I always encourage my clients to make analytics a priority in their weekly (or daily) workload. I'll often help clients set up Google Analytics, Hubspot or other analytics tools to ensure that they have access to important data about how their site, content and campaigns are performing.
The problem is, most marketers don't commit to learning analytics basics or making analytics a regular priority in their busy workdays. I've heard over and over again, "I don't understand analytics!" or "Who has time to look at reports all day long?". And here's where it gets interesting...if you're just looking at reports or if you don't understand what you're looking at, then I can guarantee that you won't get ANYTHING out of analytics!
You see, there's a huge difference between reporting and analytics. Reporting generally involves running the same reports day after day, week after week, month after month and looking at numbers or simple metrics (think "# of pageviews"). You may even take that data and paste it into other pretty reports. But are you really getting anything out of all of those reports?
Analytics, on the other hand, involves looking at richer, more complex data and analyzing it to gain actionable insights. In other words, figuring out how it's going to help you gain more traffic, convert more leads, increase sales or whatever your particular goal happens to be. Analytics need to be completely customized to your particular business, industry and role in order to be effective and meaningful to you. I also absolutely insist that my clients utilize automation when they think about analytics. Most popular tools allow you to create recurring reports or email those reports to yourself or others on a regular basis (daily, weekly, monthly or whatever makes sense for you).
I recently gave a presentation about getting more out of analytics and I'm attaching a slide that explains more about reporting versus analytics. Do you know the difference and are you getting anything out of your analytics these days? Do you know how much traffic you're getting, where those users are coming from, what they're doing when they visit your site and how engaged they are with your content? If not, contact us so we can help you define a better, more results-focused analytics strategy. We can even set up recurring, automated reports that will be delivered to your Google Analytics dashboard, Hubspot account or email inbox each week or month--so you can spend less time building reports and more time getting useful information out of them.
It doesn't have to be hard, time-consuming or expensive to create ongoing analytics reports and a solid analytics plan. It just takes commitment. Contact us today to learn more about our upcoming analytics training or how we can help you create easy-to-understand analytics reports that will transform your business.
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Lisa Kirschner
Founder and Managing Director
Flair Interactive Services Inc.