As part of our new focus on core web tools and tactics for small businesses, we’ve decided that Tuesday will now be known as Analytics Tuesday (not to be confused with Pancake Tuesday here in the UK) on the bpodr blog. Each week, either Adam or I will put up a post about analytics/metrics and some links to places to find more information.

A good place to start is with the decision to install analytics on your site. When we conduct site reviews, we come across a startling number of sites with no means to capture metrics (and just as many where the metrics aren’t collected, even when the means to measure it is installed). So, we’re kicking off this week with a look at why installing a way to capture data on your site is, without question, as important as having a working web site in the first place.

A site without metrics is a brain without oxygen

Choosing to launch a web site and then do nothing to measure its effectiveness is akin to buying an expensive house without finding out where it is nor caring about its condition.

Of course, measuring effectiveness also implies that there is a clearly defined objective. In other words, you need to know the main purpose of your web site. For most businesses, this will usually come down to one of these:

1. To drive more sales;
2. To generate more qualified leads;
3. To establish credibility.

The first two may appear similar on the face of it but the primary objective for the site itself will depend on whether you’re running a true ecommerce site or a site that seeks to bring prospects into your pipeline.

Let’s say you’ve got a B2B business and your product or service is not something you can pop in the post and send to a customer on receipt of an on-line payment. In this case, your site is probably looking to get visitors to pick up the phone and call you (or request a brochure or fill in a contact form).

Metrics provide the data for your business decisions

A decent metrics package will let you know where your visitors are coming from, what pages they visit on your site, and how long they stay there. With experience – or help from someone familiar with analytics data – you’ll start to see if and why potential customers are failing to answer that call to action on your site. That data alone can form the basis of a marketing strategy for driving more traffic, or improving your landing pages, or even making sure you implement a plan for loading fresh content on a weekly basis.

When you capture data from your site and analyse it properly, you’ll immediately be in a position of competitive advantage. (Whether you do anything with that advantage is up to you, of course, but the chances are that at least one of your competitors will make use of data gleaned from their own site.)

In the early (earlier?) days of the web, much was made of ‘hits’. The web was much simpler then and hits on your site actually meant something. Nowadays, with each web page containing so much information served in separate calls to your server, counting a hit is as much use as counting bricks to decide which house to buy. My favourite quotation about this comes from Jim Sterne ( as quoted in Avinash Kaushik’s excellent book “Web Analytics An Hour A Day”). Jim defines ‘hits’ as “how idiots track success”.

Jim Sterne and Avinash Kaushik both have blogs that focus on web analytics. Browsing the archives on their sites is a great place to start if you want to delve into the subject further (and quicker).

Coming next week….

Alternatively, you can just wait until next week, when I’ll look at some of the key terms used when talking about metrics.

If you miss any of the posts in the series, just click on the ‘Analytics Tuesday’ category for a complete list.

Let us know if there are any metrics topics that you want to see covered. Questions, opinions, gripes, and corrections are also always welcome.