If you don’t have any kids that are school age, humor me for a minute and pretend that you do. Now, answer me this question:
How many times did they bring home a report card and you simply tossed it in the trash without looking at it?
Hopefully the answer is, “Never.” It almost sounds like a ridiculous question to even ask, right? Let’s examine that for just a minute. Why, exactly, is it a ridiculous question? Here are some reasons you may give:
- It may not be perfect, but it’s the best tool we have for monitoring the progress of my child.
- There are other indicators like absences, tardies and teacher comments that can be early warning signs of problems.
- I want all of the information I can get my hands on in order to guide my child’s education in a positive direction.
We all do this because we understand that an education is a critical factor in their future success. It would be borderline negligent for us to ignore these report cards. Are we good so far?
So why is it that so many business owners either don’t check their own grades (website analytics) or – worse yet – don’t even issue report cards?
You’ve all heard it said before: You can’t manage what you aren’t measuring. So how can you manage your website’s effectiveness if you aren’t measuring it? But sadly, even those businesses who are measuring are frequently watching the wrong numbers.
The Wrong Web Analytics
The most common numbers that businesses watch are the ones that show up on the summary dashboard of Google Analytics; visits, pageviews, bounce rate, etc… But these are really metrics and not analytics. They describe what’s happening but don’t really explain why it’s happening or how well the site is performing against strategic goals. Unless you’re making huge money off of ad impressions, visits don’t pay the bills. Customers do. So how well is your site doing at securing more customers? How many did you convert? Where did they come from? How much did they cost?
The Right Web Analytics
There’s no single list of “right” analytics for every business. However, conversion rates are a great place to start. Every website should have a list of goals it’s trying to achieve. And every goal should have an associated landing page. You’ll learn more about your marketing tactics by tracking the segmented visits to those pages and the corresponding conversion rates than any other analytics. These will tell you how many found you, how they found you and how they responded. Then, if you know how much it cost you to drive that traffic and what those conversions are worth to your business, you can perform the Holy Grail of marketing calculations: ROI.
