Analytics supplies you with a vast amount of data, but it can be difficult to know what to with all of that information. Google Analytics provides some basic reports and general insights, but they’re too broad and unfocused to provide you the potential deeper insights. Rather than reporting on general user numbers and high-level findings, implement a plan that is customized to your business and starts to uncover what’s most important to your users.

Form a Plan

Before you engage more deeply with analytics, it is best to formulate a plan that will lead to action. Define your goals so you know what analytics to track to determine if you’re being successful. From there, you can determine how to proceed. Goals should be precise and time-bound. Determine what you are going to measure, for how long, and try to pick something that you can achieve. Base them on your business so that they’re relevant and can help you from chasing numbers for the sake of seeing numbers go up. If higher numbers doesn’t result in more or better business for you, you may need to adjust what your goals are. For more on goal writing, you can reference Atlassian’s guide to writing SMART goals.

Here’s an example scenario.

Scenario: User testing shows that people react well to your landing pages and they often want to learn more about your business. You put some focus on your landing pages and want to see if it motivates your users to sign up more than before.

Goal: You decide to track 5 key landing pages and want to see a 5% increase in sign ups over the next 3 months versus the past 3 months.

The Plan: Take a benchmark measurement of how many signups you had from those same landing pages in the past 3 months. Then make any changes to the landing pages and wait. Take another measurement after 3 months and compare. Did you reach your goal? If so, build off of your success and define a new goal. If you don’t reach your goal, it’s time to take a step back and assess.

Assess Your Progress

Time to dig in and develop some theories about what might have happened. In the case where you don’t reach your goal, take a look at the data and scenario to see if you can change your plan to reach your goal.

Consider the Context

You are comparing the first quarter of the year to the second. Maybe the type of information users need that time of year is different, since the second quarter is past the main enrollment window. Maybe you need to change the timing of your goal to get a more accurate answer.

Modify the Navigation

Maybe the pages are just hard to find? They are multiple layers deep in your navigation. Or maybe the labels in the navigation are unclear? You could try changing the wording or the structure to something else and reevaluate if users have more success finding the page.

You could also try something as straightforward as adding a feature to your home page to draw attention to the section. There are a number of ways you could approach reaching your goal, and one way isn’t going to work in all situations.

Conduct More Research

Maybe you need to conduct more research with your users to identify what they are really reacting to. You created this goal based on observations from research, but maybe your questions weren’t specific enough or there’s more to uncover here? If you have the time and budget, you can run a new test with the information you gathered from analyzing the analytics.

Modify Your Goal

Reassess your goal and determine a path forward. Set a time frame. Don’t be disheartened if you don’t reach your goal on the first try. There isn’t a correct answer to reach your goal, and it might take some experimentation to get there.

Take the First Step

Start with your top 10 goals. As you get comfortable analyzing the data and get better at predicting your user behavior, then you can expand. Maybe some of your goals have uncovered new areas for you to focus on. Perhaps mobile and desktop users behave significantly differently and you want to get better results from one. See if there’s data you want to collect for one of your goals that isn’t gathered by a default Google Analytics setup. Analytics isn’t going to solve all of your problems, but it provides you quantitative insight into user behavior that is unmatched by one-off user tests.