Site Analytics Data into Action

Businesses are hungry to know how to make site analytics data into something that is actionable. Actionable could mean differently depending on how you want those data to serve the objective of the site. Some business wants to drive increase in sales, site engagement, awareness, and registrations.

There are few places to start when looking at the metrics data. Especially, before answering how to make the data actionable.

1) Number of traffic to the site across different time frame. You want to see how your site is acquiring traffic by specific initiatives or events that occured.

2) Where are your traffic coming from. Search, media, other sites, direct, etc.

3) What are your visitors looking at. Popular contents, entry page, content groups, etc.

Once you get these basic understanding of your site traffic, where do your business goals reside or considered as success?

For example: If you are running a media campaign, how many traffic had generated from the campaign and how many had bounced or converted. Those 3 points mentioned above will help you understand the situation, and will help you take it to the NEXT analysis point.

Once you run through the basic metrics, then the next approach is to answer a granular questions such as:
- Where did the traffic drop out and how you can improve it next time?
- Was the conversion rate good or bad?
- Did the metrics results meet the initial target and expectations?
- What did the other metrics look like that make the traffic from this campaign unique?
- What strategies and tactics could apply next time, when a similar campaign or initiatives run?

This thinking process and approach would naturally help to tackle the analytics data, and build better understanding of the results to plan for the next action.