Website analytics
In our experience, the outline of the implementation plan to creating or updating a website is as follows:
- Discovery (define goals, research audiences and competitors, etc.)
- Planning (brand, imagery, UX, UI, CTAs, action paths, etc.)
- Programming (build the site)
- Add content
- Go live
- Gather data and analyze
That last step – Analyze – may be the most important step in website development. It’s one thing to make sure that your site works properly. But if you want your site to be effective you need to know what’s working and what’s not. What’s the behavioral flow? Which pages are not seeing any activity? Which CTAs are getting the most engagement and which are not? Which pages have the highest bounce rate?
After going live most businesses breathe a sigh of relief and revel in their new site. And it’s an accomplishment, to be sure. But if you want to rise above the rest your site needs to be more than live, it needs to be dynamic. Analytics will make the difference as to whether or not your site is working as part of your business plan, or just sitting in cyberspace.
