COLLECTING and collating marketing data has never been easier. With Google Analytics – a freely available package – you can get details on everything from the number of visitors on your site through to more complex statistics like purchase funnel drop-out rates.

Following on from feedback on one of our recent workshops at the Marketing: The Art Of conference; we have outlined the top five actionable analytics insights and actions that you should – but might not – be looking at.

Understand your end goal

If you run an e-commerce website, the first thing to do is ensure you are using Analytics to track revenue as well as traffic. This may require help from a web developer, but any initial development cost will more than likely be offset by the benefits inherent in tracking revenue. Tracking revenue will help you to determine best vs. worst performing products, conversion rates by category and understand what marketing is actually driving sales.

If you don’t have an e-commerce site, you still have an end-goal. So this needs to be tracked. This could be anything from tracking downloads to contact form completions or newsletter sign-ups. Whatever it is, establishing an end goal is a prerequisite to using your online data to drive strategy.

Review mobile vs desktop usage

With the recent explosion in the number of mobile and tablet users, one of the first ports of call should be to check multi-platform data. If you generate traffic from mobile phones but the conversion rate for traffic from this avenue drops to zero, you may want to consider investing in a more mobile friendly site.

Know what people are searching for

As well as identifying areas that work well or poorly, web analytics is useful for determining what your site’s users desire. If your site utilises an internal search system, review your site search logs and try to spot gaps in your product range/service.

Check your site’s performance

We all know the irritation experienced when a site takes an excessive amount of time to load.

Understanding page load times for all of the pages on your site based on actual user data is a core metric you should be reviewing.

Get an early warning system

Google Analytics allows you to quickly set up alerts for when certain criteria is triggered and email you daily, weekly or monthly.

Daniel Hoggan is head of search at Mediaworks Online Marketing in Gateshead