Do you know your numbers? 🧮
Hello Reader,
When's the last time you took a hard look at your website analytics?
Not just your traffic, but how long people stay on your site, if they return, what pages bring them in, and the trends around each.
It's a task that's easy to neglect—especially if you don't understand what all the terms mean and, more importantly, why those numbers matter (or if they even do at all).
By studying our web analytics, we can make better, more informed decisions.
If an old piece of content, for example, is suddenly bringing in more traffic, it's probably appropriate to analyze why that's happening. If your bounce rate creeps up, perhaps you need to work on an improved internal link strategy.
Then, of course, there's the issue of balancing user privacy and the information we need to best serve our audience. There's not a do this, don't do this answer to this question—it's all context dependent.
Our team has move all our web analytics to Fathom—it's a paid, privacy-first analytics service (because when tools are free, you're almost guaranteed to be the product) and it gives us enough information to be able to make good decisions while maintaining our visitors' privacy. But, if we had a different business model, well, maybe it wouldn't be enough for us. Again, context is critical.
When we audited our content awhile back, we noticed a big gap in our public-facing resources around this topic, despite "Analyze Achievements" being one of the key tools we use in our nine-part framework for working with clients.
So, we're going to fix that! We're kicking off this effort with a comprehensive guide written by our Marketing Project Manager, Andrea. It's... long. Really long. But, it'll give you all the info you need to confidently dip your toes into web analytics.
| ⭐️ Read the Guide ⭐️ |
If you only take a few things away from this guide, I'd like for you to focus on the following:
- Many analytics are just vanity metrics—decide what’s important to you.
- Your conversion rate is often the most important number to understand.
- Don’t fear your numbers—even beginners can start to understand web analytics and take action.
Is there anything about web analytics you're curious about? Hit reply and let me know, so we can continue to create content that demystifies this often misunderstood topic!
Warmly,
Sarah