What's Your Strategy for People (Visitor) Analytics?

What do you do with your analytics data? It’s rare that a website is set up these days without some sort of analytics behind it. So you should be getting regular reports on the number of visitors and what they’re doing, whatever your connection to making sales within your business.

Here are some ways people typically use analytics

Fire and Forget (not recommended!)

This is unfortunately the most common way that analytics is used. When the site is set up someone adds analytics to it and sets up a weekly or monthly email report to be sent to you. You look at it now and again and maybe include it in management reports. You’re happy if numbers go up, and might call the digital agency in if numbers go down. But little real critical thinking happens.

Exception Handling

One day you get your report through on email and it doesn’t look like the previous week’s reports. You notice a significant change: lots more people from Italy looking at your products; a spike in people searching for a specific product; a massive drop in traffic hitting your enquiry page. Now you act.

Lost Opportunity Focus

One of the simplest forms of proactive use of analytics is to look at lost opportunities. How many people hit your site but didn’t enquire or make a purchase. Where did they drop out? Is your form too long? Your landing page not clear enough? Looking at your lost opportunities and progressively trying to minimise them is a good, structured way to start using analytics effectively.

Repeat Business Tracker

It’s usually a lot cheaper to bring an existing customer back than to win a completely new customer. So it’s a good metric to track for your website. From simple returning visitor metrics through to detailed analysis of individual behaviour, understanding - and optimising for - repeat business can be a very profitable way to use analytics data.

If your analytics is ‘Fire and Forget’ today, consider some of these alternatives, progressing through Exception Handling to minimising lost opportunities or maximising repeat business. See future posts for tips on how to approach your analytics challenge.