How to surf on your website’s data

1. Set Your Goals

First, you need to know what your objectives are to understand what the statistics are you must study. Ask yourself why you are doing this analysis. Your organization might already have one, but make sure it’s related to your website.

Let’s take the example of a surf company. It has a sales target of 4 million dollars this year (assume that we will always be speaking of million of dollars in this post) and that the website usually generates half of the sales. Thereby, we could set the website’s sales target to 2 million.

You could also split your goal in smaller goals. Per say, our surf company could have the goal to generate 1 million in sales with it’s online marketing campaigns during the first half of the year. To meet their goal, the company will use an ad campaign on google and Facebook.

You probably already heard of the SMART objectives (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Timely). This methodology will help you with the M in SMART, specifically to measure your objectives.

2. Define KPIs

The Key Performance Indicators (KPI) are the stats you want to track to confirm or bust your hypothesis. In our Surf company example, the KPI is the sales in dollars. At this point of our analysis, all we must do is determined if we reached our goal (or not). If we reached 1 million in sales online in the first 6 months of the year, it succeeded. If you didn’t, you didn’t reach your goal.

The sales example is an easy one and the KPI to track is obvious, but do not neglect this step. In some cases, finding the right metric is very complex and choosing which stat to track will change how you measure your success, therefore your success.

3. Track your progress

Now that your goal is set, you need to ask yourself if you’re on the way to meet it. Looking at your progress, are you expecting to reach your target or not? Answer this question by yes or no only.

You need to take a deeper look and find out where it went wrong or why it went so well. To do so, state hypothesis to help you provide a structure to your search for answers. Your hypothesis could be any of the factors you think could have influenced your result: your website’s traffic, your bounce rate, your ad campaign!  It will help you clarify what you want to verify precisely and help find out what metrics you should use to validate it. In the process, use only true or false answers so you don’t get lost in your data ocean again!

Let us go back to the surf business. The company did not hit their target. Since the answer to our question is no, they did not reach their goal, we must state hypothesis regarding to why it did not work such as:

• The sale objective on Google Ads is reached.
• The Facebook campaign reached its sale target.
• There is more competition on the keywords we are targeting on the search network.

4. Close the loop

Even if the cause is obvious, do not take for granted that it is the only one that lead to your failure. You have an ocean of data to validate your questioning. Take advantage of it! The goal here is to state new hypotheses and to validate them until you are satisfied of the answers you find.

For example, even if there is more competition on your keywords on Google Ads, raising the click prices and cause the number of clicks to drop for the same budget, there might be other reasons why the surf company did not meet its target.