Analytics consulting | Tagging, data visualization & insight | Cogney

Why are analytics important?

One of the most compelling aspects of online business is the ability to monitor consumer behavior in real time -- that is, if you have the proper analytics and dashboards set up on your website and for your business. Without that data at your fingertips, it is very difficult to troubleshoot your website, let alone optimize it for customer acquisition or conversion.

Analytics can give you answers to crucial questions which arise at different phases in the customer’s interaction with your online business.

What can analytics measure?

Acquisition

Where are visitors coming from?
What cities?
What's the age and gender breakdown?
What mobile device are they on?
Are specific ads or keywords working?

Behavior

What are visitors doing?
What are the most popular pages and sections?
Are they encountering difficulty?
What are they typing into the search box?
Which pages are slow to load?

Conversions

What percent of visitors purchase, sign up, click ads or contact us?
What products are visitors adding to their cart and buying?
What does the conversion funnel look like and where do people drop out?
How many times did they visit before they bought?

What gets measured gets improved

Armed with this information, a business owner can both address problems with the user experience and gain insight into which items or content are performing well. Regarding the latter, analytics reveal the exact intersection of supply and demand and can inform decisions about inventory, category expansion (or abandonment) and overall gearing of a business. If you’re serious about the feedback you get from analytics, it can help you establish a virtuous feedback cycle which leads from strength to strength, rather than basing decisions on preconceptions about what your business should be. With analytics, there’s nowhere to hide. The numbers tell it like it is.

The Process

Set Up

We typically follow this process when setting up analytics:

Perform an audit of everything that should be tracked
Write custom tracking code
Create dashboards, segments, and reports
Set up filters to remove inaccurate or spam data
Add tracking parameters to your campaigns
Link Google AdWords and Google Search Console to Google Analytics for data sharing
Set up automated alerts when key metrics change
Perform quality assurance of the data
Train your team for up to two hours to learn how to find, slice, and interpret the data.

Reporting

Each business is different so we configure your analytics to generate reports which address the questions most helpful to your business. At a minimum, your monthly report will include:

Sessions growth, year-on-year and month-on-month
Sessions segmented by channel, device, language, country, gender, age, etc.
Top search queries sending traffic to your website
Landing pages receiving organic search traffic
The number of keywords each page is receiving traffic from
Changes in traffic from keywords your competitors are ranking for
Backlink profile monitoring

Depending on Cogney’s involvement, we can monitor your analytics in order to flag problems and opportunities, as they occur. Regardless, you always retain direct access to all of your data and dashboards.

Training or Ad Hoc Consulting

We're also happy to train or consult on analytics. We have a lot of experience in:

Google Analytics
Google BigQuery
Google Data Studio
Google Search Console
Google Tag Manager
Doubleclick
Tableau
PowerBI

Our results

Collect, measure and analyze visitor activity on your site

Whether it’s a question or a quote, we’d love to connect. You’ll get a reply in less than a day.

Measure performance