For any business with a website, mobile website and applications, tracking should be on the top of your priorities list. Setting up the correct process to measure, understand, evaluate and inform how your business operates, what the correct user experience is, what areas of the business to invest in, marketing or otherwise, can make or break a startup’s probability of success.
Here are 3 easy steps to getting started.
1. Determining your tracking goals: What are you call to actions and how are they prioritized?
A call to action is whatever you identify as what you want a user to do: “view deal now”, “subscribe to email”, “buy this today”, etc. Go through your user experience on site, via mobile, off-line and determine any instance where an action that is important to the business takes place.
For Google Analytics: Create a list of these actions and identify a URL, Name, Priority by rank. These actions will be tracked as one of the following: action based event, URL destination tracking, URL based funnels, goals and/or virtual pageviews.
2. Setting up a Google Analytics Tracking Infrastructure
Google Analytics IQ Lessons will guide you through video explanation and tutorial on every step of the process and can be found here. There is also dedicated support at 866-2-Google.
3. Build custom reports and filters: Here’s how.
Again Google Analytics IQ and dedicated phone support will walk you through step-by-step in real-time how to set up the best reports for your business. Reports to ask about:
1. Browser Type Report – A look at browser type of visitors to your site.
2. Conversions/Landing Page Report – Landing pages and their overall performance.
3. The MASTER CONVERSION REPORT – This report offers a comprehensive drill down of your conversions and conversion rates per traffic source. Drill down into specific mediums and analyze goals and e-commerce activity.
4. Geographic Distribution of Visits Report – Take a look at the performance in different geographic regions.
5. Time of day trends report – Look at website activity during different hours of the day.
This post provides highlights from the insights of Liam Martin and Mike Mason. More detail can be found here.
