The Secret to Improving Your Site: Ask the Right Questions
We all want our sites to be “better,” more efficient, and more effective. While that’s definitely true, let me fill you in on a little secret. The key to converting traffic data into actionable insights doesn’t have anything to do with KPIs (key performance indicators) or bounce rates or how good you are at crunching numbers.
The secret is to ask the right questions.
You could wade through the infinite data that Google Analytics spits out and never get anywhere if you don’t know what you’re looking for. That’s why when people ask me for help and only give me access to their Analytics profile, there is little I can do. Web analytics isn’t like SEO—I can’t just go in there and tell you to do this or change that and your site will perform “better.”
Each site has it’s own set of unique goals, problems, and advantages. That’s why the most important part of the process is asking the right question. It may sound like a cop out to you (“Just fix my site already!”), but it’s true. It’s like starting a new project without a goal—how are you going to know if you’ve succeeded without one?
There are tons of different kinds of questions you can ask, and the more specific you get, the faster someone like me can help you help yourself:
- Why are users coming to this page so much?
- All my posts have a similar bounce rate except for this one. Why is that?
- How did this page get so much traffic?
- Where did these people come from?
- Why does this page keep generating so much traffic from Google?
- What are my users clicking on when they hit this page?
- Why does Google hate me?
Asking specific questions that get at the heart of what you’re trying to do on your site is absolutely essential. Not only that, it makes things fun for people like me that love to dig into the data to help you find answers. I get to play detective by taking the questions website owners have and digging through the data to find answers.
It’s kind of fun.
So if you have a site (whether it’s a blog, a business, or whatever), think about the questions you want answers to first. Then you can worry about how to use web analytics to find the answers. And feel free to send me your questions—I’d love to help.