Analytics audits are usually customer focused, so don't get too upset if the below process is missing some steps that you think your audit should include. My intention for posting was to give a little insight into what an Analytics Audit can look like.
Ensure your site is reporting accurately. Can you be confident in the action it suggests you should take?
- Analyze URLs
- find the identity of referring websites
- analyze URL structure to ensure organized analytics data;
- Analyze URL parameters
- document URL parameters and identify their adverse affects
- distinguish between parameters that make pages unique and those that are simply for tracking purposes
- ensure your web analytics platform is configured correctly for the parameters
- provide your development team with parameters "best practices" for your specific requirements
- perform monthly parameter audits
- Analyze cookies
- review and document reliability and P3P privacy sensitivity of the cookies you analytics depend upon
- review and recommend vital first-party cookies best practices
- measure your cookie rejection and deletion rates
- Visits, Visitors and Unique Visitors
- explain precisely how these two critical metrics are being computed
- interpret these metrics in terms of your web analytics tool
- examine the impact of how your site is dealing with sessionization
- check the impact of your cookie handling on these vital KPI's
- Time on Pages/Site
- Examine how this metric is measured on your site
- Page Views
- a page naming strategy is fundamental to meaningful, actionable analytics. We begin with your site's strategy and the analytic's implementation of that strategy.
- most rich media or AJAX websites incorrectly implement analytics. We examine its implementation and make specific, actionable recommendations to correct the implementation.
- Filtering Analytics data
- explain the impact of the rules, repercussions and exclusion on your data collection and reporting
- Conversion funnel accuracy and verification
- identify your site's fundamental eCommerce and other success events (sales, downloads, leads etc).
- examine their tracking and display to ensure they point to weak points in the conversion process
- Campaigns
- review for proper tagging and accurate identification of your traffic sources
- Correlate this audit with an audit of your Ad Word ROI for more actionable management of your monthly spend.
- Search Engine Traffic
- examine the accurate identification of your site's Organic Search success and extract recommendations for improvement
- correlate with an SEO audit to deliver a comprehensive action plan to explain visitor paths to your site and increase rankings and referrals
- Optimization
- identify weak areas degrading your site's conversion rates
- propose A/B testing techniques to have your visitors point you to more compelling methods to achieve conversion success
Deliverable – an actionable summary of findings and recommendations, prioritized by potential impact and supported by detailed findings
