Analytics You Rebuilt in July

A rushed migration leaves gaps

The cutover had a date, so most businesses did the minimum required to keep collecting and moved on.

That was the correct decision in June, and it leaves a set of things half-configured that nobody has looked at since.

Five months of data has now accumulated in whatever state the July setup produced.

So December is the right moment to check it, before another full year of figures builds on the same foundation.

The check itself takes about half an hour.

The three checks that matter

• Are conversions being recorded.
• Do the numbers match something countable.
• Can somebody else get in.

The first is where most rushed migrations failed. Traffic collection works by default and conversion tracking has to be configured deliberately, so a site that appears to be working frequently records visitors and nothing else.

Check conversions first

Which is the thing you actually need the analytics for.

Submit your own enquiry form, place a small test order, or make whatever the site's main action is.

Then look for it, by name, in the reports the following day.

If it does not appear, the analytics is counting visitors and telling you nothing about whether the site works.

Five months of traffic figures with no conversions is a record of activity rather than of results.

That is the one check to do this week rather than leaving until January.

Compare against something you can count

Which is the sanity test.

Take a month, count the enquiries that actually reached your inbox, and compare that to what the analytics reports.

They will not match exactly and they should be in the same neighbourhood.

A reported figure that is double the real one usually means something is being counted twice, frequently because two tracking codes are installed.

A figure well below the real one means submissions are not all being captured.

Either way, a number you cannot reconcile against something countable is a number you should not use for decisions.

A worked example

A business migrated in June and checked nothing afterwards.

In December they counted eleven enquiries in November from their own inbox, against three in the analytics.

The form on one of their three service pages had never been configured to report, and that page was their busiest.

Five months of decisions had been made on a figure that captured about a quarter of the reality.

The fix took twenty minutes.

The five months of understated data could not be recovered afterwards.

Check the historical data question

Which is the one with a deadline of its own.

The old system's data does not transfer, and access to it does not last indefinitely.

If you have not exported the years of history you care about, that is a job with a closing window rather than an open one.

Export the summary tables you would actually reference: monthly visitors, monthly conversions, and top pages by year.

A spreadsheet with three tabs is more useful in practice than a full data export nobody will ever open.

Do that before it becomes impossible rather than discovering afterwards that it already has.

An hour now protects several years of history.

Check who has access

Which is the question that outlives all of this.

A migration done in a hurry frequently created the new property under one person's account, occasionally a supplier's.

Confirm that the business owns it, that more than one person can reach it, and that a supplier's access can be removed without losing the account.

That is the same question as the domain, the hosting, and the listing, and it fails in the same way.

Fixing it takes minutes now and is genuinely difficult once the person who set it up is unreachable.

Set the one number you will watch

Which is what makes the rest worth having.

Pick a single figure, most usefully monthly enquiries or orders, and put it somewhere you see it monthly.

Everything else in the reports is available when you have a question and does not need watching.

A business that checks one number monthly notices a problem in weeks, and one that checks everything quarterly notices nothing at all.

That habit is worth more than every configuration detail on this list put together.

Analytics nobody looks at is a cost with no return, however correctly it is set up.

Check the reports are comparing the right thing

Which becomes an issue precisely now, at the year boundary.

Any comparison against last year currently spans two different systems measuring in different ways, so the year-on-year figure your reports show is not a like-for-like comparison.

Know that before quoting a percentage to anybody, since the difference between the two systems is large enough to invent a trend that does not exist.

The honest approach for this one year is to compare the second half against the second half, both measured the same way, and note the limitation.

From next December onwards the comparison becomes clean again, which is worth writing down now so nobody puzzles over it in twelve months.

The counter-case

Some sites need very little of this.

A business whose enquiries all arrive by telephone can count them without any analytics, and a perfect configuration would tell it nothing new.

Chasing exact accuracy is also a poor use of time, since these figures are approximate by nature and always have been.

And a business that made no decisions from its analytics this year would not have noticed if the whole thing had stopped working in August.

That is worth admitting, since it changes how much of this is worth doing.

Submit a test enquiry and look for it, reconcile a month against your inbox, export the old history, and check who has access.

What to do

1. Submit a test enquiry.
2. Look for it by name tomorrow.
3. Count a month from your inbox.
4. Compare the two.
5. Export the old history.
6. Check who has access.
7. Pick one number to watch.

Step one is the check with the largest consequence, since traffic collection works by default and conversion tracking does not, so a site that appears to be working may be recording visitors and nothing else.

The warning about this is at the deadline coming in July.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.