Latest Interviews
‘Web Analytics – The Nuts, The Bolts, The How-To’
Posted: Monday 10th Mar 2008
As the vast Google monster expands ever further, consuming all in its wake, one of the fringe benefits is Google Analytics. This wonderful package lets you keep an eye on traffic for your web site, the only downside being that it’s a bit of a puzzle to get started with.
Enter Sally Kavanagh who used her talk to help decipher the runes – as it were – at our last Wired Wessex networking event at the end of last month.
But first, Sally, please introduce yourself… “I run a company called Atracks which provides search engine optimisation and web analytics to clients. We offer training on these subjects mainly because, especially with the SEO [Search Engine Optimisation], it’s very helpful if a client understands how the process works, even if they want to do the work in-house. After all, they know much more about their topic than I do. And that way we find that both the clients and myself work very well together.”
But how did ATracks get set up? “I’ve been working myself for about fifteen years – initially, I was doing publicity work, but when the Web came along, I went over to the SEO field, as that’s very text-based. So ATracks has been going now for quite a few years.”
As for what Sally discussed at our last event, she sums it up as avoiding being drowned by all the data: “The most important thing about web analytics is making sure you handle properly the whole issue of information overload. And you get a process set up for the company and the web site is well integrated into the business process and the analytics is used to drive it. So what I really talked about was the various ways in which you can address this information overload issue, and really distill the information down to what is business-critical for your particular company and web site. Other issues that are important are to make sure that action is taken in regards to any analytics activity. Because there’s no point spending all this time collecting all that information, analysing it, reporting it, presenting it, if nothing is done as a result.”
So if I were just starting my web site, how would I go about using web analytics? “Well, Google Analytics is free and also an extremely powerful tool. So a good way to get started is to get Google Analytics set up on the site. It’s a very simple matter of putting a little bit of Java script on each page. And it’s important that it goes on every page, even the ones you don’t think of as being particularly important. And then, data will start being collected as soon as the script is uploaded. After that, it’s a matter of defining your key metrics that show how well your site is meeting its goals. Because it’s key for your process to have defined at the start what those goals are. Otherwise, you’re not going to get the message across very well.”
But say you’re an established company and you’re applying web analytics to an existing, established site… “It’s always vital to know WHY you have a web site and what it’s up there to do. I think that as the web has developed, and it is a very new medium, or at least it’s not been going as long as it feels like, it’s really important that the site delivers a good return on the effort put into it. And whereas a few years ago, it was much easier to have a simple site, as every company felt it had to have one, that’s simply not good enough any more. And web analytics allows you to really quantify how effective your site is being, in how it’s delivering what you want it to deliver.”
Indeed. Any last words? “Just make sure you’ve got your analytics set up and use them. And that means ACTION.”