Leveraging web analytics can be extremely useful for growing your business.
However, if you’re ingesting data incorrectly, you could render the data useless or limit its potential. As the old saying goes: garbage in, garbage out.
And even if that data’s good, you still need to ensure that you’re analyzing it effectively.
So to help you avoid some common mistakes, we’ve outlined 7 web analytics best practices that you should follow. This will help you get the most out of your data and allow you to make actionable decisions to improve your business.
Let’s dive in!
1. Install Your Tracking Code Correctly
First off, you need to ensure that you’ve set up your tracking script correctly. This will enable your website to properly track pageviews, events, and conversions across your site.
To do so, you’ll want to make sure that you place the script inside the <head> section of your HTML code. This ensures that the code loads early and tracks all visits accurately.
If you’re using WordPress, this can usually be done via your theme’s settings page. Alternatively, you can use a plugin or add the code manually to the 'header.php' file. When in doubt, consult your developer and they’ll be able to install it in seconds.
Once your tracking code is in place, you’ll then want to verify that it’s working correctly. An easy way to do this is to browse your website while looking at your real-time reporting. Ensure that all of your browser activity is being captured.
There’s also one more important thing to mention: The earlier you get your tracking code set up the better!
You’ll definitely want it running and tested before you launch your site and start generating meaningful traffic. This way, you’ll have more historical data to analyze.
2. Filter Out Internal Traffic
Once your tracking code is installed and running, the next thing you’ll want to do is filter out internal traffic. This is especially important if you’re a new site that’s not generating a lot of traffic yet. Otherwise, you run the risk of skewing your data and giving yourself false signals.
Imagine a scenario where you’re only getting 10 visits a day and each of those visits are lasting 30 seconds each on average. If you and other teammates are also on your site for prolonged periods of time, you can grossly inflate traffic numbers and average visit durations.
As a result, it’s best to filter out this traffic so you have a more realistic picture of traffic and engagement.
With GoodMetrics, you can do this by excluding IP addresses that belong to you and your teammates.
3. Set Up Custom Events
Let’s be real…
We all want more traffic and more pageviews. It makes us feel warm and fuzzy inside when we see these numbers going up and to the right.
But the reality is, more traffic doesn’t necessarily mean more revenue and more profits. It’s the right traffic that matters!
So with that being said, you’ll want to set up custom events that align with your business goals.
Evidently, this will completely depend on the type of business you run. For an e-commerce store, this will likely be something tied to purchases and order value. For a SaaS business, this will likely be tied to trials and subscriptions.
Whatever the case may be, it’s important to set up the custom events that matter for your business.
4. Prioritize Actionable Insights
Once you’ve got your custom events in place, you’ve taken one important step to getting the most out of your analytics data. However, it’s easy to still get overwhelmed with dozens of reports and vanity metrics.
So the next important step is to prioritize your key metrics and focus on insights that are actionable.
One again, this will depend largely on the type of business you run.
For example, if you’re running a media site, then you’ll likely be very interested in your engagement metrics. You’ll want to answer questions like: How long are people staying on my site? Which pages are people spending the most time on? Which pages are generating repeat visitors?
These kinds of questions can help you figure out which content is resonating with your audience and which type of content to produce more of.
On the other hand, if you’re selling digital products and courses, you’ll likely be more focused on purchases and conversion rates. You’ll also want to answer questions like: What are my best sources of traffic? Which landing pages are converting best? Which blog posts are generating newsletter signups?
Regardless of the situation, you’ll want to make sure you’re prioritizing the metrics that matter.
5. Utilize UTM Parameters for Campaign Tracking
Now that you’ve got custom events set up and you’re focusing on actionable insights, you’re already in a great spot.
However, to get the most out of your individual marketing campaigns, you’ll definitely want to leverage UTM parameters.
UTM parameters are snippets of text added to the end of a URL to track the effectiveness of your campaigns across traffic sources. They'll help you identify how visitors arrived at your website, including the medium that they came from and the specific campaign that generated the click.
As you can imagine, this is extremely important when measuring the success of online ad campaigns. It’s not enough to know that someone came from Facebook or Instagram, you’ll also want to know whether it was a newsfeed or story ad, and which ad variation generated the conversion.
Not only are UTM parameters useful for online ads, they’re equally as effective for partnerships. If you’re running sponsored posts in a variety of newsletters, UTM parameters can give you the extra data needed to help you determine which placements were the most effective.
And to help you generate UTM links as effortlessly as possible, we’ve built a handy UTM builder that's free to use.
6. Segment Your Audience
Did you know that mobile devices accounted for more than 58% of web traffic in 2023? Did you also know that while mobile traffic is higher, conversion rates on desktop are typically 2x higher than on mobile devices? As you would expect, this is often due to the ease of browsing and completing transactions on larger screens.
These stats highlight the importance of audience segmentation. By going one level deeper, you can uncover hidden insights in your data.
Sticking on the mobile vs. desktop theme, if you find that desktop converts significantly better than mobile (beyond industry averages), that could indicate that your mobile UX needs some work.
And beyond device type, you can segment user data based on location, web browser, and operating system. By doing so, you could potentially uncover that certain geographies convert way better than others. You might also discover that visitors using a certain web browser convert worse because of an undetected bug.
Whatever the case may be, segmenting your audience may uncover useful information that would not be possible by just looking at higher level data.
7. Focus on Trends
Last but not least, an important best practice when it comes to web analytics is to focus on trends.
If I told you that a certain website generated 10,000 visits in a month, would you say that’s good or bad? Obviously, you’d have absolutely no idea without additional context.
If they only generated 5,000 visits in the month prior, then it’s probably a good thing. However, if they generated 20,000 visits the year prior because it’s a seasonal business, then it’s probably a bad thing, even though their month-over-month numbers improved.
As you can see, understanding the trajectory of your business is a lot more important than what your current metrics say at any given time. By focusing on trends and seasonality, you’ll be able to better understand what’s going well, what’s not, and what types of changes are needed (if any).
Wrapping Up
As we’ve mentioned before, web analytics can be extremely useful but only when leveraged the right way. If your site isn’t set up correctly or you’re simply looking at vanity metrics, you’ll be leaving a lot value on the table.
However, if you follow the best practices laid out in this post, you’ll be well on your way to maximizing the effectiveness of your web analytics efforts.
Make sure you refer back to the tips above and I’m confident they will help you make smarter decisions for your business.