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:
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 on your website
- 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?
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.
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 (2) hours to learn how to find, slice, and interpret the data.
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.
