Analytics, Record Everything, Track Everything
In today’s world Privacy is just about gaining the upper hand, securing your data from monolithic corporations that sell your data to their advertisers is just about doable, but what of us normal website owners, just trying to get a few visitors and maybe the odd enquiry to two. How do we grow our website presence and expand our own small corner of the Internet. I heard this morning on the radio that it’s never been easier to make money online, please can someone show me how?
Where’re we at?
Smaller browsers like Brave or Opera have full privacy automatically enabled when you use them out of the box. iPhones are more or less the same. The law is also on the users’ side because it states that no data is allowed to be recorded without express consent.
The big boys with deep pockets can get around all this because they can anonymise a lot of data, use server-side tracking, or utilise quite countless other ways to circumnavigate the rules. It’s all doable. But here in lies the rub. Big business does bother to circumnavigate the rules and we have to ask ourselves why they bother. (Apart from selling space to advertisers). The reason is data is everything.
If you only measure 60% of your traffic and don’t take that very seriously, or worry that your data is not accurate – you’ll lose trust in your own data and then you lose trust in your marketing and before you know it you’re switching things off and wondering why more people don’t want your products.
Put simply, we live in a world where not to advertise is literally the death throws of a business. You need to sell, there’s no escaping it.
Record everything, Track Everything
If the big corporations are putting in so much effort to Tracking their users, we should as well… accurate data however has to start with some sort of tracking. Google Analytics is as good as any other and it’s free, but don’t hold your breath. The core issue with all tracking however is that it involves something triggering something, usually on the user’s computer and this is what Cookies tend to block.
Some servers are moving away from using Cookies, but there is little point, legally this is about collecting data, so it makes no difference if Cookies are used, the point is data is not allowed to be collected. other services promise to only use Anonymous Data, so it cannot be tracked back to the user.
For our purposes though we just want to record everything we can and track it. It’s worth having two or even three Analytics packages installed on Platforms like Shopify this is a given. Shopify has it’s own analytics and Google can be used as an alternative.
However, it’s often necessary to go further and track specifics, if you can track phone number clicks or email address clicks, conversions, patterns of routes through the website such as Checking out, downloads of PDF’s, whether people log in, it’s all valuable. You should even be able to track how many people decline or accept Cookies. All this information is valuable.
Track it all.
Now tidy it up
That was the easy part, installing some tracking code, easy, configuring Google Analytics to record events, adjusting youer website forms so that you can see how many people complete an enquiry. That’s all strightforward and most platforms like WordPress or Shopify make this easy.
The hard part is elinmating the ‘unknowns’ – as soon as a user clicks ‘decline’ cookies – you’re in trouble, we find the rough average is about 1/3rd of all users will decline cookies if they can, that’s an immediate 33% of your traffic you won’t learn thing about. But some simple common sense in how the Cookie Banner is displayed will reduce the number of ‘Declines’ to as little as 10%… suddenly your tarcking will be much more accurate.
Use UTM links any time you want anyone to link back to your website, especially, Google, Facebook, Instagram, or any advertising, UTM links over ride that Google things with what you know. If you put the UTM link in full on a 3rd party website, Google Analytics will have to allocate it properly.
I liken all of this to a Shop… if you run a clothes shop, you’d expect thousands of people to walk past the shop every day and maybe a couple of hundred might eneter the shop and of the couple of hundred that enter the shop 50 might purchase something, that could be a coversion rate of 25%.
But consider how they found your shop, they might have already heard about, been a repeat customer, just walked past on the off change, there are lots fo reasons why they came into the shop. but you can expect a relatively high proportion of visitors to buy something.
Why is it not the same on a website. there are millions of people surfing the internet highway, you may well get 200 people visiting the website each day, why then, if people are visiting the website for more or less the same reasons as if it was a high street shop, why then do you only get 2 enquiries, if you’re lucky.
It’s never made sense to me. Why does it take a user 5 visits to a website before they make a buying decision.
The turth is most Internet junk is not human, it’s just bots and trawlers, I just do not believe 200 people visiting a ‘business consultancy services’ website where 99% do nothing. It’s not feasible.
So the second area to clean up – nonsense traffic. It far better to record everything, track everything and then remove the junk. Anything you can do to identify Bots, Trawlers, Crawlers and other superflous users of your website should be elininated.
It’s far more realisitic and accurate to concentrate on the 20 geniune human visitors to the website and hear their genuine enquiries and requirements. You’re building the website for humans, not bots and finally it will make your stats look better.
Conclusion
Track and record all the traffic that comes to the website, because only from that point can you learn to eliminate the road blocks that prevent you from seeing the true spectrum of clients and prospective clients.
And then you can work to provide the content you need for those people and that’s how to grow your business. All too often I’ve seen clients upload content that has no connection to their business, but it will generate traffic, but what’s the point, none of those people are looking for your services. Much better to focuses religiously on offering the best content possible for yourt target users.
That’s what big business does. Look at their websites – they offer exactly that their users expect them to offer, no more and no less. They might collect all our data and sell it on, but ultimately they only offer a very simple message at the core.