Choosing the Right Analytics Platform for Your Website Goals
Introduction: The Importance of Website Analytics
Understanding your website's traffic and engagement is crucial for making data-driven decisions about optimization, growth strategy, and ROI. As consumer journeys become increasingly digital and omnichannel, leveraging analytics is more important than ever for identifying customer pain points and opportunities.
For example, an ecommerce retailer may use analytics to uncover that a certain product page has an extremely high bounce rate. Upon further investigation, they realize the product description is unclear and doesn't resonate with visitors. By optimizing the page content, they increase time on site, lower bounce rate, and boost conversions.
Website analytics provide insights into key questions like:
- How are users finding and interacting with my site?
- What content resonates most with my audience?
- Where are users dropping off in the conversion funnel?
- How effectively are campaigns and channels driving actions?
With this context, you can refine experiences to boost conversions and retention. This article provides an overview of choosing the right analytics platform based on your business goals and needs. Aligning your analytics tech stack to objectives will enable better measurement and maximized returns from data.
Defining Your Website Goals and KPIs
The analytics platform you choose should track metrics tied to your specific business goals. Common website objectives include:
- Lead generation - building a qualified audience for sales teams. For example, a B2B SaaS company may focus on capturing leads through content offers and newsletters.
- eCommerce sales - selling products/services directly via the website. An online retailer would aim to drive online purchases and repeat customers.
- SaaS signups - getting users to subscribe to a software-as-a-service product. Companies like Slack or Zoom want visitors to sign up for paid accounts.
- Brand awareness - increasing visibility and recognition for the brand. Media publishers often track brand lift through website engagement.
The key performance indicators (KPIs) will vary based on your core objectives:
Lead Generation
- Click-through rate on calls-to-action
- Lead quality score
- Cost per lead
- Lead to customer conversion rate
- Lead velocity/sales cycle length
eCommerce Sales
- Revenue per visitor
- Average order value
- Shopping cart abandonment rate
- Page views per session
- Bounce rate
- Repeat purchase rate
- Customer retention rate
SaaS Signups
- Free trial starts
- Free to paid conversion rate
- Churn rate
- Account engagement score
- Lifetime value per customer
Carefully identify 2-5 metrics that best reflect success for your goals. Track these KPIs consistently to measure performance.
Key Analytics Platform Features
At a minimum, your analytics platform should provide:
Core website tracking - Page views, visits, unique visitors, bounce rate, time on site, and other traffic metrics. For example, tracking pages per session to optimize site navigation.
Channel insights - Track traffic sources and engagement across organic search, paid search, social media, email, and more. Such as analyzing conversion rates by channel.
Custom events and goals - Build conversion funnels with custom metrics for signups, purchases, form submissions, video views, etc. Like attributing signups to specific CTAs.
Segmentation - Analyze and compare traffic segments like new vs. returning visitors, location, referral sources etc. Such as segmenting engagement by audience personas.
Integrations - Connect analytics data to other platforms in your martech stack for unified reporting. For instance, combining analytics with your CRM data.
Here is an overview of popular analytics platforms and their notable features:
Google Analytics
- Industry standard free platform
- Robust core web tracking and customization
- Integrates easily with Google marketing stack
- Requires technical knowledge for advanced features
- Limited paid plan options
Adobe Analytics
- Powerful tool for enterprise-level analysis
- Advanced segmentation and attribution modeling
- Expensive with steep learning curve
- Tight integration with Adobe Experience Cloud
- Robust platform for complex businesses
Mixpanel
- Excellent for mobile and app analytics
- Powerful funnel and cohort analysis
- Intuitive user interface
- More limited website tracking capabilities
- Pricing based on data volume
Heap
- Plug and play implementation
- Retroactive analytics via data pipeline
- User-centric analysis features
- Primarily event-based tracking
- Targeted at fast-moving startups
Evaluate both breadth of features and depth of analysis capabilities when choosing a platform.
Factors for Choosing the Right Platform
The best analytics solution depends on your business size, existing tech stack, in-house expertise, and complexity of data needs:
SMBs and Early Stage Startups
- Often best served by intuitive low-cost tools like Google Analytics
- May lack analytics expertise for complex platforms
- Integrations less crucial with smaller martech stacks
- Focus on high-level metrics and getting started with measurement
For example, an early stage ecommerce startup may use Google Analytics to understand their website traffic and shopping cart abandonment rate.
High-Growth Startups
- Require more advanced analysis as business scales
- Benefit from multi-channel attribution and funnel optimization
- Must balance cost, capabilities and ease-of-use
- May need both platform-based and specialized analytics tools
A unicorn startup like Away may leverage Segment for data collection and Looker for analysis to fuel growth.
Large Enterprises
- Often leverage enterprise platforms like Adobe or IBM
- Have analytics teams to handle implementation and analysis
- Require deep platform integration and single-vendor stacks
- Focus on advanced features like AI and predictive analytics
Delta Airlines likely uses Adobe Analytics with dedicated analytics engineering teams to understand customer journeys.
Evaluate your resources and analytics maturity to choose the right platform fit.
Leveraging Analytics Insights for Growth
Selecting the analytics platform that best aligns to your business goals and resources is crucial for data-driven decision making. Continually connect insights back to core objectives around conversion rate optimization, customer retention, campaign effectiveness, and more. Let data guide your activities across growth channels and experiences.
With the right analytics foundation, you can unlock immense value and visibility that drives business impact. For example, you may discover that LinkedIn ads drive 2x more conversions than Twitter ads, informing future campaign budget allocation. The possibilities are vast.
Conclusion
The analytics tech stack is a key driver of digital success, but must be tailored to your specific business objectives and implementation capabilities. Defining website goals, KPIs, and ideal features ensures you choose the optimal platform.
Careful assessment of business size, resources and existing martech stack also informs the right analytics solution. With aligned measurement capabilities, you can make data-driven decisions that boost growth. Use these criteria to select the best analytics platform for your needs and propel ongoing optimization.