I was sitting with my idc team in front of our conference room’s 75″ computer screen, looking at webpage after webpage of our analytics dashboards, showing us how many people are visiting our site, from where they are visiting, what pages they are viewing, the route through the site they are taking and how long they are staying. I also see what sites, social media platforms, or searches the visitors are making, leading them to our site or before they reach our site.

As the owner of idc, I could spend the entire day looking at Web analytics—such great information…so much fun…such a massive time-stealer.

How do we make all this information work for us—delivering, say, marketing qualified leads, and not be a huge overwhelming analytics rabbit-hole time-waster? 

Focus on the Website

If teachers want to gauge how much their students improve after a lesson, what do they do? In the beginning, they give an initial assessment. Then, they judge improvement with another assessment at the end.

Before a business does anything else, it must establish a baseline of current performance. It can use Google analytics or any one of the million 3rd-party sites. These sites enable businesses to track how many people come to their sites, how they arrived there, and what actions visitors are taking. This data can then be compared to data collected after future performance.

Now the idc team starts with the basics and then dials into paying attention to what is driving people into our sales funnel…the sales funnel that is delivering to us those coveted marketing qualified leads!