you’re seeking, there will be other pages and tools on your website that contribute to these.
Sometimes these are referred to as ‘contributing points’. Examples of contributing points could be:
- home pages
- product pages
- special offers (either in terms of pages or on-site advertisements)
- tools (eg. calculators, comparison pages)
- pricing pages
- testimonials
Because these types of pages have an influence on whether a prospect decides to pursue an outcome (eg. adding a product to a shopping cart), it’s important to also track the impact of these pages on key conversion points.
This provides an overall measure of effectiveness of your site’s performance.
For example, if one page receives a bulk of website traffic, but only contributes to a key conversion point 1% of the time, there’s a good chance that page isn’t doing its job and either may not be required or needs to be improved.
5. Get above it and look at the trends
It’s easy to get bogged down in the day-to-day data for a website. There are so many measures on the surface that seem important to watch. Now and then it’s good to get above the detail of data, and look at the longer term trends of site statistics.
There are two metrics to always track. First, trended volume of key conversion points over time. Second, the overall site conversion (represented as ‘number of key conversion points’ aganst ‘overall site visits’). The first measure will tell you whether your desired outcome is growing. The second measure will tell you whether your site is becoming increasingly effective at creating conversion results.
6. Measure, refine, and measure again
The techniques above will give you a measure for your site’s performance. These will tell you if your site is performing well within any given period, or requires improvement.
As with all business growth activities, it’s important to watch these measures while you’re launching activities in the market to grow your business.
By keeping a watch on both – your site performance and in-market activities – you’ll be able to see whether there are specific activities that create superior performance for your site. You can also continue to refine elements on your site to see if this changes performance.
