Cut through the fog: How to act on website data

Abstract

A common chorus from internet professionals is how challenging it is to make data-driven decisions with which to improve their programmes. Popular tools such as Google Analytics are intuitive and seemingly easy to use, yet when the time comes to use data to measure a programme’s stated goals, too often the main question surrounding the data is ‘So what?’ This paper focuses on bringing clarity to this challenge through a specific stepped web analytics process, and discusses the use of an automated Google Analytics API tool and associated custom dashboard to measure a website’s performance more meaningfully.