Your web analytics checklist
This article, written by Neil Mason, was originally published on Clickz.com on 24/09/09 and is republished here with permission.
In the course of our work we see many implementations of many different web analytics systems. However, despite the fact that most companies now have an analytics system or indeed are on their third or fourth different technology I remain surprised sometimes by the poor quality of the data that are being reported from these systems. If you are only using the system to report very top line numbers then it’s easier not to worry too much about the quality of the data as it’s hidden from view. Once you begin to start to work with the system and use the data for diagnostics and analysis, then the quality of the data becomes more and more important and any data issues become more and more apparent. So here’s a quick checklist to understand how well your web analytics system has been configured and how good the quality of your data is:
Page Tagging:
First of all is the site being tracked properly? Have you got a page tag on all the pages that you want to track, including your error pages?
IP address exclusion:
Have you determined which IP addresses that you needed to exclude or filter out from the data? Do you need to exclude your own organisation’s IP addresses? How about any site monitoring tools that you may use?
Page naming:
Good page naming is the bedrock of easier content analysis and understanding user paths. Does the page naming make sense? If you have page URLs or document titles that are self explanatory and make sense to any ordinary user. If you have complex or dynamically generated URLs can you change them to something that is easier to understand? If you have a lot of extraneous parameters in the page URL’s (such as session IDs) have they been stripped from the data collection so that they don’t appear in the reports as different pages?
Content grouping:Is your content organised into logical and coherent groupings? Do you have neat folder structures on your website that allows you do group content easily or do you need to create a customised approach to grouping pages into content sections? How will this work be maintained?
Conversion events:Are conversion events well defined? Are all the important conversion events on the site being tracked? Do you need to customise parts of the system to recognise certain key events that are not being captured automatically?
If you are an ecommerce site, are the orders being tracked properly? How does the data compare against your order processing systems? Are there any obvious differences and, if so, why is that?
Campaign tracking:
Do you need to track campaign in the system? If so, what structure and detail do you need for your campaign reports? How are you going to add the relevant tracking parameters to your landing page URLs and keep them up to date?
Internal search
Do you have an internal; search engine on your site? If so, is it being tracked? Are you capturing the keywords that are being typed in and analysing the results?
The above checklist is not exhaustive and depending on your business there may be some other issues that you need to focus on. However, these are some of the common problems that we encounter in our work with clients and if you’re focussed on getting these things right then you are well on the way to have good quality data to work with.