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You want your web analytics system to serve as a solid tool for your website measurement and analysis. After all, you are making important business decisions that will affect your online performance based on that data. You cannot afford to rely on partial, inaccurate, or otherwise misaligned data. You must have your tool properly set up to meet your tracking needs.
Web analytics systems are complex, and out-of-the-box defaults are rarely enough to provide you with the level of data accuracy and insight needed for the tool to be fully effective.
This is where Seperia (easynet) comes in. We specialize in end-to-end web analytics solutions. The firm’s experts work with its clients to define their business needs and key performance indicators (KPIs). They assist in selecting a system and setting the tool properly for tracking and provide ongoing analysis, which render actual insights and action items that will ultimately improve your website conversion rates.
Below is a checklist that will help you understand whether your data is showing you the right picture.
Internal traffic filters
Web Analytics is the study of online customer behavior to optimize user experience and improve website profitability. Usually a website manager/developer/designer visits the website frequently. Such activity skews the data. When website owners cannot distinguish between their company staff or partner behavior from their customers, they cannot optimize for the customer. It is therefore essential to create filters to exclude the IP range used by the company and its service providers such as web development and marketing agencies. This will substantially increase accuracy of the data, especially for small and medium websites.
Custom segments, reports and profiles
Most default reports show aggregated data, i.e., the overall visitor behavior. However, the average is not representative when analyzing the website. Each segment has a significantly different behavior, and when aggregated, can show trends that in fact do not exist or hide important existing trends. It is necessary therefore, to segment the data to extract insights and actionable data. This is done by analyzing data for several segments separately. Useful segment analyses include: organic, PPC, direct, new visitors, returning visitors, returning buyers, combinations with locality and others.
Subdomain & cross domain tracking
It is common to use subdomains and multiple domains to organize content and properties of an organization. This could negatively affect the website behavior data if not dealt with properly because Web Analytics tools make heavy use of cookies to track visitor uniqueness and other special variables. The domain where the user received the cookies is one of the parameters used in the cookies.
If, for example, you visit www.example.com and receive its cookies, then shortly after, you visit subdomain.example.com your browser will not recognize the domain cookies as being the same as the subdomain cookies by default. This issue could decrease data accuracy and prevent data streamlining, particularly when it comes to uniqueness and special variables.
lowercase vs. UPPERCASE
A substantial number of web analytics tools are case sensitive when it comes to URLs -- that means www.example.com/Easynet and www.example.com/Seperia (easynet) count as two different pages. From a customer perspective, those two pages are exactly the same.
This inaccuracy will skew information about the path users take on the website. For example, if all users who get to the website from an Adwords campaign see the uppercase URL, and all users who get to the website from a newsletter see the lowercase URL, the web analyst will not get a complete picture for the page performance and navigational information. It is important, then, to lowercase (or uppercase) all URLs using filters in your Web Analytics tool.
Tagging rich media, Flash, Ajax, and JavaScript
Web analytics tools do not, by default, track all special events such as JavaScript buttons, Flash videos, or dynamic URLs. These elements, however, are often essential for a complete understanding of customer experience. It is imperative to understand whether customers clicked on a lightbox, or whether they clicked on an AJAX tab to read more information in the website. From this, you will understand how users behave in the website and how they interact with different kinds of technologies.
Internal Site search tracking
It is difficult to understand customer intent when entering your website, but can be accomplished by studying the source of traffic and the content viewed. For customers coming from a search engine, the keywords that brought them to the site are important because they show what the customers are looking for and their behavior after searching. Proper setup of the tool's internal search recognition function then, is essential for good evaluation.
Tracking ROI of campaigns
Most websites use more than one acquisition method: PPC campaigns, banner campaigns, affiliates, and many others. However, the web analytics tool does not always recognize these sources of traffic as paid campaigns. To track campaigns properly and measure their ROI, it is important to tag incoming links according to your web analytics tool URL building guidelines.
Sometimes the parameter you are already using can be imported to your solution but may require additional special parameters. In addition, conflicts in this respect can arise with the tracking URLs you are using for other tracking purposes, such as internal corporate transaction tracking. Easynet specialists can help you streamline your tracking processes.
Tracking multiple calls to action from same page
Most websites position more than one call to action per page. This could be a good strategy, especially when pages are long and force visitors to scroll down. It is important then, to understand which calls to action are generating clicks and leads, and will enable the website manager to optimize the website and increase conversion rates.
For help with your configuration issues contact Seperia (easynet)
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