Don’t Get Stuck: 5 Ways to Simplify Analytics and Avoid Analysis Paralysis

Using web analytics sometimes feels like trying to sip from a firehose. There’s so much potentially useful information that it’s tough to decide what you will actually do with it all. At that point, confusion sets in and you are really no better off than if you had no information at all. Presumably this is not what you bargained for when you got into analytics, and these 5 tips will simplify the process for you.

1. Roll it out little by little
2. Today’s sophisticated analytics packages allow you to track dozens and sometimes even hundreds of different metrics. While this can be very helpful, it is only frustrating and overwhelming if you are new to analytics. Early on, ignore these advanced tracking options in favor of just a few–say, page views, conversions, and visitor value. These are the numbers that truly matter, and getting a feel for regularly testing them will prepare you to track more metrics in the future.
3. Focus on dollars, not percentages
4. It is very easy to get caught up in tracking things that are only indirectly related to your bottom line. Click-through rate (CTR) is a prime example of this. While it is obviously desirable to have a high CTR, it only matters if those hoards of people who click actually buy something, sign up, or otherwise act in the way you are hoping they will. Put another way, a 20% CTR doesn’t matter if your conversions are persistently stagnant. When making analytics-related decisions, place more of your attention on dollars (conversions, Visitor Value) and less on percentages (page view, CTR.).
5. Rank each metric in terms of importance to your specific goals
6. 

   It is a mistake to think that masters of web analytics have somehow figured out how to track every single metric with equal effort and stay on top of it all. In fact, the opposite is true. The true analytics pros know which metrics matter to their unique website(s) and relentlessly exclude the others from consideration. For example, if you are running a lead generation website, your important metrics are probably page views and opt-in rate.