6 steps to creating a customer-centric web analytics strategy

Analyzing website performance data can feel like you’re floating aimlessly in a sea of numbers, graphs, and percentages, without being able to anchor them to real-life scenarios. For example, you can track the abandonment rate of a particular page, but that data alone doesn’t explain why customers are exiting in the first place. 

Web analytics data gives you the information you need to analyze what’s happening on your site—but understanding and using those insights is another thing entirely. And without a web analytics strategy, you’ll end up doing a lot of guesswork.

A well-crafted analytics strategy ensures you make website optimizations based on objective data that reflects your customers’ needs and provides the best user experience (UX) possible—all while keeping your business goals and priorities on track. 

This step-by-step guide helps you get down to the basics of creating an impactful, customer-centric web analytics strategy guided by data-driven decisions.

What is a web analytics strategy?

A web analytics strategy is the collecting, reporting, and analysis of website data. It’s essential for gaining insights into what drives your business forward and developing an understanding of the user experience—plus how you can improve it.

In short, a web analytics strategy is a playbook for achieving your goals and meeting your business objectives.

Why do you need a web analytics strategy?

It’s simple: if you have a website for your business, you need a web analytics strategy. 

Having a web analytics strategy in place before you dive into your data and customer insights ensures you make data-driven business decisions that keep your customer at the forefront of everything you do. It will

• Increase your empathy for customers: understanding the frustrations or challenges your customers experience—and the wins and successes of what you’ve gotten right—helps you tailor your site to best serve the very people your business is for.

• Allow for strategic assessment of performance: a strong analytics strategy includes consistent and frequent data reviews so you can track performance and pivot as needed, meaning your customers won’t have to wait around for things to be fixed. 

• Enable informed decision-making: there’s no room for biases or assumptions here. A defined strategy acts as a reliable roadmap and clarifies what’s working, what’s not, and the why behind it. With this strategy, you can build your business and plan for the long term—all while getting buy-in from your team and minimizing the risk of subjective interpretation.

How to create an impactful web analytics strategy in 6 steps

We’ve brought it back to basics and created this 6-step guide to help you develop a strategy that puts your customer at the forefront, so you can keep making the right decisions for the right reasons. 

Let’s dive in!

1. Collect website data and customer insights

Web analytics tools give you insights into your website and customer behavior so you can assess metrics like traffic, user interaction with your site, and visitor acquisition. 

We’re spoiled for choice when it comes to web analytics tools: there are plenty of options with varying costs, collaborative capabilities, and user interfaces. Select tools that collect information in the way you find most helpful. But for the best results, you need both quantitative and qualitative data.

For example, using an all-in-one experience intelligence platform like Contentsquare, which combines web analytics with qualitative behavior analytics, provides the best of both worlds, giving you in-depth insights and helping you answer the whys behind the whats of web analysis.

When you combine Contentsquare capabilities like Heatmaps, Session Replay, and Surveys with your web analytics dashboard, you add visual representation to your data. This gives your customers a voice, letting you see (from your customers’ perspectives) exactly where you’re going right or wrong.

Monitor key metrics in Contentsquare with customizable dashboards, then jump straight to relevant session replays to see the user behavior behind the numbers

💡 Pro tip: by analyzing both quantitative and qualitative data, you’ll see the hard facts (the numbers, graphs, and percentages we mentioned earlier) and the behavioral context behind them. 

Typically, you’ll want to analyze at least the following metrics to get a clear sense of your user behavior:

• Traffic to your site

• Acquisition of your website visitors

• Bounce rates and abandonment rates

• Time spent on-site

• Conversions

Keep reading to learn which key performance indicators (KPIs) we recommend for a customer-centric web analytics strategy. 

The opportunity for inspiration is endless, so we’d caution against only looking at so-called ‘vanity metrics’ and remember your reason for implementing your web analytics strategy in the first place. 

Celebrating the wins is important, but the point of analyzing data is not just to pat yourself on the back about the sales you’re making and ignore the rest. Look for opportunities and be motivated by the potential of your site to offer an amazing user experience.  

Once you’re set up with an analytics platform that works for you, you’re ready to collect insights into your customers’ experience and use them to inform the next steps of your strategy.

2. Define your goals and objectives

Your goals and objectives set the tone for your web analytics strategy. 

