Why you need web analytics

I would say the key thing that online managers need to grasp is that analytics is not reporting. Many people use a web analytics tool like GA to set-up dashboards and then look at charts but don't actually gain any commercial insight.

That is simply reporting. As Pete explains in the video, the analysis is the overlay of context and reason to understand why the numbers are what they are and whether or not this is good or bad.

For example, if you see a page has a bounce rate of 80%, is that bad? Given that anything over 30% is considered bad for e-commerce, you would think that is terrible and you must address the page instantly.

However, the high bounce rate might actually be a logical occurrence. Take a blog article page - it might be that this page attracts a high number of returning visitors who come purely to read the article and then some of them use social sharing buttons. However, they leave the site after reading the article, so it looks like a bounce.

On the surface the high bounce looks poor. Yet digging into other signals like time-on-site, split between new & return customers, on-page goal completion (e.g. social sharing) etc gives a potentially different picture. If you then factor in the lifetime contribution of regular blog visitors, you get a more detailed view of the contribution of that page.

Web analytics is the process for driving commercial insight using all the available data. It's iterative and progressive and you'll never exhaust its potential.

thanks
james