Measuring Analytics Trends: What’s Really Important, And Why?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

If you do business online at all then you will have to face the fact that analytics is an important part of conducting that business. Whether you rely completely on organic search results and search engine optimization, pay per click, or a combination, you’ll have to measure your performance against results and that requires some form of analytics package. But what should you measure?

First, before getting into specifics about what you should measure, how about a little discussion on why you should measure. In essence, you want to look at the trends. Individual numbers by themselves don’t really tell the story. Numbers over time are the story.

Here’s what I mean: Let’s say you know that you had 1,000 visitors last month of which 899 were unique. Of those, you saw 200 page views on your most important landing page and 5 conversions. That’s great, but how do you interpret that data?

Those statistics exist in a vacuum. They mean nothing until you measure them against previous months. If the six months prior to last month you saw more than 2,000 visitors each with more than 1,500 being unique and that most important landing page saw more than 500 page views with more than 10 conversions – last month doesn’t look so good now, does it? You may have seen a profit last month, but that profit was a decline from your history so that’s not good. Now you must discover what caused the decline and how to fix it. That’s why you engage in analytics tracking and trend analysis.

This afternoon we’ll discuss what you should measure. Go analytics!