Yes, if you only look at the data and don’t act.
- Who cares if your bounce rate is 70% or 30%?
- Who cares if you have 5,000 visitors per month?
- Who cares if 30% of your visits come from California?
None of that matters if you just look at it and say, “Yay! I have Google Analytics on my site!” Having Google Analytics alone will not help your site in any way. Knowing that you have 100, 1000, or 1-Million visitors per month, doesn’t help you.
For each metric in Google Analytics, you should look at your site over time and note any changes.
- Is the metric trending up? Down? -> What does that mean?
- Are there peaks or valleys in the graph? -> Why?
Guide to Google Analytics Actionability
Here is a short checklist to help you determine what to do with your Google Analytics data to improve the performance of your website:
- Look at the Reports. – Does anything stand out? (Peaks/Valleys/Trends)
- Ask Questions. – Why? What changed? Outside influence?
- What do you WANT the data to show? – Do you want an increase or decrease?
- What can you DO to alter your desired metric? – Design Change? Ad Copy Change?
- Track it! – Track the results of your efforts. Did they have the desired effect?
- Repeat with each report or metric you’d like to see change.
The key takeaway of this post is that you (we) all need to stop just looking at our analytics reports. Passively watching your stats go up and down is merely entertainment. We need to ask tough questions and make the necessary changes to improve the performance of our sites.
Good luck!
> If you would rather just look at your reports, we’d be happy to help you with the actionability part. Contact us at BusinessHut.com for our Google Analytics Consulting services.