Working backwards: The key to optimizing your website using Google Analytics

The Challenge

Over 50% of websites use Google Analytics (GA) according to recent estimates. But GA alone only covers basic tracking, like where people are coming from, and what pages they’re viewing. Many businesses want to know more than the basics, but aren’t sure where to start, what other tools are needed, or how they can make them all them work together. Because the objective of your website is unique to your business, there can potentially be a fair bit of custom work involved with ensuring you end up on the path to a better digital presence.

Where to begin?

At the end! It’s often best to start with the end goal. The business problem(s) you’re trying to solve. Identifying the objective(s) of your website should lay the foundation for everything you track. Otherwise, you could end up wasting time and resources setting up “nice-to-have” analytics, rather than “has-an-impact-on-my-business” analytics.

Next, consider business questions you’d like answered.

Suppose you had all the data in the world related to your business. Without data-related roadblocks, come up with plain-English questions that you’d like to have answers to. These answers, ideally, would be at your fingertips, and would drive business decisions that tie back to the objective(s) you outlined above. Examples could be “What's the best way to get more quality traffic to my website?” Or “Once people are on the site, are they getting what they need? Are they able to convert/book/contact us with relative ease? Can they learn about our brand easily?”

So, how do I answer these questions?

This would be the best time to reach out to a Digital Analytics professional. Whether in-house, or third-party, the key is data translation. They would need to have the ability to connect what Google Analytics provides, to your business questions. Then, ultimately, provide insights and recommendations toward the desired optimized behaviour.

Let’s connect if you’re looking for a third-party solution, or if you want to make your great in-house team even better.

What are the steps Digital Analytics professionals take to provide insights and recommendations?

Continuing with the trend of working backwards, they would consider typical answers to the questions mentioned above. Ideas like: “You can get better web traffic by identifying traffic trends over time for each source (Organic Search, Social, Paid, etc...), and deciding where to focus your efforts.” Or “Analyze how people are consuming your site, and if there are roadblocks (or drop offs in the customer journey), remove them.”

Insights and Recos

Answers to those questions lead to insights and recommendations like "Organic Search has a much higher chance of booking. Let's focus on SEO." Or "There's a surprising number of young people on our site, maybe we should change the content to suit their needs."

Finally, time to act

Once they have all of this context, they can finally set their sites on implementation. Meaning, they’ll combine tools like Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager (more advance website tracking), or Google Optimize (A/B testing) to track everything that’s needed to create the data that will lead to your objectives being met.

In the end

The order of your Analytics Planning…

Objectives identified -> Key questions and answers (sometimes called KPIs) identified -> Google Analytics Tracked -> Data Gathered

Should be the opposite of execution…

Data Gathered -> Key business questions Answered -> Insights -> Recommendations -> Data Driven Business Decisions -> Objectives met

If you want to get started on your website optimization path, be sure to reach out.