Explaining Analytics

As with all business objectives, you need to have a way of effectively measuring the impact of your online activity. Otherwise how do you know if your website has resulted in more online sales or improved your company’s brand recognition? Analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of online data for the purposes of understanding and optimising online activity.

It is important to have in place a way of gathering data from your customers and measuring your key performance indicators. There are many metrics tools available but the ones you use are determined by the metrics you need by which to judge the success of your activity. Do you want to track the number of hits to your site or the average length of each session? Do your metrics depend on the number of connections you have on Facebook or the number of followers on Twitter? Whatever your goals you must be able to measure them in a structured way. Once you have decided what you want to measure the next step is to set meaningful targets.

Many commercial and free tools exist which you can use to track your metrics. These include Google Analytics, StatCounter, Facebook’s Insights and Twitter Stats. We can even integrate the analytics into your email marketing campaigns, so you can monitor their impact. After a few months of tracking your metrics you will be able to assess whether your online activity has been successful or whether there are areas where you are failing.

Once you discover the keywords people are using to find your site, and the length of time they spend on each page, you are in the position to make positive changes to your website. Rubious install Google Analytics on all of our websites free of charge, and give you the tools to monitor your website. We then have the ability to suggest changes to your website based on these statistics.

Using A/B testing we can directly measure the effect of these changes. For example, we can make a significant change to your homepage and then show 50% of your visitors the old version and 50% the new version, measuring how many of those visitors end up contacting you or ordering your products. Once we have enough data we are in a position to confidently say that the change is for the better, and to roll it out for all of your visitors.

If you have further questions on this area then please contact any of the team and will be happy to help.

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