Analytics

Site Goals

Building a website is only the beginning of a long process of visitor, prospect and customer engagement. Websites typically have business objectives for their owners. This could be to simply increase traffic, turn visitors into registered and returning users, or convert users into customers or leads. Some sites want users to fill out a form, watch a video, play a game or simply lead them to another website. There are many types of goals. The success of a website - and its business owners - is increasingly being measured against a target set of quantifiable goals. We work with client stakeholders to make sure these goals are clear, reasonable and integral to the design and flow of a user’s website experience.

Google Analytics

ISL has worked with numerous web measurement solutions over the years, but recently have focused our primary attention on Google Analytics. It is the best and least expensive - e.g. free - solution available to website owners. It also ties in very nicely with Google Adwords search engine advertising.

Google Analytics permits the comprehensive analysis of website traffic sources. It permits business owners to look at user behavior in terms of page views, time spent on site and which content is most popular. It permits in-depth navigational and geographical analysis. It also allows discrete analysis of the search terms that led visitors to a site and their engagement with a website once a visit is underway.

Google Analytics also allows website managers to establish goals and measure how well a site and which types of visitors are completing conversion tasks. This can include:

• registration
• newsletter sign-ups
• page views
• email referrals
• purchases
• search
• PDF documents
• file downloads
• playing a game
• and much, much more depending on specific business requirements

We usually work with clients at the beginning of a project to establish the goals most important to them and make sure the site and navigational paths are laid out in a way that makes measuring and understanding goal-directed behavior as transparent as possible.

E-commerce

For e-commerce related sites we are experienced with coding shopping carts to help business owners understand where their customers are coming from and how much they are spending. What are the top states for my customers? Do customers in Las Vegas spend more than those in San Diego? How much more? Google Analytics permits a site manager to answer this and more granular questions that could tie in, for example, with increasing ad spends in certain markets. We are also experienced with providing detailed product sales by line item, sales tax reports for clients who need to charge sales tax for every state, country and city that requires it in the US and Canada.

Database Reports

Google Analytics is a very successful solution for monitoring many facts of a website, but there are some things that it cannot do, like access a site database. How many users of a certain kind registered on my site? How many registered users came back to my site over the past week? How many reviews did they submit?
Questions like this are best handled through database queries, and for such clients we provide a database look-up tool within the content management system that lets them run their own reports to answer specific questions.

Reporting

We work with clients to establish a reporting procedure that makes the most sense for their business. This can involve establishing an email list that sends daily Google Analytic reports on site traffic and goals; we can also work with clients to provide custom Powerpoint reports at scheduled intervals to review the facts they are interested in.