Metrics: Why The End Is Important At The Beginning
Writing by Brick Marketing on Wednesday, 12 of March , 2008 at 10:35 am
The Google Analytics Blog had a great blog post about how necessary it is to plan your tracking and metrics rather than just winging it.
The main points of the Analytics blog post are, when planning your approach to tracking data on your website, you should:
- Determine what data you actually need
- Find out if the data is available by default
- Decide where you are going
I agree that it is important to know where you want to end up before you begin. Know the finish before you start, in other words. That said, these points are critical for making key decisions on collecting and analyzing data.
Be careful though that you don’t just start tracking data that you don’t need. Beginning webmasters like to ask for everything imaginable, but they may not really need all the information they are asking for. Be sure you ask for only what you need.
Most analytics packages offer a set of default tracking metrics. Those are default because it is assumed that most webmasters will be interested in that information. But some webmasters may want a little more detailed information. If that is the case then you’ll want to set up custom tracking for those particular metrics that you have an interest in.
Finally, by knowing the end before you begin, you can keep an honest and accurate record and historical information for that data that you are interested in.
Thanks for the Google Analytics Blog for an insightful post. Now happy tracking!
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