Data strategy for website analysis - Part 1
Crafting a data strategy for web analysis
The main pitfall for your web analysis is to collect data you never end up using. It's easy to do as most analytics tools automatically collect a lot of data about your website and its visitors, but that doesn't mean you don't need a data strategy. With a clear strategy in place, you will not only use the data you have collected, but it will also contribute to the company's business objectives.
Your data strategy is a plan for how you are going to collect and use your data. It includes which people and teams are going to be involved, what data is needed, what tools you'll use to store and analyze the data, and how the data will be managed and distributed within the company.
Start with the business objectives
Before you start to collect data, and even before you determine which type of web analysis tools you need, you should identify the business objectives that are relevant to the website. In some cases, the website may be directly related to the business objectives, in other cases, you may need to be a bit more creative as you figure out how the website can contribute to achieving the objectives.
For example, if your objective is to increasing online sales, you probably want to track your online sales, but also find the factors that affect the conversion, so that you can encourage more sales.
Must you use business objectives?
No, but your objectives will help you determine what data is relevant and allow you to use your time more efficiently. Without basing your strategy on your objectives, you risk collecting data you don't need, spending time on analyses you don't use, and wasting money on tools that don't contribute to the growth of the company. If you have business objectives, use them for your data strategy.
Target groups
Once you know the objectives, the next step is to select the target group (persona, audience, whatever you call it) for each objective. It's unlikely that you have objectives that include every single website visitor. Or rather, you probably shouldn't. You may even find that you have one objective for one group of visitors and another objective for a different group, or that one objective has two target groups.
By narrowing down your analysis to target groups, you're analysis will become more accurate. There is no use in analyzing why your job applicants didn't purchase from you, because that was never the reason for their visit. They should therefore be excluded from the analysis of online sales.
Identify your target groups
When you have your target groups, you also need a way of identifying them. It's going to be difficult to be precise, and you will most likely have to settle for a method that is close enough.
If we continue with our example of increasing online sales, you can evaluate online sales by looking at those who made a purchase, those who could have made a purchase, or both. Identifying those who made a purchase is easy with analytics, but that group can only tell you what made them purchase. It will not tell you anything about why potential customers didn't end up purchasing from you. If that is important for your objective, you need a way of identifying that group. That is relatively easy to do with a survey, but you will never be able to include every potential customer (which is completely fine!).
Evaluate your needs
After you have pinned down the objectives for the website and the target groups that are relevant for the objectives, it's time to evaluate your data needs. Let's continue with our online sales example.
What data do you need?
To start with, you need to track the number of sales. On its own, it will only tell you if you've achieved your objective or not, but it will not tell you how you can achieve the objective. To understand that, you need more data.
A good place to start is to evaluate who your customers are and how you are getting sales today. For that, you can use data such as channels/referrers, campaigns, location, and so on. For example, you may find that visitors who found your company on Facebook are more likely to buy a product that visitors who found you on Google. This will tell you where to advertise to bring in more customers.
Or you can focus on your potential customers and why they didn't purchase from you. For that, you can use a survey and ask what products they are looking for, if they are planning to buy from you, and if no, why they chose not to. For example, you may find that shipping is too expensive in some areas, or your size options are too limited, and so on. This will tell you how you can appeal to more potential customers.
In general, you need to track everything that can give you the answers you need, but don't forget about the data needed to identify target groups.
Who needs the data?
Although it may be the web team working with the data strategy for the website analysis, the data you collect from your website can be interesting for other teams too. To continue with our online sales example, the marketing department needs to know which ads are effective and where they should spend money, while the top of the company may want to know if the sales are increasing and by how much.
When you take the other teams and recipients of data into consideration, you may find that you need to collect more data. You also need to think about how you are going to share this data with the other teams.
Do you have the time and skills?
A part of evaluating your needs is to determine how much time and skill is available within your company. It doesn't matter if you have highly skilled analysts if there's no time for them to analyze your data. If you are lacking in skill, do you want to pay for the time if takes for the people involved to not only learn the tools you use but also how to analyze the data?
You can to some extent compensate for lack of time or skill with an advanced tool, as you can quickly and easily get the results you need, and possibly even some basic analysis. However, if you are lacking either time or skill, you're likely to also need analysis support.
Select your tools
In order to collect data from your website, you're going to need some sort of tool. Depending on the data needed for your strategy, you are going to need different tools. The most commonly used tools are analytics, heatmaps and session recordings, and surveys. But that may not be all you need.
Analytics
If you want to track visitor behavior and conversions, you'll need an analytics tool. This will enable you to set up goals for your visitors and see how they use your website. You will also get a better understanding of how you bring in visitors to your website and if they return.
Heatmaps and session recordings
If you want to evaluate visitor behavior on specific pages and how they navigate, you'll need heatmaps and session recordings. This will visually show how the visitors navigate, which elements they engage with, how much of the page they read, and so on. These are very helpful tools for improving the design and layout of the website.
Surveys
If you're instead interested in the experience and opinions of your visitors, as well as why they are on your website, you'll need web surveys. This will allow you to directly ask questions to your visitors, and depending on the questions you include, you can learn how they use your website, how often they visit, how easy they find the navigation, what they think of your brand, and much more. Surveys can be used in a variety of ways to fit your needs.
Data visualization and analysis
Besides collecting data, you'll also need a tool for visualizing and analyzing the data. This is generally included in the data collection tool, but in some cases, this is something you'll need to add. Especially if you end up needing more than one tool and want to have the analysis in one place.
What Extellio offers
If you find that you need more than one tool, Extellio can help you. With our all-in-one tool, you get access to web analytics, heatmaps and session recording, and web surveys. Not only will you be able to track both your visitors' behaviors and their experiences, you will be also be able to combine the data sets and segment analytics data based on survey data, and so on. However, if your objectives don't require all three products, you can select only the products you need. Should you need help with the set up or the analysis, Extellio offers a variety of support and analysis services. (länk)
If you want a more detailed description of the different tools used for website analysis, you can check out this article.
In short
By basing your data strategy on your business objectives, it will be a lot easier for you to determine where to focus your resources for the website analysis. The business objective will help you to identify target groups, what data is needed, and which teams that need data. It will also make it easier for you to select tools for data collection and analysis.
