It’s always good to go back to the basics. Web analytics is a set of tools that answer questions and provide insights. A good strategy allows you to act like a detective, understand what has happened, and decide what to do next.
If you understand your data correctly, your web analytics tool offers more than historical statistics (200,000 page views). Instead, you may use the technology to analyze historical data and come to insightful conclusions about the future (for instance, leads are 20% more likely to convert when we take them on a guided tour from the Pricing page).
You have to figure out what exactly you want to know and how to use these analytics to their full potential.
As with most marketing, you must approach your decisions with a goal and an actual strategy. You have to figure out what exactly you want to know and how to use these analytics to their full potential.
How can you develop a web analytics strategy?
One of the challenges when implementing a web analytics strategy is that each company is different and has different objectives, challenges, and ways of measuring things. It’s hard to pick a single answer to tell you what you should pay more attention to, but some excellent practices can help you stay in the direction best for you.
First, what matters most to your company:
Find out what parameters you need to calculate what leads you to success.
This boils down to figuring out what information you want to know and then thinking about how to use it best.
I suggest that you work backward from the final objective. This will give you an idea of what data is essential to you.
Our ultimate goal is to sell a marketing automation product. So, thinking back on that objective, we can devise a route of this type:
This is very simplified, but it gives us a general idea of what is essential to our company and helps us figure out what data to consider to achieve our goals.
From the answers above, the things I need to keep in mind for tracking are:
How do I put data analysis into practice?
“Come on, give me an example of what you do!”
I will give two examples of how we set up analytics tracking on our website to help us make more strategic decisions.
Example 1: Audience Tracking
We have two audiences that we care about and want to engage with.
We have different business objectives depending on whether that person is a potential or a customer.
We want prospects to visit our product and pricing pages and then go to a critical CTA to convert and engage in a conversation with a sales representative.
We want customers to feel motivated to explore the content, use the search function, and be able to self-serve the information they are looking for.
How do I know if I’m doing well with those two subsets of users? This is where our web analytics platform comes into play.
We have created a customer dimension in Google Analytics that knows how to distinguish whether someone is already a customer or a potential one, which allows me to differentiate between one type of user and another. This way, I can prepare reports on what clients and potential clients do on our website.
That has allowed us to make critical decisions about positioning content for different users.
It has provided us with a wealth of information about how customers and potential customers use the website. That has allowed us to make critical decisions about positioning content for different users. In addition, we can report more precisely on the actual use of the various sections of the website according to the type of user for which it was created.
By keeping our goals for each type of user in mind and tracking what they do and where disconnections occur, we have built a website that meets the essentials of both customers and prospects.
Example 2: CTA Metrics
A large part of our commercial strategy is to put CTAs on our website to offer relevant information to users and get them to convert through a form.
We were very interested in knowing which CTAs people interacted with to determine which offers had the most hook. Well… We could use our analysis platform to see that. We can also use it to see when people click on a CTA and if we have points in our journey that cause a user to abandon.
What is a CTA?
A call to action is a clickable link that directs visitors to additional information and takes them to the next step in their journey.
We’ve created a custom event tracker showing which offers are clicked and which pages. We even discovered some CTAs on our website that we should have paid attention to (oops, oops).
We set up different event categories because our marketing and customer success teams care about different types of CTAs and want to see how users interact with the website.
These event categories allowed us to categorize the most common CTAs on the web and determine which pages users are more likely to interact with different offers on.
Using our analytics platform, our team can dig deeper into the data, segment it by user type, and then see the popularity of each program on the web.
Since form generation is our daily bread, it has been beneficial for us to understand how visitors interact with different pages. Based on this, we optimize our form conversion rate and generate more interaction with high-value assets.
Our strategic approach to analysis and testing helps us understand the user experience on the web.
Add web analytics to your tools.
The truth is that web analytics is a very important part of the marketers’ toolbox. Using our analytics platform, our team can dig deeper into the data, segment it by user type, and then see the popularity of each program on the web.
This is a small overview of how we use analytics to go deeper and make decisions. But I hope it gets your imagination going! Creating custom tracking in your analytics platform is critical to success and collecting meaningful data.
