How to get started with website analytics

From Norway to Cuba and back to Canada, Pablo Childe is known for helping business leaders around the world better understand their customers’ online behaviour.

While he has provided such insights to internationally renowned companies, his approach to website analytics is the same for smaller businesses.

Now Canada Post’s senior analytics manager, Childe says data can reveal the health of a business and also make clear how its problems can be resolved.

“Any business with a website is beyond local; it’s now connected all over the world,” he says.

To understand and leverage your business’ website analytics, he recommends:

• Find free tools

  Familiarize yourself with website analytics by reading online about which tools your business can use to collect customer data.

  Many business owners use Google products because they’re free and easy for beginners to use.

• Know who’s coming to your website

  The most basic, free analytics tools will reveal who’s coming to your site.

  With each data point, you can better engage customers, refining messaging and deploying marketing tactics most likely to resonate with specific individuals.

  Analytics tools will reveal your customers’:

  • Gender
  • Age range
  • At what time they visit your site
  • With which devices they’re accessing your site
  • How long they’re spending there

  Depending on how your analytics tools are set up, you may also be able to see how customers are navigating through your site. This information can help you update its design to quickly offer customers what they’re looking for.

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• Identify specific problems your business needs to overcome

  Define your business’ most significant problems and then use data to engineer solutions.

  For example, does your business need to increase revenue? Website analytics can show where customers are spending money online – or, at what point they’re abandoning an online purchase. Do you need more information from your customers in order for transactions to be complete?

  Childe recalls his work with a business that wasn’t receiving essential information from customers. Website analytics showed that customers weren’t completing online forms.

  Upon further investigation, the business owner discovered a bug on the company’s mobile site that was freezing the form submission function and then shutting out customers from the site.

  Even if customers had wanted to complete their purchase, they weren’t able to.

• Ask for help

  If you find website analytics overwhelming, or if you’re unclear on what the data is revealing, help is available.

  Support with website analytics is often close by from experts and smaller digital agencies open for business across Canada.