You always hear good web analysts stressing that you can’t stop your journey of finding insights for business improvement at the “what.” For example, a “what” would be “conversion rate fell by 20% last quarter compared to last year.” If you stop there and bask in the doom and gloom…you’re doomed (and maybe gloomed, but I don’t know what that means). That fall might actually be a good thing. What?!? That’s right. The answer to the question “why” will tell you if that’s true or not. Without that, you’re taking stabs in the dark.
Finding out why can be easier…
Recently, I talked about many of the available options you can use to listen to your site’s customers and help identify the “why’s.” But, there’s one very simple yet under-utilized action you can take that helps tremendously in your search for answers from your data. It’s a little feature in your analytics tool called “annotations.” What are they? They’re basically notes of your business and site activity on your timeline of data. Here’s where they are in Google Analytics…
You see that red arrow? That’s showing you the drop down box under the timeline that contains all the annotations entered for your chosen time period.
You won’t remember everything…
Why are they so important? Because six months from now, you’re likely not going to remember that your developers made some changes to your site or even what changes they were. Or how about when you’re making year-over-year comparisons and you want to know why sales were down by 10% this year. It will be mighty hard to pinpoint exactly what happened last year, won’t it? What dates exactly were you were out of stock on your products? When did you increase your PPC budget to draw more visitors? When did we hire that “discount” pay-for-performance SEO company that took us for a wild ride? When did our developer made those site changes that screwed up the analytics tracking code, and we didn’t notice for three weeks? When did Walmart start selling our product? See what I mean?
Start with the most likely answers first…
If you see a shift in a metric’s trend this time next year (as compared to this year), having notes on your timeline of all the key changes that may have contributed to the shift just may save you a bunch of time, money and energy trying to figure it out. Why? When you investigate a problem, you always start with the most likely answers first, right? Chances are, the problem lies with what is most likely to have caused the problem. Yes, I just said that. And it’s because everyone has had these “duh” moments when, for example, they’re checking on why their toaster isn’t working only to find out an hour later that it’s unplugged.
Wouldn’t it be nice to know you changed the written content and images for a product page on specific dates and have that directly aligned with your data for that page? Now, in 12 months, if your page metrics change for the worse, you might be able to trace it back to the source. Heck, let’s reverse it. Or, if you made changes to the page and the metrics didn’t change, that’s an issue, too.
Overall, this is a seemingly small and insignificant activity that you don’t hear much about. But, the next time you want the answer to a why question, you might wish that you had kept specific records of your activities. This one activity of recording your actions in your data timeline will likely save you much more time and energy than it takes to record them.