The Single Most Important Thing To Know About Web Analytics & Success
Whether you’re already using web analytics, or you’re just about to start delving into it, there’s one key thing you should know to hugely increase your chances of success.
You won’t find many successful companies or website owners who don’t keep an eye on their stats. Having worked with a few of these companies, and talked to a lot of website owners I think the difference between success & failure with Web Analytics boils down to one ridiculously simple, often overlooked question.
The Key Question: “What Is My Website Supposed To Achieve?”
Okay that sounds overly simplistic, but it’s a question that’s often totally forgotten about: Somebody came up with the idea that you needed a website. Maybe that somebody was you &, either at the time you first put it together, or in between that time and now, the central purpose of the website has lost focus & you’ve drifted into a routine. Or, perhaps, you do know what the website is supposed to do, but that goal is a list of 50 different things swimming around in your head.
For Your Website To Be A Success, You’ve Got To Have A Clear Picture Of What ‘Success’ Means To You
This ’success’ could be a single goal at a Macro level (eg: “Earn Enough To Pay Off The Mortgage”), or it could be a series of goals at Micro levels (eg: “Double Our Google Traffic”, “Make 30 Affiliate Sales Each Day”), or anything in between. But, unless you have these clear goals, you have nothing to shoot at and, thus, the numbers you’re looking at in your analytics tool won’t move you any closer.
A Few Example Goals To Get You Started
- Sell More Products
- Increase Profits
- Get New Customers
- Build a Mailing List
- Earn Affiliate Money
- Get 1000 Visitors From Digg This Month
- Keep Customers Warm For Your Sales Team
- Increase The Loyalty of Your Top 100 Accounts
- Educate 12-25 Year Old Women About Menstrual Health
- Gather Leads For Your Housing Project
Each of those is a fairly simple thing to aim for but, without deciding that that is what you’re aiming for, your web analytics is more or less useless: you just flounder about checking to see how many page views you had on monday, or how many visitors you had from Venezuela.
Once you have those goals in mind, you can stop wasting time looking at meaningless numbers & focus your web analytics work on the numbers that really are going to move you closer to actual success.
