Analyze this: Tips for setting up analytics on your website

This post first appeared on Ueno’s blog here.

Making things pretty is not enough. The things we make also have to work well for their intended purpose — telling a story, selling a product, sharing content. One of the ways we use to tell if what we build achieves its purpose is through analytics. Information is power!

Gathering useful information from a website is more than slapping on some code. Before adding any code snippets, you must first identify what you want to track, and why. Then work with your developers to implement the analytics code, check that all is firing as expected, and BOOM! You’re ready to go. Simple, right? Sort of.

We recently did an analytics audit of the Ueno website to establish objectives and make sure we’re getting the information necessary to make the best decisions. Website changes take time and money, so we needed to prioritize, and data would allow us to do just that. We chose Google Analytics (GA) because it’s a powerful tool, generally easy to use, and one of the most commonly used platforms across industries.

Our first step was to define our objectives. What’s the purpose of Ueno’s website? This is what we came up with:

Attract new business
Attract new talent
Showcase our work

Once we established those objectives, we brainstormed a list questions that would help us measure them.

How many people are visiting the site? How many of those are completing the new business inquiry form?
How much content are people consuming? How many pages to they visit and how far do they scroll?
Where are visitors coming from? Which channels are most likely to result in a new business inquiry or job application?

When we had a broad sense of the information we needed, and it was time to set up the GA account. Here are three key components to the setup:

1. Conversion Goals

Based on the primary objectives, we defined two Conversion Goals to measure how often users complete specific actions.

A conversion goal might seem more obvious on an e-commerce site (a purchase, for example) but depending on your objectives you can always find some action to measure success. Here are ours:

Conversion Goal 1 — New business form submission: Fires every time someone completes our new business inquiry form
Conversion Goal 2 — Careers application submission: Fires every time someone submits an application

These are the two main actions we want people to take on the site, so at a high-level they can tell us how effective our website is and which traffic channels are performing best.

2. Events

Next, we defined several GA Events to help measure how well the website is achieving its objectives.

New business events

New business form form: Number of visits, submits and successes
Track what page(s) are driving the most new biz submissions / what content influences people to submit
What channels (e.g. social, newsletter, referring sites) drive submissions

2. Career events

Job application form: number of visits, submits and successes
What channels (e.g. social, newsletter)/websites are driving applications

3. Engagement events

Clicks: all clicks to outbound links
Expands: expansion of content
Scroll tracking: what percent of visitors scroll to 25%, 50%, 75% or 100% of the page

3. Audience Segments

We wanted to view website data through the lense of different audiences to hone in on behaviors — who is doing what and why. Here’s a list of audience segments we set up:

Engagers: Users who clicked an outbound link or expanded content
Non-Engagers: Users who did not click a link or expand content
Converters: Users with at least one goal completion
Non-Converters: Users with less than one goal completion
Organic Traffic: Users who were referred from a search engine (Google, Bing, etc.)
Social Traffic: Users who were referred from a social media channel
Email Traffic: Users who were referred by email (our newsletter)
Blog traffic: Users who were referred by Ueno blog

Segmenting the audience lets us filter information such as:

How does traffic from email channel behave differently from traffic from the blog?
What actions from converters are contributing to conversion?

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Are you thinking about setting up analytics for your own company or agency? Here are a few tips based on our experience.

Start simple. It might be appealing to gather ALL the information, but it can also be overwhelming. Establish two or three goals to start, and focus on learning as much as you can about what contributes to those goals. Build from there.
Enlist help. Even though I had a good sense of what we wanted to achieve, we hired an expert GA consultant to help. It was great to have someone confirm or challenge my ideas, share his experience from working on GA setup for other clients, and help with technical implementation.
Keep iterating. Setting up your analytics isn’t a one-and-done process. The first phase will establish a baseline, but you may quickly discover that there’s more you want to know. And as your website grows, make sure new pages are tagged.
Don’t forget to block your IP address. You can blacklist visits from your company’s IP address so internal traffic data doesn’t muddy your data.

We’re using the data from GA to establish a performance baseline, so we can measure the impact of any changes to the site.

We’ll keep you posted.

-Posted by Elizabeth Donovan-