3 simple steps to set up and track business objectives on your website

Just finished designing the new website for your business.

You loved everything about it — the layout, the information, the type… It’s perfect.

However, while admiring the new design, you can’t help but think:

“I love this website, but how do I know if my customer and audiences love it as much as I do? Also, how do I know if this website is truly useful for my company? How do I know if it will really increase my revenue and traction after its launch?”

These are the questions you can answer with web analytics.

Today, we are going to lead you through a simple, 3-step exercise to set up the most basic analytics for your website, so that you can:

1. Understand the true business objectives of your website.

2. Access key metrics to demonstrate the effectiveness of your new website.

3. Measure whether the new website helped you achieve your business objectives.

Step 1 — Define the business objectives of your website

Your website is like “functional art.” It must serve a purpose for your business, whether that’s creating sales, generating leads, or getting traction for your brand.

Your mission in this step, should you choose to accept it, is to identify one or two concrete business objectives for your website.

If you are an eCommerce company, this objective is most likely to increase the number of customers who complete checkout. For a B2B company, it may be submitting a lead form. For a SaaS company, it’s probably signing up for a free trial, etc.

When selecting these objectives, there are two important points that deserve your attention.

First of all, you should only select one or two objectives.

One of the biggest analytics problems for business owners is having too many objectives for their website. That’s why two business objectives should be the maximum.

Having too many objectives is bad for two primary reasons.

First of all, it creates a crammed website.

It is very hard to put enough information on your website that serves all of your objectives artfully without confusing your users. That’s why it is always better to be a specialist in one or two objectives than to be a master of none.

Secondly, too many objectives make generating insights from analytics extremely difficult.

Very often, you will take action steps that make progress on one objective while setting you back in another, and too many objectives will make these trade-off calculations immensely complex.

As an added benefit, the exercise of condensing many goals to only two key objectives can also help you prioritize and truly understand what is important for your business. This makes executing your digital strategy much easier and more efficient.

Let’s go back to your mission for this step.

In addition to having a maximum of two goals, the second principle for setting goals is that they should also be “concrete”.

By concrete, I specifically mean that you should choose a goal that you can envision clearly and measure with ease.

For example, one of your objectives may be “gaining traction.” But what does that really mean?

In the context of your website, gaining traction could mean many things ranging from viewing your ads to signing up for a newsletter on your website.

Therefore, you should narrow down that goal by asking yourself what you mean by “gaining traction.” Then, define a clear action that your users can take that you will count as a goal completion.

This will help you not only avoid goals that do not have any concrete meaning but also make setting up goals in your analytics tools (e.g. Google Analytics) easier down the line (see Step 2).

Here is an article we wrote if you want to learn more about how to choose the right business objectives for your website.

How to identify the right micro-conversion goals for your website using Google Analytics

Step 2 — Setup Google Analytics (or Other Tools) to Access Key Metrics

Now that you have your business objectives defined, it’s time to set up the tools to actually measure how well you are doing on these business objectives.

There are multiple tools on the market that can help you analyze various aspects of your website traffic. These include your traffic statistics (Google Analytics), your search engine performance (Moz), and where people tend to click on your website (Hotjar).

A good overview of all those tools is displayed in the graphic below (credit to analytics legend Avinash Kaushik).

Out of all these options, I would always recommend starting your analytics journey with web traffic (or clickstream) analytics tool such as Google Analytics. This is because 1) they are usually free or very cheap, and 2) it can give you a general idea of how other services fit into the big picture for your analytics (and what services you should use next).

Google Analytics is our go-to clickstream analytics tool not only because it is one of the most popular free tools out there with robust functionality, but also because it integrates very well with common analytics and advertising platforms such as Google Optimize and Google Adwords.

We have written a whole article about how to set up Google Analytics, so I won’t go in-depth here, but it is a very easy and painless experience that can be done in as little as 10 minutes.

How to Setup Google Analytics Correctly

Just by setting up Google Analytics, you will already have access to a lot of information about your website including:

1. Who your users are, and how many there are

2. What sources they are coming from

3. How they are interacting with your website

4. Which pages are performing best, and more

For a more detailed overview of all business questions that can be answered by Google Analytics please reference our 4 Business Questions framework below.

4 Business Questions Google Analytics Can Answer About Your Website Visitors

However, while all of this information is already very helpful to measure the functional success of your website, we can go a step further. The next step is to understand whether your website is meeting the specific business objectives you chose in Step 1.

Step 3 — Configure Conversion Goals To Measure The Effectiveness Of Your Website

No matter how well-designed your website is, no matter how much traffic you get, if no one “converts” (i.e. completes the business objectives of your website), your website is not useful for your business.

Therefore, if you were only to measure one metric about your website, you should measure “conversions.” Conversions define how well your website meets your business objectives defined in Step 1.

Luckily, Google Analytics offers a very easy way to track conversions on your website through its “Goals” feature, and you only need to go through two simple actions to set it up.

Firstly, you need to “operationalize” your business objective by defining a concrete user action that signifies the completion of that objective.

For example, for the business objective of “completing e-commerce purchase”, a very common way to track this objective is tracking how many users visit the thank you page after checkout since it is only accessible after a successful checkout by a user.

Therefore, if you were only to measure one metric about your website, you should measure “conversions.”

After you have identified that specific action, all you need to do is set up a Google Analytics Goal to track that specific action as a “goal completion.”

You can find a tutorial on how to accomplish that in Google Analytics below. In short, you need to go to the “Goals” section of your Google Analytics Admin and simply create a goal that corresponds to that user action you chose.

How to Setup Google Analytics Correctly

With that, you are ready to track your business objectives!

Final Thoughts

With all the action steps explained in this article, you should have a simple but robust analytics system configured on your website to track how effective it is in adding value to your business.

In fact, in each of these three steps, you may have already found actions you can take to further improve the experiences of your website users. Now it is just a matter of implementing these action steps with a systematic plan.

As you are taking these actions, it is essential to keep track of relevant metrics on a weekly basis to make sure your actions are actually creating meaningful improvements for your website.

With these incremental improvements, you will eventually create a website that is an engine of growth for your business.

At Humanlytics, we create tools that automate the processes explained in this article to make actionable analytics accessible in only a couple of clicks.

We are driven by this vision of a future where data benefits everyone, if interested in learning more about how you can use data to consistently grow your business.

Questions? Have any aspects that I missed? Need to brainstorm a topic you’d like to write about? Share below in the comments — I’d love to help and hear them!