Author: Massimo Paolini

It was a great honor to speak at the Bootstrapper’s Breakfast last week. Where else can you meet and eat with local entrepreneurs who you can one day say, “I knew —- back when . . .”

For those of you who were unable to attend, here’s a recap:

Web analytics is all about understanding your customers, your site’s performance, and the results of your marketing efforts across all mediums. It’s not a one-time vaccine that allows you to dump all your efforts into your website one time and then leave it alone for the next three years. It’s an on-going process of making changes and then watching the results of those changes.
Use analytics to understand your audience and behaviors and then optimize/improve/correct the site based on that knowledge. Watch what new results come out after the changes then, as I say, rinse and repeat.

Specifically, businesses should use analytics to

• Know exactly where their clients are coming from
• Learn how much time/money it costs a company to find those clients
• Discover how satisfied people are with the course that is mapped for them
• See where companies are losing their customers
• Find out where to focus their time

In an ideal world, customers will find and come to your site, fall in love with your product, purchase it without any issues, and sing your praises to all of their friends. But the reality is that only small percentage of visitors ever start your sales process and those numbers continue to dwindle with every click.

For example:

• 3,285 people visit your site
• 428 put items in their shopping cart
• 195 go to the shipping information
• 104 continue to the payment screen
• 65 hit submit and place the order

The 65 represent 15% of the initial visitors with intent to purchase and 2% of your total visitors for this period of time.

Analytics will sift through data at each step to find out where those first 3,285 people came from. What were they looking for? What information did they want? What items did those 428 put in the shopping cart? What didn’t they like or what couldn’t they do that made 54% leave the shopping cart sitting in the aisle? Where did the 91 people go after completing the shipping information? What did they find out that made them “get out of line?” How can you get more people like the 65 who actually completed the whole process?

Ultimately, what are the goals for your site?

• Get more leads?
• Increase sales?
• Increase downloads?
• Increase usage of FAQ/help?

When you use solid and thoughtful analytics, you can match customer expectations with your intent to create the magic called conversion. But without a goal, web analytics is just a huge collection of data.

Information is fun and fascinating, but ACTIONABLE insights create revenue. And that’s what we’re all here to do, right?