Saturday, 14 February 2009
The Cure For Website Analysis Paralysis
Opening up most website analytics packages, the amount of data, charts, and graphs can be daunting. It’s not enough just to know what this data stands for (although this is a challenge in itself) you also have to know how to translate this data into improving your website.
This is when website traffic analysis paralysis sets in.
- What data should I be focusing on?
- What timeframe should I be looking at?
- Which pages on my site are most important?
It’s tempting to try and absorb all the data, and try to fix every issue on your website. But inevitably this leads to a mediocre result. Although, ideally speaking, you want to process all the data for your website. You’ll get a better result focusing on 5-10 key statistics, on your key pages/website processes. A few examples of key stats are:
- Bounce rate for key pages
- Unique Visitors
- Key process conversion rates
- Increase in brand/key service search referrals
- Top referring sources
With this you can build up a priority list of stats you can use to measure your website health much more quickly. You can also use these stats as a reference for improving your website e.g. how can I make my homepage more engaging (lower bounce rate). How can I get more referrals from the site already driving me traffic, how can increase brand awareness etc.
Until website analytics packages get better at giving us actionable data, cherry picking the key stats for us (googly analytics is probably the best at this currently) we’ll have to prioritise this data ourselves.
After all, better to fix the key 10-20% of the issues on our website, than try to address every single issue our website analytics package throws at us.
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