How to Configure Analytics for Your Small Business Website
A step-by-step guide detailing everything you need to know for setting up bullet-proof tracking for almost any small business web site.
A step-by-step guide detailing everything you need to know for setting up bullet-proof tracking for almost any small business web site.
Being able to measure the performance of your web site is of critical importance if you’re doing any marketing at all. Although the accuracy and transparency of measuring the performance of advertising campaigns on the web has never quite lived up to its promise, it’s still infinitely better than anything marketers have had available in the past.
But before you can start reaping the rewards of the vast amounts of data available at your fingertips, you must have 100 percent solid tracking set up on your web site.
Even if you aren’t planning on getting into detailed stats any time soon, making sure everything is set up now will give you a wealth of historical information in the future. (Web developers: it’s a good idea to install Google Analytics on new client websites by default. They’ll thank you later.)
The Basics
Many tracking packages are available, ranging from the free to the very expensive. Your web server almost certainly has something basic installed already.
However, for most small business web sites, Google Analytics is a good fit. It’s fast, reliable, powerful, and free. We’ll assume you’re using Google Analytics for the rest of this column, but most of the advice will be the same for whichever package you use.
If you haven’t done so already, start by signing up. Grab the tracking code and follow Google’s instructions on how to install it on every page of your website (or ask your web developer to do so).
That may sound obvious, but some websites only place the code on the home page or a handful of other pages. It has to be on every page!
Another common pitfall is when you have a website run by two different pieces of software (e.g., Joomla running the main pages and WordPress running a blog section). If this is your scenario, double check that the tracking code is everywhere it should be. Likewise, if you ever install more sections of your site using different platforms, ensure that the tracking code is put into them immediately.
Installing the tracking code itself is usually straightforward (simply a case of copying and pasting the code into the right parts of your site’s templates), but if you’re running a platform such as WordPress, you might need to install a plugin that will handle Google Analytics for you.
It’s also worth using an automated testing utility to check that the code is present on every page of your site.
Profile Settings
Now that we’ve done the easy bit, the next step is to configure your profile. This is fairly straightforward, and usually only needs to be done once.
Most of these settings are obvious, but these areas deserve special consideration:
Goals
The most important, not to mention the most misused and under-used, part of Google Analytics is the conversion goal setup. Tracking important user actions as conversions on your site is vital for monitoring and optimizing the performance of your marketing campaigns or site optimization efforts.
Most small business websites fail to set this up correctly or thoroughly. Give yourself a pat on the back if you’ve already done everything outlined below!
Google Analytics makes it easy to track three different types of user behavior, and by working with virtual pageviews, you can track almost anything else that happens on your site. A virtual pageview is a powerful tool that lets your site trick Google Analytics into thinking that a new page has been loaded — you can use this to track all kinds of events on your site (see below for a more detailed explanation).
The three types of conversion are:
Now, these options are nice, but you have to choose how to use them. Google Analytics gives you 25 slots for goals, divided into five sections. How you organize these makes no difference as far as the hard numbers are concerned, but can make a big difference to how easy it is for you to monitor and manage your results.
It’s worth putting some thought into this, along with what exactly you’re going to measure. Your exact configuration will depend on your own site, but for a typical small business site, you might end up with something like looks a bit like this:
There’s really no end to what you can do with goals, making advanced use of different URL match types, virtual pageviews, and the Google Analytics API. For most small business sites, 25 slots and the kind of ideas given above will more than suffice.
The key is to think carefully about anything that you could use to optimize your site’s performance, above the obvious contact forms and the like. It’s better to start with more goals and reduce them over time if you find some to be redundant, rather than the other way around.
If you’ve got e-commerce too, that will have to go in as well of course (it’s worth tracking e-commerce with goals as well as Google Analytics’ transaction tracking so you can make use of goal funnels). Remember to test your goals thoroughly and often, especially if you’re making any changes to your site’s URL structure.
Lastly, I’ve mentioned several concepts here that could do with further explanation:
Note that it’s not really worth setting up a funnel for something such as a simple contact form, but if you have an e-commerce site it’s a must for your checkout!
Summing Up
That was a long haul, but you should now be armed with everything you need to know to set up bullet-proof tracking for almost any small business web site. Please comment if you’ve got any further ideas or if you think I’ve missed anything!
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