Analytics Tracking & Measuring Checklist ? - Evil Twin, Badass Tech & Startup Marketing

Which Data Should be Tracked?

Sessions
- Sessions, formerly known as visits, are the number of times a user was active on your website. These numbers are significant because they represent the size of the audience you’re reaching. You can compare these numbers month to month as your web marketing efforts grow. If the number of sessions increases, it means that more people are visiting and returning to your website for information.
- It’s vital to remember that this measure doesn’t distinguish between individual users. Instead, if a repeat visitor returns to your site after 30 minutes of inactivity, it will be counted as a new session.
Page views
- The total number of pages viewed on your website is referred to as page views. This number is important because you want visitors to view as many pages as possible on your website. Keep in mind that a high number of page views could indicate that your site’s content is of high quality and value.
Traffic sources
- While it’s important to know how many sessions and page views your website receives, knowing where your visitors are coming from is crucial. Google Analytics can assist you in categorizing your traffic sources into the five categories listed below: Organic Search, Paid Search, Social, Referral, and Direct.
Bounce rate
- When a visitor reaches your website and leaves right away, the bounce rate is determined. This usually indicates that a user did not find what he was looking for or that he came to your website by mistake. Reducing your bounce rate is critical because lost visitors equals lost opportunities. That’s why it’s important to understand and address any issues that are causing visitors to leave your website.
Conversion rate
- One of the most essential metrics to track is your conversion rate. The percentage of visitors who complete a goal on your website is referred to as the conversion rate. Completing a purchase, signing up for a subscription, filling out a contact form, or visiting a specific page on your website are all examples of goals. If your website’s conversion rate is low, it’s possible that you’re attracting the wrong type of visitors or that your content is ineffective.
- In super general terms, less than 2-3% is considered a low conversion rate.
- Monitoring your conversion rate will help reveal if there is a problem with your website. If your conversion rate suddenly drops, for example, it could be due to a problem with your shopping cart or sign-up form.

What can you do to boost the performance of your website?

Decrease the page load time
- Google places a high value on website speed so users will not have to wait for your website to load. According to studies, a one-second delay in page load time leads to 11% fewer page views and 7% fewer website conversions.
Enrich the page with more content and value
- If your underperforming pages contain fewer than 500 words, don’t just add words to increase the wordcount but add meaningful content to help improve your search ranking and traffic.
Make the page mobile-friendly
- If you believe that all of your website visits come from desktop computers, you are wrong. Google Analytics will show you how much traffic comes from mobile devices. Therefore, having your page responsive and mobile-friendly is crucial.
- As of 2020, more than 64% of traffic comes from mobile devices, including B2B websites.
- Here’s an example of a mobile-friendly page:
Increase the amount of data, graphics, videos, and interactive features in your website
- Source data from Google, trusted websites, research platforms, educational institutions, and industry experts — provide as much information as possible to increase people’s confidence and trust in your content.
- Include interactive elements (e.g. calculators, traffic estimate tools, conversion tools), and don’t forget to develop custom visuals (e.g., infographics, graphs, illustrations) for your post to boost your content’s real and perceived value. All of these features are necessary to keep people captivated by your page.
Study the behavior flow
- When it comes to analyzing what paths your website users take when navigating across your website, behavior flow is a great tool. Rather than providing you with plain number data, this report displays graphic representations of your visitors’ journeys across your website. This way, you’ll be able to observe which pages users interact with the most, as well as which pages they visited last before leaving your website. In addition, this will allow you to see what content they found valuable and what content they didn’t like.

Connect Google Analytics to Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a “no-cost service” which allows you to monitor your website’s presence in Google’s search results. You can connect your Google Analytics account with Google Search Console, so you can easily analyze your SEO rankings along with other Analytics data. It can also help you in finding and fixing website errors, submitting a sitemap, and creating and checking robots.txt file. After the accounts are connected, all the reports under acquisition – Search Console will start populating. Remember that they have a 48 hour delay so give it a few extra days before checking for data.

