Why Web Analytics?

101 Tips to Improve Your Business AnalyticsThe task of marketing your company can be very complex.  Business owners must find the balance of promoting and attracting new customers while continuing to deliver on good products and services.  It is critical to every business to capture the data to analyze what customers are doing online with web analytics.  To learn more about how to get started with web analytics don’t forget to watch my short video or read how to get started quickly.  Below are 101 tips to business web analytics.

Tips to Improve Your Business with Analytics

  1. Install Google Analytics or another web tracking tool
  2. Install analytic tracking code on every page of your website
  3. Determine which page of your website gets the most pageviews
  4. Determine which page of your website gets the lowest bounce rates
  5. Set up custom conversions to track when a customer purchases
  6. Set up custom goals to track how well customers are doing what you would like them to do
  7. Create multiple custom dashboards
  8. Schedule automatic weekly updates from your reporting tool
  9. Track and tag online campaigns that drive traffic to your site
  10. Measure and compare web performance from different time periods
  11. Create an advanced segment of people who view your site more than 3 times
  12. Create an advanced segment of people who come from Facebook
  13. Determine which keywords are bringing in the most traffic organically
  14. Analyze path reports to see how customers are navigating throughout your website
  15. Measure how social media is referring traffic to your site
  16. Track your social media efforts
  17. Schedule time to review Facebook insights
  18. Sign up for bit.ly to track social link sharing
  19. Sign up for hootsuite to track social
  20. Start a newsletter and collect email addresses from your readers
  21. Track open rates and click-through rates from people opening email
  22. Set up tracking for visitors who search your site
  23. Study visitors who immediately bounce to improve your site
  24. Set goals to improve time spent on site
  25. Set up A/B testing to experiment with what type of message your visitors respond to
  26. Share insights with other people in your company
  27. Look at Click map to see what kind of things people are clicking on the most
  28. Look at demographics to see where your visitors come from
  29. Pay attention to what Operating System visitors are using
  30. Pay attention to the different types of mobile devices
  31. Pay attention to mobile growth
  32. Have a balance of sources of traffic ie: Organic, Paid, Social, Referrals
  33. Make sure to have fast page load performance
  34. Isolate how people are behaving when they land on the homepage
  35. Track engagement on your site ie: comments or social sharing links
  36. Monitor what people are saying about you on the web via: blogs, forums, or social
  37. Discipline to improve one metric week after week
  38. Understand how to data capture important items that affect your bottom line
  39. Understand how you acquire a customer online
  40. Track the performance of online campaigns in relation to purchases
  41. Isolate your campaigns to track success
  42. Pinpoint peak web activity
  43. Nurture your most important referring traffic
  44. Compare your data against site averages
  45. Segment everything
  46. Correlate everything
  47. Don’t settle for pre-defined variables
  48. Extract insights not numbers
  49. Annotate known site improvements
  50. Test and double check custom implemented tracking
  51. Block internal employee traffic that might skew data
  52. Subscribe to web analytic blogs to keep up to date with best practices
  53. Experiment with different tracking tools
  54. Measure to improve revenue
  55. Determine your top landing pages
  56. Measure against your competition
  57. Study pathing to see how visitors get from Entry to Checkout
  58. Study why visitors are dropping out from Entry to Checkout
  59. Measure your data against your company KPI’s
  60. Identify your site goals
  61. Identify what product makes the most money
  62. Identify what content contributes to making the most money
  63. Learn analytic definitions between pageview, visit, dimension, metric, etc.
  64. Set goal, conversion, traffic targets to hit
  65. Understand the data before reacting to the data
  66. Join analytic discussion forums to receive help and lessons
  67. Create a word cloud for your content or search terms
  68. Analyze direct traffic to determine brand strength
  69. Focus on loyal and repeat visitors within a short timeframe
  70. Track user-generated content
  71. Nurture your most loyal repeat customers
  72. Determine your top 5% customers
  73. Strive to review analytics on a scheduled routine basis
  74. Determine what metrics you know
  75. Determine what metrics you know you don’t know
  76. Seek to discover metrics that are unknown
  77. Get in the mindset to be driven by data
  78. Keep a log of what works
  79. Keep a log of what doesn’t work
  80. Use analytics for guidance and not an end-all be-all, always experiment
  81. Network with other web analytic professionals
  82. Join analytic meetups
  83. Find ways to implement custom variables
  84. Explore different ways to visualize data
  85. Don’t be confined by the reporting tool
  86. Play with data in Excel
  87. Don’t settle for incremental improvements
  88. Strive for triple digit improvements
  89. Get an analytic book
  90. Take an analytic class
  91. Get a web analytic certification
  92. Practice web analysis on your site as well as your friends’ or family’s sites
  93. Make and discuss analytical decisions as a team
  94. Pinpoint weak web activity
  95. Annotate changes that might skew your data
  96. Correlate different metrics and dimensions to get new insights
  97. React to large peaks or dips in data with passive caution rather than aggressive
  98. Determine which keyword phrases drive traffic to your site
  99. Track web growth from foreign languages and countries
  100. Set up custom alerts and notifications in large data spikes
  101. Allow multiple analytic access to key people in your business