meaningful numbers

The Meaningful Numbers Blog

Why Use Google Tag Manager?

Beginners guide to campaign tagging

What is Web Analytics?

In a nutshell, web analytics is capturing data about your website’s visitors and using this information to improve your website and online activities in order to generate more business. For example, knowing how people find your website, which of the website pages turn up most often in search engine results or which pages convert most […]

Improving the measurement of visitor engagement on your website

Audience engagement is a fundamental micro-conversion for any content marketing campaign: it indicates that people are visiting your website for a reason and not just because they have stumbled across it. With social media how you measure engagement is set by each social medium, such as followers on twitter, likes on Facebook etc. These measures […]

Measuring the success of content marketing

Content Marketing is hard work. Coming up with ideas, turning them into content and publishing it takes a lot of time and effort, it is a big commitment. So you will want to know if it is working and to gain insight into how to improve its performance, and that requires measurement. Without assessing the […]

Campaign Tagging – An overview

Campaign tagging, also called link tagging and sometimes UTM tagging, is at the heart of Google Analytics’ tracking and reporting of how visitors reach your website. Google Analytics provides a set of 5 dimensions – think of them as values – that can be updated to record details about the link a visitor clicks to […]

Tips for using Google Analytics to track your off-line marketing

If you advertise in print, on radio or TV how do you tell which hits were generated by which advert? E-commerce retailers often include a discount code that enables them to identify which advert to attribute a sale to. However, not all sites sell direct to the public and this doesn’t identify the visitors who […]

Keeping your Google Analytics data relevant

The value of web analytics derives from understanding the behaviour of your customers and potential customers. So if your analytics system is recording visits from sources that are clearly irrelevant to your business it will be much harder to understand what is going on. Irrelevant visits generally fall into two categories: 1. Automated visits: these […]

Which 50% of your marketing spend is wasted?

It was once said that 50% of the money spent on advertising was wasted; the problem was you didn’t know which 50%. Online marketing is different. You can see where your customers come from, what they look at and what they decide to do. Whether that is making an online purchase, signing up for a […]

4 Common assumptions not to make when using Google Analytics

On the face of it, the standard reports in Google Analytics (GA) are simple and intuitive. But, as an old boss of mine was fond of saying: “To assume is to make an ass of yourself.” So, in a bid to help prevent people inadvertently making asses of themselves by misinterpreting their website data; here […]

Are you surrounded by data but starved on insights?

Unless you are measuring how well your online marketing and website content is performing you will miss out on the opportunity to learn, improve and, in the end, to increase your profit. The keyword here is opportunity Measuring your web visitors’ activity does not necessarily bring you actionable business insights. It depends on how you […]

Is your online business flying blind?

Targeting the sources that bring the best customers to your website is key to having a successful online business. But without the data to give you the confidence that you are heading in the right direction, you really are flying blind. However, finding this information is far from easy, and that is where a specialist […]

New reports in Google Analytics: Cohort Analysis Reporting and Active Users

Here is a brief overview of two new reports in Google Analytics, Cohort Analysis and Active Users, that are currently being rolled out across Google Analytics accounts. Cohort Analysis provides a way of spotting trends in the behaviour of recent new visitors over the days and weeks following their initial visit. Whilst the Active Users […]

What do websites and speed dating have in common?

Visitor meet website. Website, you now have 30 seconds in which your visitor has to decide if there is any sort of a meeting of minds; let alone the prospect of something more physical, like ordering a product, before they dismiss you and move on to the next one. Just like speed dating, when your […]

Good web analysis begins by asking great questions

What is the purpose of your website? Is it to sell goods, collect sales leads, attract people to join your organisation, attract donations? How successful is it? What goods have you sold online? How many sales leads have been generated? How many people have signed up to your email list or become members of your […]

Google Analytics and a real-life example of how one website drastically reduced its bounce rate

Web analytics takes the guesswork out of improving your website. Right? WRONG Web analytics will tell you where to target your guesses, along with your knowledge, experience, creativity and skill, and it will also tell you if they have worked. However, it cannot tell you what to do. But that does not mean it isn’t […]

How time on site is calculated and why you should beware of the bounce rate

Is your web site capturing your visitors’ attention? One of the best ways to tell is by looking at how long they spend on it and, in particular, which pages are keeping their interest the longest. If they don’t stay long, then maybe people are coming to your site by mistake or the content needs […]

Are new and returning visitor numbers accurate?

Have you ever wondered about the accuracy of the visitor statistics reported in Google Analytics? It is all to do with how Google Analytics collects the visitor data, and that relies on cookies: those snippets of data that websites like to store on people’s computers. Each time a visitor views one of your website pages, […]

Six easy ways of adding extra information into Google Analytics

As soon as Google Analytics is installed on a website, it will start to compile enormous volumes of data. How many visitors, how often they visited, how they got to your website, what they looked at, how long they spent looking, their location when they looked, their device, their browser etc. etc. But this is […]

How to give meaning to your website statistics

Have you ever dived into Google Analytics, extracted lots of interesting information about your website visitors, but ended up with no more idea about how to improve web traffic and conversions than before you started? If so, it is very likely to be because you are missing a vital ingredient. The ingredient that, when applied […]

Four steps to help you get real value out of Google Analytics

Are you new to Google Analytics? It is a mammoth system. There is a huge amount of data and it is presented in quite a complex way. You can easily to spend hours clicking round looking for information that will provide some insight into how to improve the results from your online business. But whilst […]