Is Your Website Telling You The Truth?

How could a website lie to you ask? Well, I guess it cannot really. But, your analytics could be telling you the wrong story depending on how you set your analytics up.

Have I lost you yet? No, good. I am going to get to my point here now.

The analytics and tracking software on your site is not telling you how people are using your site or answering the questions you should be asking about your business.

How do I know that?

Because, from my experience, it takes a lot of thought and effort to get your analytics & tracking organized, optimized and reporting properly. Even after you have done that you probably still are not answering every single question you have. It is something you can fiddle with and never get to what you would consider 100%.

The tracking and analytics tools, on your site, are supposed to answer your questions about what your visitors are doing on your site and when.

For instance, what is the normal content path users are taking when they make a sale or what content do, they skip over or how much of a video do they watch, etc. These may be the questions you want answered and those answers would give you a direction to take your website design or the content on your website.

My Journey

My journey with web analytics and tracking has been very interesting and long one. I, like most business owners, did not see the value in it for years. I did not understand how best to utilize the tools and they were not answering my most important questions. In essence, the tools were there but were not creating any actionable data for me or my business.

So, what changed my view? Well, I was working with a client who had used multiple agencies and the analytics were a mess. The results they thought they were getting (from their campaigns) were wrong. They had no idea how people were using their site. Because of that, they were not able to make actionable decisions based on any of the data. After we spent a ton of time figuring what the site was supposed to do and what the KPIs (key performance indicators) were. We implemented our analytics and tracking tools. Finally, we were able to start making better decisions based on data and not guessing.

While working on that project my beliefs about analytics and their importance changed. Now, I would never send paid traffic or attempt to optimize a website without them.

Real World Comparison

Tracking and analytics tools are like videotaping everyone who comes into your store. Or recording every conversation you have with a potential client. You get to see what info they are interested in, what content is driving them towards action on your site, what information they are objecting to, and at what point they are leaving your site. Plus, you can tie this all into your inbound marketing campaigns or the organic searches the visitor came in from.

Analytics & Tracking Are Even More Important Than You Think

What do I mean? Well, if you have an online store, they can show your revenue for each specific traffic channel. If you are service based business, it can show your lead flow by channel and campaign. It can give you awesome audience insights. That alone, will help you start targeting in Google ads and Facebook more effectively. They can give you insights into what people are searching for within your site. This feature can tell what content you should be producing for your customers or what FAQ people are most interested in. All of the data your analytics and tracking are sharing with you can help drive your business in so many different ways.

What Are The Differences Between Analytics And Tracking?

Glad you asked. Analytics is the collection of numerical data related to your site. In this instance, I would use Google Analytics for this. What it gives you is raw data about your users, what they did, whether they completed the actions you wanted them to.

Tracking, at least how I use it, is heatmapping and visitors to your website recordings.

For instance, with a heatmap, you can see where the majority of people are clicking, scrolling, where they are putting their mouse, etc. I use this on landing pages or content pages. It gives you an idea of what your visitors or users are reading or clicking. If the functionality of your site is not particularly clear this will show on the heatmap.

With website recordings, you can watch what the actual website visitor does. I like to use the recordings for pages with forms to see why they did not convert or where they dropped off. You can also tell if there are errors with your form happening or if something is confusing. This is a great tool to start making your users experience seamless.

The best tool for both heatmapping and tracking is hotjar. They do both and much more. Definitely check them out.

Wrapping It All Up

Leveraging analytics and tracking is mission critical to having success online. The best thing is these tools are free for pageviews / day under a certain threshold that most businesses do not exceed.

If you need help, this is what Happy Monday Marketing does. Connect with us to see how we can get started helping your business.

Happy Marketing,
-Michael

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