Web Analytics

Everyone uses a web analytics service on their website, but how many of us use that data to actively improve our websites?

Most of us just use analytics to monitor how the site is performing, based on simple measurements such as Pageviews and where the traffic is coming from. Pageviews are up! Great, what I’m doing must be working. Pageviews are down! Oh no! What went wrong? And at that point we may start looking into what the problem is.

While measuring performance makes sense, analytics should be more than just monitoring the data. It should be about the insight you can gain from that data. Insight that can lead to action. Action that can improve your site.

That’s what most of the articles in this section are about – using Google Analytics to identify actionable information.

When giving my Actionable Analytics talk, I asked the audience how many people had a team looking after their website. Quite a few hands went up. When I then asked how many of those teams had someone who’s job included analysing web statistics, only 2 hands stayed up.

I then asked how many people had a website that they ran by themselves. More than half the audience hands went up. When I then asked how many spent time analyzing their web stats, no hands stayed up.

That goes to show that an analytics expert is a luxury that most small to medium websites just don’t have.

That’s really unfortunate, because while you can get by without one, the benefits of acting on insight are huge, especially if making money is one of the goals of the website. There are so many things you can do to improve the user experience and conversion rates through acting on insight from analytics!

This page contains resources relating to my “Actionable Analytics” talk at WordCamp Melbourne on 27 April 2013.

Video

Slides

Alternatively, you can download the slides in either of the following formats:

Questions

If you have any questions about the talk, feel free to ask. I’m pretty busy, so apologies in advance for any delay in responding, but I will try to answer genuine questions.

I’m probably most responsive on Twitter, but feel free to leave a comment here as well.

Scratch99 Design

Web Analytics

Actionable Analytics (WordCamp Melbourne)

Video

Slides

Questions