Your whole business can benefit from using website metrics

--- Make better decisions that lead to profitable outcomes. ---

Anyone in a business can use website analytics, but the metrics have to be the right ones for them to be useful. The digital marketing department has always used them, but who should pay more attention to them? Hint: Everyone can benefit from website analytics.

Website teams track usage events and make UX decisions based on the information gained from the collected data. Acquisition, engagement, and conversions form the key KPIs that are tracked, and they seek to influence these through related metrics that could be individual buttons in a redesigned menu that is being used or even seen.

On key pages, if it moves, can be clicked, tapped or interacted with, it can and should be measured. All this is to understand what is influencing the conversion rate on the site, which is that team's domain. They need to use website analytics as they take responsibility for the website, design, admin and development making use of suitable metrics from analytics platforms to improve landing pages, optimise content do A/B testing and so on all to improve a conversion rate somewhere in the sales funnel.

Session Conversion Rate - Total Session / Session Conversion

User Conversion Rate - Total Users / Total Conversions

Website analytics are not the only metrics that should be used; digital teams are not solely working on their sites, interacting with mapping services, directories, or trade-specific sites that provide contact details without users ever reaching your website. Website conversion rate fixation is common, they also need to understand what the rest of the business is doing and how this could affect the conversion rates, give them access as it gives an additional layer of context to data.

If you are not in the web team, the analytics collected from websites could give you additional insight into your data too, the organisation which has an open data policy will be able to give decision-makers more context leading to better long-term decisions.

The Whole Marketing Team

Operating from an e-commerce only background for years, this came as a surprise to me, where everyone had at least access to Google Analytics and reporting was done routinely by all, to an environment where a campaign was run and the effect on the website stats hadn't been looked at.

For appropriate campaigns, where goals of gaining interest in specific products/services or locations, you can see increases in visits to these pages. You can track mailto: email and phone clicks, better would be quick forms or meeting bookings to confirm the user has become a qualified lead. Connecting the dots from campaign to sale and not looking at the website as part of that, will lead to missing links if you work in marketing you should be looking at website analytics.

Marketing needs to know the number of customers they are drawing to the business. The whole team needs to know if that number is going up or down and whether those customers are visiting more often. New and returning visitors are a common metric, total engaged users is a stat that the marketing team as a whole could track and see this line trending up and it will likely correspond to important KPI.

Local campaigns, location page visits, and what users are doing on them can gain insight into real-life campaigns, and spikes on localised pages at the same time as a radio campaign in the area is going to be an indicator alongside store visits that you have connected with people, and metrics down the funnel can be used give that campaign further evidence of return on the investment.

Should we open a store?

Website user visits do not equal IRL store visits. Combined with tracking footfall in existing shops, you can show the correlation between these two metrics, and then predictions are possible. Users who click on directions, collect orders, or start a quote for any reason are all strong signs of intent; these are likely to be more important to store managers and sales teams. Narrow this down to regions and specific locations, and drill down any website metric you like and see if they correlate to IRL. Not only store visits but local interest in services and products can be gauged, are people looking for us to offer service in this location?

Should we continue buying that product?

E-commerce sites specifically can give data on how customers, or potential customers, are viewing products again; it could be location-based. Merchandising online is mostly a straight numbers game. Product scores determining priority placement can be made of many metrics, some are business-specific, margins or trade agreements from suppliers. Also, using common website metrics like item_view and add_to_basket, the complete purchase funnel.

What problems should Website Developers work on?

"Don’t lose customers to site errors" . https://www.noibu.com/

Not all analytics platforms are created equal, Noibu (silly name!) tracks and reports technical errors your users are seeing and relates them to the sales on your website. It also puts them a neat table assigning an estimated e-commerce revenue cost to the business, working with conversion rates on the site and monitoring successful checkouts and processes with no errors, against users that encounter problems in the difference between conversion rate and the value of orders.

Finding errors and problems on site when particular metrics are down can move a development team ahead of the issues, not relying on error reports from users makes the fixing process that much easier for the development team.

Generally

Decisions guided by data, and informed by previous experience will end up being better decisions than those that arent and most businesses will have digital touch points and paying attention to these for those that previously haven't will have a greater impact, and those that continue to undervalue them will be losing out on digital natives that are growing up with not only websites but apps and AI tools at their fingertips and not calling up their shop to have a chat.