Web Analytics Core principles

James Hourihan Web Producer

•  Why web analytics are important

•  How to approach web analytics

•  What reports you should use (and why)

This presentation will cover

Why web analytics are important

Improving visitor experience

How can you respond to something you don’t know about?

Google Analytics in real life: Site search

Data driven actions

test

analyse

action

measure

Measuring and take action.

•  Measuring allows us to test things.

•  Testing is a quick way to explore potential solutions.

•  Analysis identifies what worked (or didn’t).

•  Actions turn analysis into practical improvements.

Analytics are available

Do you measure and more importantly, is it helping?

Reporting vs analysis

Reporting just gives you numbers and more questions. Analysis gives you the insight.

How you should approach web analytics

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”

Albert Einstein, Physicist

Plan for your actions

1.  What are your website’s objectives and audiences?

2.  Which Key Performance Indicators measure them?

3.  What tools are needed to measure these?

4.  What actions can be taken to drive change?

test

analyse

action plan

measure

Its important that you know, what you want to know.

Choosing the right KPIs

A key performance indicator is a metric that helps you understand actual performance against your business objectives.

Metric What’s measured

Session The number of active users on your site

Page view The number of times a page is viewed

Time on page The average amount of time spent viewing a page

Bounce rate How frequently visitors exit the site from the page they land on

Entrances How often visitors enter from a specific page

Defining success

The right KPI should help you understand how your web pages are performing against your website objectives. Objective: Achieve greater international awareness of research Key Performance Indicator: % new international research visitors Custom report:

•  Metric: % New visitors •  Filter: /research* (section) •  Filter: Page depth (greater than 2) •  Segment: Visits from outside the UK

Test little and often

Testing can be a quick and cheap way to improve your web pages. 1.  Choose one specific thing to test at a time. 2.  Run the test over a set timeframe using the right tool/method. 3.  Make an amend and track how visitors habits change over time. 4.  Use what you learn to make decisions on other web pages.

Test Tools

Content popularity Web analytics

Content readability Readability tools like hemingwayapp.com

Navigation Web analytics, card sorting

What reports you should use?

“We have so much data on the web, almost all of it available for free,

that we dive into the data ocean hoping that magically awesome things will follow.”

Avinash Kaushik, Web Analytics Evangelist

Standard reporting and segmentation

Useful reports What it tells you

All pages Which content is performing the best/worst

Channels How people are getting to your website

All campaigns Which marketing efforts are most effective

Site search What your visitors are struggling to find

Google’s out-of-the-box reports are great for:

•  getting a high-level overview of your website’s performance •  learning about the metrics/dimensions within Google Analytics •  running quick insights into specific behavior (using segments).

Custom reports and dashboards

Focus on the data which relates to your to your objectives. •  Custom reports allow you to define exactly which data you

want to measure, and how you want it displayed.

•  Dashboards allow you to collect together bits of data from different reports, to quickly visualise important information.

Custom reports and dashboards can be shared amongst the Google Analytics community. There are some great examples online, made by analytics experts.

Events and goals

Track the things that are important to you. •  Events allow you track additional interactions that a user may

make, such as watching a video or clicking a button.

•  Goals allow you to define successful actions and measure how often visitors complete them, such as joining a mailing list.

Intelligence and alerts

Keeping a watchful eye on the general performance of your site. • Intelligence events can be set up to automatically monitor variations of important metrics on your website. • Alerts allow you to set a threshold for your intelligence events, so you can be notified if a certain trend drops or rises dramatically.

Add annotations to your timeline, to keep a record of important events.

•  Be objective about the things you want to find out.

•  Set up custom reports and dashboards so you can easily access this data.

•  Use intelligence events to keep an eye on variations in data/trends.

•  Ensure your analysis gives you data driven actions.

Time saving tips

Get inspired kaushik.net cutroni.com blog.kissmetrics.com

Get the knowledge analyticsacademy.withgoogle.com youtube.com/user/googleanalytics google.com/analytics/gallery Get support web@cardiff.ac.uk

Getting into Google Analytics

This is the last slide

Questions?