Web Analytics Primer: Five Metrics Demystified
Let’s face it: Web analytics is complex. But if you’re new to site analysis, don’t fret, you can still jump in, and following our action plan, gain valuable insight on your e-store that you can use to boost sales in time for the holiday rush.
We asked Avinash Kaushik, author of “Web Analytics: An Hour A Day” and the highly revered analytics blog, Occam’s Razor to provide us with some tips for beginners. Kaushik, who also happens to be the Analytics Evangelist for Google, agrees that interpreting site data can be overwhelming, but said there are five simple things Web shop owners can do — without absolutely any knowledge of analytics — that will provide instant benefits. These include helping you prioritize your paid and organic search marketing efforts, improving design and marketing by seeing exactly how many clicks each link on your site gets, flagging in on choke points in your selling cycle and identifying problem product pages, among others.
“I think of these five steps as a sort of primer on analytics, and it can be done using any type of program,” said Kaushik with a chuckle, “The goal is to make money, and if you spend 15 minutes on each one of these steps, you will see results. I like to quote Deng Xiaoping, ‘To get rich is glorious.’