Analytics may sound like an intimidating word, but if you’re willing to put in the effort to learn about the kind of traffic your company’s website receives, you can give your website that extra attractiveness that will get more traffic.
Once you’ve actually learned what metrics you want to follow in regards to your web traffic, you will want to consider what analytics company you should use.
This article will attempt to give you some pointers on choosing what company you wish to trust with your analytics.
Determine what you are willing to spend.
First, you should consider spending some money to hire a company to prepare analytics for you. While there are free options (Google Analytics has a free option, for example), the services they offer are not often robust, and their customer service is usually lacking.
There are no hard and fast guidelines as to how much you should spend. At least one suggestion, that you should spend 1 percent of your media budget on analytics, serves as a decent guideline, but you should be willing to spend more if your company is smaller and hoping to grow.
The best way to determine how much you want to spend is to determine what you want.
Determine what you want.
If you are willing to do the research beforehand (numerous videos exist to give you tutorials on basic analytics competency), you can determine exactly what metrics you want.
You should consider what data points are most important to you, first of all. You should keep an eye out for companies that will allow you all the data points that you need.
Keep an eye out for companies with multiple plans with different prices. Companies with multiple price packages including customizable packages, such as Kissmetrics, indicate their willingness to customize the package you take with them, which usually indicates a strong customer service ethic. If they’re willing to work with you on the price, they’re likely to work with you when you have a customer service issue.
Another thing to consider is the data freshness. This is the amount of time that it takes for the data to be received from the company after a click. As an example, Google Analytics’ free option has upwards of 24 hours for data freshness, while their paid option improves that data freshness to 10 minutes to an hour. If you want up-to-date information, data freshness is vital.
One other important thing to consider is the limits for what each company can offer with individual plans. You should determine what amount of unique hits will be enough for your company to review, how many data points will work for you, whether you need cross-domain tracking, and how long a company will keep your data available for you to review.
Read the reviews.
While you’re researching the data points that you want from an analytics company, make sure you look at customer reviews for any company you consider.
More specifically, look at the reviews with average scores. Five-star reviews can sometimes come from company partisans who are trying to improve a company’s online appearance; one-star reviews can be a form of Google bombing from bad faith actors who are disgruntled with the company.
Meanwhile, average scores will often come from a place of honesty, and will give you a list of both positives and negatives about any company you consider for analytics. These reviews will
often point out whether or not the customer service is robust and legitimately helpful.
Conclusion
While there are many other things to consider when running a business, analytics should not be at the bottom of the list. You will want to know what works for your website, because, in an increasingly online world, a single click to your website may be the only interaction you have with a customer if you aren’t careful.
If you are willing to invest the time, energy, and money into hiring a company to aggregate analytics for you and learning how to parse through the information they send, you will see a massive return investment.