The 10 Rules of Web Analytics
Web Analytics is so important to monitoring how your business is doing. This article is a refresher course on the world of web analytics, so for those of you who have forgotten the 10 rules, here they are:
1. Measure all you do – if your online work cannot be measured, it may be a waste of time and money as you will never know what kind of return you are gaining from it. All online business activity costs money, whether it is paid advertising or the time you spend on your social media channels.
2. Set goals for your business – the business should set goals before online advertising is started, this helps to draw clear lines and helps with strategy. If you are meeting with online web marketers, bring your business problems and you will find insightful, helpful answers.
3. Do not misuse others personal information – users of your site and online arenas have rights, so avoid gathering private data about them as it is not a good idea.
4. Keep your KPIs and Metrics clear and easy to understand – collaborate with different areas of the business to define clear business metrics.
5. Remember that online and offline data are equal – no one source of data the “best” source, each area of data assists with understanding a different area of the business. Make sure to understand all areas of data and their importance to your business.
6. Do not bombard stakeholders to your business with data they do not understand – there are so many tools available to you, it is very easy to not see which bits of data are relevant to your stakeholders, so make sure not to waste stakeholders and anayst’s time with the wrong information.
7. Do not mix data types that are not relevant to one another – this happens so often, but it leads to confusion for the stakeholder reading the information. If you feel your own data is not enough, use secondary sources to back it up but do not try and use your own data that is not related to the topic enough.
8. Do not steal data – following from the last point, do not take data that is not yours to take. There is a lot of intellectual property issues around the area of online, but remember that in most cases it is the property of the business it is collected for, not the analyst who collected it.
9. Do not alter data for your own gain – do not make up numbers and make data look better/worse than it is. This one if fairly simple!
10. Do not use tools that are not of value to your business – if the tools you are using do not pay for themselves, you may not be using them correctly. In this case, get help or do not waste your money!
Web analytics is a great tool for your business, when it is used correctly, so make sure you are using them as well as you can be. Have a look online at different options such as Google Analytics for more precise information on individual products.
For more information on web analytics and web marketing, contact us. For more information on this topic, click here.