Web analytics has historically been a topic that’s brought great confusion among organizations. When considering which metrics to look at, you’ll start with topics like conversion, engagement, and click-through rates. Once you begin to increase your program’s complexity, you’ll likely look at a multi-touch attribution model tied to a financial analysis while looking at business-focused metrics. This evaluation is essential when evaluating your marketing organization or your marketing program’s entire health. Still, I will argue they’re not very important to your website’s overall health.

The concept of being finance focused in marketing isn’t flawed. Understanding how your marketing activity and investment impact your overall business’s health is essential. It becomes flawed when it stands in the way of making decisions. Once the decision-making process ties into metrics that are clunky or hard to acquire and track, the entirety of your optimization program slows down. Avoiding that slowdown is precisely why you should simplify your web reporting.

Speed of Web Reporting

Simplifying your web reporting allows you to work with speed and decisiveness. Depending on how much traffic you get to your website, it’s easy to get anxious about making sure you’re making the right decision. Every visitor counts when it comes to collecting leads and winning business. While this might be true, you generally only need about 1,000 visitors to a page to reach statistical significance. That number becomes even less for pages with a highly defined target audience. The truth is, the faster you can hit that number and adjust again, the more likely you will find a change that will make a significant impact.

Why Speed Matters

Let me use an example. In our beta testing here at Qualiscore, a client came to us to express their dissatisfaction about switching between our dashboard and their GA account. During the conversation, they explained to us that they wanted to be able to work quicker and wanted to have the data at their fingertips. Upon further examination, it turns out the client was using that data to try and make an even more “advanced” decision about what to work to complete. In doing that, they spent countless hours having conversations (meeting cost), they spent hours trying to analyze the insights (people cost), and they continued to have a page ranking one that would ultimately end up an eight (loss of business cost). The value prop of our business is helping you reduce that burden and cost, which led us to dig in.

Ultimately, we sat with that customer and mapped out for them the cost of making that decision vs. the increase in leads from getting the page to an eight. If they had simply made the change without hesitation, it would have led to 71 new qualified leads during the time it took them to make the final decision to try the optimization. Indecisiveness will lead to slower decisions.

Avoiding The Speed Bumps

The truth is, not every decision will work out like that early Beta tester’s situation. You’ll win some of those tests, and you’ll lose some. That said, moving with speed outweighs the risk as long as you win more than you lose. A continuous improvement model is the best way to handle your website optimization. Know that not every test will be successful, and learn to be OK with that. Your business won’t shut down because you changed the color of a button or opted to collect less information from a lead form. Your company might shut down if you get stuck in analysis paralysis. Avoid the speed bump altogether and simplify your web reporting.