Website analytics tools can contribute to design decisions to improve the online experience of visitors, but also to inform site owners and business owners about the performance of their website.
However, in many cases, eBusiness managers, webmasters or web operations managers start deploying web analytics tools as a "nice to have" tool.
Instead of measuring performance and comparing it to business goals, they mostly communicate raw analytics data to senior management, without any further explanation or any recommendations to improve the site.
To take advantage of the value that web analytics tools can provide, you should avoid the following big pitfalls:
1) Business objectives are not defined for individual parts of the website: Business owners responsible for a sub-section of the company website in most organizations have not defined their specific business objectives for their sub-sections.
For example, a sub-section of a website might be customer support, which can be further divided into self-service tools (e.g. FAQs, driver downloads, etc.), support contact information, warranties, user guides, etc.
Measuring the performance of a site or sub-section of a site is only valuable if the measured performance can be compared with the target goals.
If business owners don't set business goals, analytics can't determine website performance.
eBusiness Managers or Web Operations Managers who are in charge of implementing website analytics tools need to help business owners define detailed business goals for the sub-sections of their website (also read "Who Should Set Business Goals" by Steve Telleen).
2) Site Owners or Subsite Owners Are Not Trained to Understand Analytics Reports: In most organizations, site owners or business owners for specific subsites cannot utilize web analytics tool reports because many of them do not understand the benefits of such a measurement approach.
As a first step, eBusiness managers need to explain the benefits and importance of this performance measurement as an integral part of their web performance measurement program.
The second step involves explaining what is being measured and how the measured data can help business owners further improve their website sub-sections (e.g. changing navigation or cross-sections, providing and updating a "most used links" section, etc.).
If business owners are not sensitive and/or trained to use the value of a web analytics report, they most likely won't even start reading the reports, and all efforts to measure website performance with web analytics tools will go to waste.
3)Data points of web analytics tools are unrelated: Web analytics tools measure data points over a defined period of time, such as number of page views, number of unique visitors, number of visits, etc.
However, these data points do not provide any value.
For example, a high number of pageviews may indicate that website visitors are lost in navigation and are going through many pages to find what they are looking for, versus a lower number of pageviews, which may indicate that website visitors find their information directly in a few clicks due to efficient navigation on the website.
It is very important for web analysts to connect the individual data points to derive value that can be translated into website improvements and that value can be communicated to business owners to inform them of their specific website performance.
For example, to measure the effectiveness of online support, web analysts should measure and correlate the following key performance indicators (KPIs):
a) Stickiness = the total amount of time spent viewing all pages in the support section divided by the total number of unique visitors to the pages in the support section and
b) Focus = average number of pages visited in the support section divided by the total number of pages in the support section.
For online support, stickiness and focus should be low, meaning that navigation to specific support is efficient (eg, website visitors need few clicks and minimal time to reach a specific support page).
It is important that the measured data points of the web analytics tools are correlated with each other and that these data points are measured for a specific part of the site.
If the data points are unrelated and not measured for a specific section, they provide no value, or at worst, if interpreted, can lead to an incorrect design decision.
4) Not enough skilled human resources are available to analyze the reports: Website analytics tools only track and record the online behavior of visitors.
Web analytics tools cannot interpret measured data. In order to derive value from the measured data, specialized web analysts must further analyze the collected data.
The main duty of web analysts is to interconnect individual measured data in order to obtain KPIs.
These KPIs allow web analysts to derive design changes to enhance the experience of website visitors.
In addition, web analysts need to be able to combine correlation analysis data with web design (see also "When not to use web analytics tools").
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