How to unlock your website’s potential through web analytics

Define goals: The goals are only a plan, while you will also need to define means necessary to achieve those goals. Try to be very specific when defining goals. Secondly, the goals of your business should be easily measurable in terms of success and failure, progress and delay, as well as efficiency of the specific goals. They also need to be time bound, at least to some extent.

Identify key performance indicators: Identifying KPIs is an essential step in the analytic process. The choice of these indicators can make or break the entire assessment of how well a website is functioning. The need for relevant KPIs is discussed later in the book. However, it suffices to understand for now that without identifying these indicators web analytics has very little value.

Discover segments: Lastly, a web analyst should segment the data before it becomes an input for metrics and KPIs. In this context, segmentation means that the data is grouped and divided into categories that define where visitors came from, what they did and what actions were accomplished.

The three most important data segments include:

Acquisition – Acquisition includes everything that a webmaster does to attract visitors to the website. This data will take into account the banner ads, pay-per-click marketing, search engine optimization campaigns and emails for web promotions.

Behavior – Behavior includes all the activities performed on the website. It takes into account clicks, downloads, browsing and viewing links and pages via the website.

Outcomes – Outcome data includes valuable results that a business wants its visitors to yield. It takes into account actions like subscribing to newsletters and other services by the business.