Are You Making These 5 Web Analytics Mistakes?
It has been said that ‘You cannot control what you don’t measure’. When it comes to online marketing, the only way you will know if your strategy is succeeding or failing is through web analytics. This involves using tools such as Finteza to monitor user actions in order to derive useful marketing insights. However, web analytics is only useful when done in the right way.
Here are some of the pitfalls to avoid with web analytics:
1. Not having a clear goal
The first step in web analytics is deciding what metrics to monitor and what exactly you want to derive from them. If you don’t ask the right question, you will not get the right answers. Therefore, every analytics effort should address specific business concerns and questions. For instance, if your objective is to optimize online sales, you should track metrics such as average order value, conversion rate, cost-per-order and track order volume.
2. Being too focused on page views
One of the most popular metrics in web analytics is page views. They can be accessed easily and most people understand what they mean. However, though it is a good metric to monitor, it does not provide enough insights. For example, page views will not tell you how much traffic came from bots crawling your site, versus human visitors. Furthermore, you will not be able to establish the quality of your visitors. Therefore, page views should be analyzed alongside other metrics in order to derive more meaningful insights.
3. Reporting raw data
While data is useful for showing us what is happening, it does explain why something is happening. Therefore, it would be useless to report raw data alone. You need to dig deeper and analyze what happened during a specific period and the reasons behind it. For example, you could report that traffic increased in the last month due to an intense marketing campaign. Besides getting deeper insights, you need to decide what action you will take.
4. Failing to test
The main aim for examining and tracking your analytics is to enable you to improve your marketing efforts, thus boosting your ROI. The best way to improve your results is to test regularly. However, this does not mean that you will have to redesign your site every few months. Just focus on one thing at a time. For instance, select one of your worst-performing product pages and change the value proposition, wording design and calls to action. Conduct an A/B test on different elements of the page and monitor the results to see what works.
5. Not detecting tracking errors
Tracking errors can end up being very disastrous to your business since they generate misleading data. Such errors could be due to reasons such as a developer mistakenly transferring incorrect values, removing tracing pixels or using the wrong tracking rules. Since most marketers don’t comprehend how tracking works, tracking errors usually go undetected. To avoid this problem, always be on the lookout for unusual signs in your data accuracy. You should also get a basic understanding of the technical aspects of tracking.
Charles Mburugu is a HubSpot-certified content writer/marketer for B2B, B2C and SaaS companies. He has worked with brands such as GetResponse, Neil Patel, Shopify, 99 Designs, Oberlo, Salesforce and Condor. Check out his portfolio and connect on LinkedIn.