Here’s where you’ll find the Google Analytics settings for turning on Google Search Console:

Events set up

Google Analytics is a great tool for measuring a website since it tracks a lot of data without requiring any customization. Beyond the conventional sessions, pageviews, bounce rates, and time on-site, there are some other actions worth measuring, like account creations, email signups, PDF downloads, video plays, contact form submissions, webinar registrations, and more. Anything important to your website can be turned into a Google Analytics event so you can keep track of how frequently it occurs. To make events happen, you’ll need to add some code to your site that transmits the event data whenever the activity takes place. Most likely, you’ll need the help of a developer to get this up and running.

Define goals

Set only one or two goals for your website, and ideally revenue-related goals. That way, if the goal goes up, the revenue goes up as well. If the correlation to revenue is weak, use an event instead of a goal.
Some examples of good goals: free trial sign up for your product, new email subscription, demo request, consultation request, affiliate link clicks. Any event that leads to a sales funnel is a good candidate for a goal.

These goals can be set in one of two ways:

URL goal – If your site is set up so that users always go to the same URL after completing one of these key actions, you can tell Google Analytics to put up a target for each time they visit that URL. This works great for “thank you” pages. There is no need for a code for these.

Event goal –

It’s also possible to have Google Analytics set up a goal for any event that occurs. Because events can be triggered at any time, you have the flexibility to trigger a goal anytime you choose. You’ll very likely need the assistance of a developer to set these up. Inquire about having a Google Analytics event created for you. Once you’ve confirmed that the event is tracking successfully in Google Analytics, go ahead and create a Goal-based on the values of your event.

Other free tools you can use to track your website:

Hotjar
- Hotjar displays heat maps of your website, allowing you to track page activity from a single dashboard. In other words, Hotjar provides metrics for tracking people’s journeys across your website and determining whether or not your intended path is working.
Crazy Egg
- If your budget allows, consider investing in Crazy Egg, a more robust version of Hotjar that tracks every visitor’s interaction with your website. With Crazy Egg you can answer questions like: What are visitors clicking? When do they start to bounce? How far down the page they’ve scrolled? Which elements drive the most conversions? Etc.
- To maintain a smooth journey through your digital funnel, you may also highlight which usability issues are slowing users down.
PageSpeed
- PageSpeed is a free Google tool that measures how quickly (or slowly) your web pages load. Why should you worry about the speed of your website in this day and age of high-speed internet?
- Even if you have a high-speed internet connection, your website may have excruciatingly long loading times. The majority of internet users will not wait longer than a second or two for a page to load.
- With Google’s PageSpeed tool, you can submit any URL to be examined. Google then provides an overall score out of 100 for the website you’ve tested, based on several performance optimization best practices. Along with this result, Google will provide various suggestions on how to enhance your performance (and therefore, your PageSpeed Insights score as well). A good Google page speed score for desktop is 90 or more, while for mobile it is 50 or more.
- Here is an example of a bad PageSpeed score:
Web Developer for chrome
- Web Developer will add a toolbar button to the Chrome web browser. When the button is clicked, a series of tools appear that can be utilized on any web page. These are organized by category (such as CSS, forms, photos, and so on) and allow developers to do things like resize the browser window, outline images with missing alt attributes, disable JavaScript, display Meta tag information, validate HTML, and so on. CSS, Disable, Cookies, Images, Forms, Outline, Informations, Miscellaneous, and Resize are just a few of the options available under each category. Simply install it, and you’ll be surprised at how much information they can obtain for a certain wesite.
If you have any other questions don’t hesitate to contact us.

For more checklists, you can visit our resources page.

Analytics Tracking & Measuring Checklist

Which Data Should be Tracked?

Sessions

Page views

Traffic sources

Bounce rate

Conversion rate

What can you do to boost the performance of your website?

Decrease the page load time

Enrich the page with more content and value

Make the page mobile-friendly

Increase the amount of data, graphics, videos, and interactive features in your website

Study the behavior flow

Connect Google Analytics to Google Search Console

Events set up

Define goals

Other free tools you can use to track your website:

Hotjar

Crazy Egg

PageSpeed

Web Developer for chrome

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