I have learned a lot about analytics these past few days. I’m likely to throw in marketing strategy as well since they seem closely related. I’m no expert on the subject. These are based on my own experiences and rationalizations on the subject.
Why?
I (and probably you too) need to stop looking at Google Analytics.
When you first start a website MVP:
- you take your idea
- write some code for a couple days
- ... and you throw Google Analytics on it about 15 minutes before you launch.
And that’s all fine and dandy. When you don’t know what you’re doing (and when you’re just launching a product, almost by definition you don’t know what you’re doing), you can’t really go wrong with Google Analytics. It’s the kitchen sink when it comes to analytics. If there is something you want to see, it’s in there somewhere 😅
Now, you have somewhat of an idea of your goals and the beginnings of product-market fit. It’s at this point that Google Analytics becomes more of a distraction than anything. It’s vanity metrics. Seeing high pageviews and low bounce rate feels good, but may not necessarily corelate with your company goals. Where do we go from here?
My Disconnect
Analytics always seemed like a difficult task to me because I’ve never seen how anyone really uses it. There are a lot of tools out there, there is a lot of big picture advice and a lot of big-brained best practices. There was not really anything that shows how to fit all that crap together and use analytics practically. I hope writing about what I have done will give people some ideas.