Think critically about what you want to get out of your website, and your business as a whole—in the short-term, long-term, and everything in-between—and create actionable, understandable steps for everyone involved. 

Objectives can be thought of as your reason for being: why your site exists, what makes your company unique, and what product or service you’re offering your customer. 

Goals are more specific, and it’s here that you need to ask yourself what you’re trying to accomplish on your website. Are you looking to increase sales? Reach a growing audience of happy and loyal customers? Spread the word about your newsletter? All of the above? 

The clearer you are at the start, the easier it is to assess your progress later on. Don’t overcomplicate things—it can be as simple and actionable as this: 

"Our objective is to build awareness of our brand, and our goal is to increase the number of signups to our weekly newsletter by 50% by the end of the next quarter."

And with that, you have a great foundation on which to base the rest of your strategy.

💡 Pro tip: developing a web analytics strategy isn't just a box-ticking exercise. 

Come up with new ways to continually build deeper connections with your customers and understand what drives them—or what turns them away. 

Think of your customer as the lighthouse that guides you, and critically assess whether everything you’re doing is being done for the right reasons. For example, your business priority may be to increase sales, but rather than simply optimizing the last step in the checkout process, look to create a more seamless journey and better user experience to get prospects to checkout.

As your goals get more specific, it's important to understand where your strategy fits within the marketing funnel and how different your approach to each stage may need to be.  

3. Understand how to target each stage of the marketing funnel

Your website goals will differ depending on which stage of the funnel your target customers are in, and your customers will be looking for different things depending on where they are in their journey. 

For example, someone at the top of the funnel may not even know what they need yet—they’ve just learned about your business and are now trying to gauge who you are and what you do. This is the time to convey your branding and personality while laying the groundwork for trust. 

At the bottom of the funnel, your customer is actively in the market and prepared to purchase; they just need a reason to choose you over a competitor.

Let’s look at how the marketing funnel is defined in simple terms.

• Top of the funnel (TOFU), or awareness: your customers’ first interactions with you. Show them who you are and what you do with attractive product landing pages and easy-to-find information about your business.

• Middle of the funnel (MOFU), or consideration: your customer is familiar with you. Offer educational content and more niche landing pages to address their specific concerns and prove your expertise.

• Bottom of the funnel (BOFU), or conversion: your customer wants to make a purchase and needs to be nudged over the finish line. Take away any hesitation with free trials, dedicated customer service, and reliable payment options.

Analyzing customers at each level of the funnel helps you apply your web analytics strategy to every stage of their journey. You’ll be able to respond to their specific needs instead of relying on a one-size-fits-all approach. 

We recommend continually assessing your customers within the funnel so you can monitor whether you’re offering the best experience possible.

💡 Pro tip: visualize how customers move through your funnel with Contentsquare. Use Funnels to quickly identify drop-offs or conversion blockers, then watch related session replays from each stage to understand the issue and boost conversions.

Use Funnels in Contentsquare to understand—and optimize—your marketing funnel

4. Determine your KPIs

Key performance indicators (KPIs) will guide your web analytics strategy and provide inspiration on how to take action in specific areas. 

KPIs like conversions, page views, acquisitions, and bounce rates reveal a lot about the health of your site and business. They give you visibility into where your customers are coming from and their behavior and experience on your website.

By mapping your KPIs back to your goals and objectives, you can track your results and measure your progress in a way that makes sense. For example, if one of your goals is to increase the number of customers in Germany, measuring KPIs such as acquisition, conversion rates, and the number of visitors in Germany would be one way to see whether you’re on track to hitting your target.

How to pick KPIs for different stages of the marketing funnel

We’ve already talked a little about the value of funnel analysis to better understand your customers’ motivations.

The same applies to your KPIs: setting KPIs within the context of the funnel will guarantee you’re looking at the right metrics for the right reasons. By defining KPIs representing customers at each stage of their journey, you can hone in on essential insights into their on-site behavior. 

Let’s look at how your KPIs might differ through the funnel:

• A top-of-the-funnel KPI could be the number of new visitors to your site, showing a growing awareness of your business

• A middle-of-the-funnel KPI could be the percentage of newsletter subscribers, revealing that people are intrigued by your business and are potentially interested in converting

• A bottom-of-the-funnel KPI could be the number of customers signing up for a free trial or discount, showing they’re ready to convert and need some final proof (or incentive)

By understanding the difference in KPIs—and the people they represent—at each level of the funnel, you’ll stay attuned to customer behavior and be better equipped to anticipate optimization opportunities that address exactly what they need.

