These days you’ve got to have a pretty good excuse to justify not implementing Google Analytics on publicly available websites. Especially if you want a happy web team.

Having another analytics package is not sufficient. Neither is implementation unless you have some very strange custom built configuration.

Maybe you can get away with it if you have concerns about Google accessing all that information. However only in special circumstances does this hold true.

For those of you who don’t know what Google Analytics is, it is a free system that will tell you a lot about what’s happening on your website – where people are coming from, and what they do once they’re on your site.

If you are using already another package, you should already understand the benefits of analytics, and there’s no reason you can’t run several. There are also good reasons that Google analytics should be one of them.

If you’re not using any other analytics package, Avinash Kaushik has a great introduction to what it offers, but today I’m not trying to convince you on analytics grounds. I’m trying to convince you as a manager or member of a web team.The “non analytics” reasons why should you be using Google Analytics on your website:

  1. As the most high profile of the free analytics packages, a number of people on a web team may have had exposure to Google Analytics before. This number will only increase from here on in. This will give you access to a level of experience in your team that you wouldn’t have with another package.
  2. You may not want to use it straight away or even anytime in the near future, but if you start collecting the data now, you can easily change your mind in the future and use the historical data. If you don’t implement it on your site, you can’t go back and retrospectively fit it.
  3. It has an attractive and clever interface that will appeal to a large number of people who are often reluctant to engage with numbers (you know who they are, and every web team has them… <cough>designers</cough>).
  4. When you’re recruiting for your web team you will be taken more seriously and get better quality candidates if you have at least one analytics package. If you can show that you’ve got a data driven decision-making culture you’ll probably get even better quality candidates for you web team, but that’s for another post.
  5. You won’t alienate your web team by not implementing it. Google has a pretty good level of credibility amongst web teams. Analytics is free, easy to implement, and should be able to provide you with valuable insights into users of your site. You run a considerable risk of annoying them greatly by denying them access.
  6. There are loads of really handy tools that are currently in beta or have recently been released by Google that you’ll need Google Analytics to monitor. Web optimiser is one that should be on the radar for every web team.

If you’re new to analytics and don’t understand what it’s all about, I suggest you scoot over to Google and get their introduction. If you’re still not convinced then perhaps reverse psychology will work.

If you’ve thought about it but haven’t quite got around to it yet, here are a couple of arguments against some of the common reasons for procrastinating.

  • It doesn’t actually add anything to my site so I’d rather spend time doing things to the site than implementing something invisible to the user.Without some sort of analytics package, you’ve no idea whether you’re helping or hindering your users. Stop what you’re doing and start to think about what information you need to work out whether your developments are actually successful or not.
  • I’ve already got an analytics package that I have paid a considerable amount for so I don’t see that a free on is going to give me anything I haven’t already got.You’re may well be right, however with the resources that Google has access to I wouldn’t be surprised if the rate at which Google Analytics develops exceeds that of some of the other options. At the end of the day, it can’t hurt to have it as well as your current package, so consider it a bit of future proofing.
  • It’s free now but I don’t want to get trapped if Google start to charge.It’s definitely a possibility (however I doubt they will as their main ROI is through AdWords and analytics encourages more people to use AdWords). However you’re not obliged to continue it if they do. If they do start to charge, then you can just stop using it.

If you‘re still not convinced, feel free to ask any questions you might have in the comments. If you’re not convinced and you don’t want to ask about it, I’d suggest you probably don’t really want to waste your time reading this blog. Yup, I feel that strongly about it.

Ready to go? Then get over to Google Analytics and sign up.

Wednesday, June 27th, 2007 at 4:48 pm | Categories: data driven decisions, web teams

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