So, you’ve got your snazzy website up and running. You’ve invested in SEO (or you’re trying to figure out what to do with SEO). Your images are tagged, your links all work, your design looks sharp. What next? 

How do you know that your website is working? Maybe more people are buying your product, or you’ve noticed that donations have increased. But, how do you know if that’s because of your website? 

ANALYTICS are your best friend. And REPORTING will tell you why analytics are your best friend. 

What’s the point in having your great website if you don’t know if it’s working properly? There’s no point in spending time, money and effort on implementing SEO best practices if you’re not looking at the information (the data) to tell you if it’s worth it! 

What’s the difference between analytics and reporting?

Reporting is when you take existing data and turn it into a presentable and understandable format. It’s about showing accurate information to inform future decisions, or prove that your SEO changes are working. 

Analytics is taking what you don’t already know and collecting data to help you make a decision. It’s the actual process for collecting the information. We use analytics because we can’t guess whether our website is doing what we want it to. Maybe sales have gone up - but is that because people are using the website, or because printed advertising is working? Analytics eliminates the guessing and gives you the real life answers. 

You’ve probably already guessed it, but as ever, Google’s Analytics are the giant in the analytics website world. Google Analytics is the most popular and most used analytics tool.

Want to know how to use Google Analytics?

Do you know what? We recommend the step by step wisdom on using Google Analytics from SEO wizards over at ahrefs.com. 

The ahrefs introduction to using Google Analytics will help you get started. But, if you want to learn more please get in touch and we can teach you how to make the most out of your data.

How to get what you want from your analytics

How do you know what you even want to be measuring with your analytics? Where do you start? 

It’s good to work out your goals. Are you simply wanting to see month on month if organic traffic (people who arrive at your website by searching through search engines like Google, Yahoo or Bing) is increasing? Or, are you trying to work out how long people are taking to donate, make an order, read a page, or even where your audience lives… the amount of data you can collect is huge!

The amount of information you can gather about the users of your website is both overwhelming and exciting. We’re here to help you learn how to use and report on analytics so that the data is useful and helps you help your audience as much as possible. 

(Nerd alert!)  DATA IS EXCITING! We love it.

Reporting - turning the analytics into useable and informative information

Once you’ve decided what you want to be measuring, the next question is how to report on it? 

Who are you trying to inform? What are you trying to share?

How to present your analytics reports:

Honestly, looking at the long list of numbers, dates, percentages and decimal points that Google Analytics presents is enough to make anyone switch off. There’s a reason why we all have a favourite picture book from our childhood. Images and colours stick in our brains more than numbers do. Images, graphs, infographics are easier to remember and make an impact. 

If you want to jazz up your reporting there are some great free tools on Google Data Studio. 

You can use Data Studio to enter the data you’ve gathered through Google Analytics into different templates and create easy to read and understand visual representations of your analyses. Make your data look snazzy and easy to share when you’re reporting on your analytics. 

There are many other reporting tools available to help you turn your data into readable and presentable pieces of information that you can learn from and decide how to action. 

Get in touch with us and we can help you figure out the wonderful world of analysing your data to make the best decisions for your audience, business or organisation. 

Remember - we love data!