Any
good Brighton web designer will tell you that the website development is just
the first stage if any business is to get the best out of its website. Once the website is up and running, including
the app design Brighton businesses need nowadays, it’s essential to keep abreast
of how the website is supporting the business. This brings us on to the subject of Google Analytics.
As
Mark Twain once said “There are Lies, damn lies and statistics”. A
while ago I was at a recent meeting with a number of Brighton web designers
where we were discussing web design and dev Brighton based companies have been
working on. At the meeting I had a good chat with a colleague at an SEO company about Analytics and Metrics. I challenged him as to how useful they really
are in overall scheme of website development projects. This guy is a great advocate of using Google analytics,
and was enthusiastic about how he could show clients the progress being made
with an SEO project by compiling a detailed analytics report each month. I couldn’t argue with what he said as we do the
same on all our own projects, and the statistics and charts can normally be used
to show progress to some degree, which then justifies the work being continued. But how often do the clients, who are usually
the website owners, question the figures with a meaningful questions such as “So
what”? Maybe if they did, and they asked for an in-depth run-down of what the data
was actually telling them, would they still be so keen?
Brighton Web Designer Expertise
In the end, what most website owners
actually want to know from their web development and SEO specialists is:
· What is their ranking is on Google
for their major keywords, and,
·
Are they seeing an actual meaningful
increase in website traffic which in turn leads to selling more products and
services.
Whilst this may seem an over
simplified approach to many, just think about it for a moment. You can show a client that a web development
and design company in Brighton has generated well over a hundred new links by publishing
twenty or so blog posts or social media entries and had them included in five
new directories. The result of all this
link building work meant one of the keywords moved from position 8 to 6 on the
top page of the Google results. This in
turn generated a 15% increase in traffic. But so what? If all that effort does not result in visitors
who bought stuff –visiting the website, then what was the point? Is it just a case that using Google Analytics
is great for padding a timesheet to show how busy the SEO team have been, or are
they actually helping the client achieve their business goals?
App Design Brighton
The answer is in fact the same as
with all statistics. Analytics are
simply just data, i.e. information that has been collected about how many people
go to certain web pages, how they navigate around those pages, how long they
take, where they come and what type of devices they’re using. The point is how that data is then presented. If we focus too much on the vast array of details
that analytics can provide, it’s possible to simply use them to swamp clients
with information. On the other hand, if we
focus on just two or three really meaningful key points that actually measure the
progress in a way that really reflects the needs of that particular client,
then the analytics become a powerful tool for not only measuring progress, but
also indicating where things might not be working so well. In that way, analytics do become a real guide
to keeping the website going in the right direction.
Web Design and Dev Brighton
So,
as with all statistics, analytics are a tremendously useful tool if used in an
intelligent way. But if they’re just used to justify the work
being done by Brighton website development and SEO companies, then I refer you
to Mr Twain’s remark above.