A note on conversions

We’ve mentioned conversions a few times now—they’re often hailed as one of the most important measures of success for a business. A conversion happens when a website user takes any desired action—like landing on a specific page, clicking a certain link, or making a purchase. Conversions will look different depending on your business and target audience.

Conversion rate optimization, or CRO, is optimizing, experimenting, or making changes to your site to increase conversions.

And while conversions are important, a lot of work needs to come before this stage. It can be easy to get caught up in the numbers and ROI, but to reach the people you’re targeting, it’s essential to keep the user experience at the heart of your optimizations and use this as the driving force behind your strategy.

Choosing a platform that combines traditional web analytics with behavior analytics and experience insights gives you a deeper understanding of the user experience, so you can stay connected to your customers' needs while working towards your CRO.

5. Segment your data for reporting

Segmenting the data you’ve gathered from your analytics tool(s) lets you isolate the specific information and metrics you’re most interested in, piece together the puzzle, zoom out, and build a cohesive picture of your customer's journey. 

Your user segmentation subsets can be as specific as you need them to be and should support the goals and KPIs you’ve already set in place. 

For example, if your goal is to increase purchases made by customers in a specific location, reviewing all customer data from every country isn’t going to give you the insights you need. Instead, segment your data by the specific location you’re targeting. Setting strict parameters for analyzing your data from the start saves you a lot of headaches later on.

You can segment your data into subsets as specific as

• Customers who purchased only a specific product

• The number of page views of a certain page

• Customers in a certain location

• All website traffic that occurred within a particular time frame 

• Mobile vs. desktop users

• Purchases made exceeding a certain value 

• Customers who added something to their cart but didn’t check out 

Then, supplement your findings with heatmaps, session replays, and user feedback to get a closer look at specific behavior patterns and site performance within your chosen subsets.

6. Analyze the results

It’s time to analyze the data you’ve collected! 

The point of putting together a web analytics strategy isn’t just to set it out to sail and hope for the best. It’s what you do with the results that really matters. 

Remember the lighthouse we mentioned? With your customer as your focal point, setting frequent check-ins, clear targets, and committed deadlines to assess your website performance prevents you from wasting time. Actively engaging with your data also ensures your goals stay manageable and actionable. 

Let’s go back to an example we mentioned earlier: imagine your goal for Q1 is to increase newsletter sign-ups by +50%. Scheduling regular check-ins throughout the quarter lets you assess performance and ensure you’re on track to achieving your goal. If your progress toward your target is slower than expected, you can look at new optimization opportunities without waiting to see how they play out. 

That’s not to say you need to conduct an extensive analysis of your data whenever you want to find out how your website is performing. We’d suggest saving the deep dives for data collected over longer periods—such as monthly or quarterly—to get the most valuable insights. For more frequent (daily or weekly) performance check-ins, keep your analysis brief and high-level; it’ll be enough to stay on top of your website performance without getting bogged down by micro-details.

💡 Pro tip: Heatmaps, Surveys, and Session Replay are helpful tools for visualizing your data, making it easier to share the performance results of your site.

• Heatmaps show which parts of a web page capture visitors’ attention (or get ignored), giving you an at-a-glance impression of which parts of your site are being overlooked

• Session Replays collect every customer’s session on your website, so you can see firsthand how they experience and interact with each page

• Voice of customer tools like surveys, user tests, and user interviews let your visitors communicate what they think and feel about every element of your website in their own words

Incorporating these user-centric insights into your analysis helps you to create engaging, visual, and empathy-driven performance reports.

Ultimately, you want your data to be understandable and actionable. Prioritize helping your audience make sense of the data and connect with the individuals behind the numbers.

Where to take your web analytics strategy from here

The next step? It’s simple: keep going!

A customer-centric web analytics strategy is the key to deeper insights—not just into your customers, but also into your business. Keep reviewing your results, assessing the impact of your web analytics strategy, and above all, putting your customer at the front and center of your website optimizations.

By staying objective with the data and continually looking for opportunities to improve your user experience, you’ll be equipped to take your goals and objectives through to long-term success.

FAQs about web analytics strategy