A friend of mine recently overhauled their company website. The result has been a massive improvement with a simple navigation and tidy redesign. What they hadn’t considered, however, was how each part of their site would be measured. To me, that’s critical.

The website uses Google Analytics – which is a big tick – but their gap was using modal pop-up boxes for their key conversion goals. This approach meant tracking conversion goals would not work by matching the URLs. Instead, each action in the journey to goal conversion had to be tagged as ‘onClick events’.

In the past this would have meant the conversion metrics would not be deemed a ‘goal’ – thankfully, version 5 of Google Analytics has finally allowed this function. However, what my friend can’t do with the new site is create goal funnels using the events. I see this a real gap in analysis.

Being able to quickly create the goal conversion funnels and present them to clients and site managers is terrific. You can all see where people are coming from and where they’re dropping out. That knowledge is particularly valuable as it serves as the centre-point of the ‘tweak, measure, tweak, measure’ approach that makes online promotion so simple.

Good site design is important. But if you don’t have a clear, simple metric reporting platform underneath, you’re limiting your website’s potential.