1. WEB ANALYTICS TIPSHEET key learnings from 100+ program implementations.

2. @PWAMenear  (613) 219.4410  menear.ca/analytics 1 START WITH A PLAN A useful measurement plan aligns your web analytics program with your business objectives and KPIs. It forces you to think through how to achieve your goals. INTEGRATE, INTEGRATE, INTEGRATE The more data that your web analytics program has access to, the more effective it will be. If your analytics software supports data imports, import as much relevant data as you can. If your software doesn’t support data imports, start looking for a solution that does. 2

3. @PWAMenear  (613) 219.4410  menear.ca/analytics 3 AUTOMATE, AUTOMATE, AUTOMATE Automate as much work as you possibly can. To really get value from a web analytics program, you should be spending your time on data analysis and interpretation, not data collection and reporting. BE HOLISTIC Web analytics programs are most frequently geared to sales and marketing, because they have the shortest hop to revenue generation. But insights from web analytics can also be useful in other areas— logistics, performance, customer service, and even product or service design. 4

4. @PWAMenear  (613) 219.4410  menear.ca/analytics 5 PRESENT KEY METRICS IN SHARED DASHBOARDS Both Google Analytics and the open-source Piwik platform allow users to create custom dashboards and share them with other users. This is a great way to easily share key metrics with senior management and stakeholders. FILTERS IMPROVE DATA CLARITY Some studies suggest that up to half of all internet traffic is generated by non-human sources (bots, scrapers, malicious tools). Identify patterns in your data that indicate automated behaviour and create filters to exclude it from your reports. 6

5. @PWAMenear  (613) 219.4410  menear.ca/analytics 7 LEVERAGE SEGMENTS TO IMPROVE INSIGHTS Analyse your existing customer segments to create groups of data points that can be recreated with your analytics software. Studying groupings of similar users will often generate a-ha! moments that you wouldn’t get by looking at all the data. SLICE AND DICE Data dimensions are your friend. They allow you to improve data clarity by defining more closely what you want to analyse. 8

6. @PWAMenear  (613) 219.4410  menear.ca/analytics 9 KNOW YOUR INTERNAL CUSTOMERS Talk to the internal stakeholders of your web analytics program, especially ones that are on the fence about it. Get to know what insights are valuable to them and what the best way to share those insights with them is. The more people that believe in what you’re doing, the more support you’ll have to implement, maintain, and grow. GET TECHNICAL Look at technical metrics like load times and latency on multiple devices. Shaving a second off your website’s average load time won’t make much of difference for desktop users—but it could lower your bounce rate among mobile users by 20% or more. 10

7. @PWAMenear  (613) 219.4410  menear.ca/analytics 11 BE TAG-HAPPY Nine times out of ten, someone will ask ‘is it okay if I only tag part of the website/campaign/app?’ No. Add the tracking code to every page. Add tracking tags to every offsite link. Go overboard. Having too much data that you can filter down is better than not having enough data to generate valuable insights. BE A [DATA] HOARDER In many analytics packages, applying high level filters permanently excludes data that’s out of scope. Any time you’re going to filter at a high level, keep an unfiltered copy of the data or profile in case you need to go back later. 12

8. @PWAMenear  (613) 219.4410  menear.ca/analytics 13 MAINTAIN PERSPECTIVE Absolutes are dangerous and misleading. Look at your numbers in the context of your business objectives and your historical data. A 2% month-over- month increase might look bad on the surface… but if the historical increase is only 1%, is it really that bad? WALK BEFORE YOU RUN Break large, complex tasks down into small, achievable steps. If your web presence has a lot of pages and behaviours to implement tracking for, start with the key pages and behaviours. What has the highest probability of affecting the bottom line? Go there first. 14

9. @PWAMenear  (613) 219.4410  menear.ca/analytics 15 FLEXIBILITY IS GOOD Avoid considering your web analytics work ‘finished’. Looking at web analytics work as ‘always in beta’ gets you in the habit of evolving to improve. If a system or dashboard or interface or approach isn’t working, develop and test a solution to improve it. Experimentation is your friend.