You monitor your website’s analytics, but the real problem is – what do you do with the data? Follow this three-step plan to make the most of your site’s analytics.
Define the Audience Need
People buy a specific product or service because if fills a specific need. When you are able to identify that need, you can then create an experience to address that need. Analytics are able to provide clues as to what those needs are. They can provide clues about your customers as to their interests, how they accessed the site, do they tend to consume more short-form or long-form content, do they watch the videos on your site, and how long do they spend on your site doing what.
Establish Baseline Conversions
It’s important to know your conversion rates. Analytics will not only help you establish your baseline conversions, but you will also be able to know the conversion rates from different sources of traffic. You will be able to determine that an ad on one site may perform at a much higher rate than other sites, or that one site in particular provides a very low conversion rate. Knowing the conversion rate of your site in general and of each of its traffic sources will allow you to focus and tweak your advertising efforts to maximize the results while minimizing the effort and expense.
Assign and Calculate Revenue
Every action and interaction on your website can be assigned a value. Of course, a sale will have a higher value than a click-through, but each interaction has a value. Analytics are helpful in determining and assigning a value to these actions. When you know what is working on your site and what is not, you are then able to prioritize decisions and increase your site’s profitability.
Knowing your analytics makes the decision making process easier and faster for you. Google Analytics can provide you with all the information you need to make these decisions and Google Analytics Dashboard for WP is a WordPress plugin that brings all the Google Analytics information directly into your WordPress dashboard.
Analytics can be a full-time job and can take a dedicated professional to comb through all the data and make sense of it all. But if you know where to look and what to look for, you can manage this information on your own and make educated decisions on your marketing efforts.