Hello, and welcome to the very first episode of Growth Detectives. I'm your host, Chris Planeta and in this very first episode, we'll talk about something very basic. When will web analytics be actually useful to you? This episode is mostly for people who are just starting out because they may make many assumptions, incorrect assumptions.

And this episode and the information here is just to straighten things out, make them more clear. 

Okay. So, when will web analytics be useful for you? When you're just starting out the amount of data about your traffic will be minimal. You won't see patterns.

You won't be able to correctly say which traffic source is better than the other. Because statistically the results you will be getting will be insignificant. Yes. You will simply have too little data to say that, okay, I'm 90 percent sure or 95 percent sure that this is correct, that this information is correct.

So of course with time it will improve, the amount of data you will be getting will improve. However, until you actually start seeing patterns then data will be mostly useful for you in terms of like psychological support.

Because seeing the numbers go up just has this psychological effect. It motivates you to go on, to keep pushing, to improve this and that in your business to invest more in marketing, to go talk to people about your products learn how they feel about it. However, I would refrain from making any changes on your website or in your business solely based on the data. Because the data will not be correct until you start seeing patterns.

And what do I mean by patterns? Okay, so this is like my rule of thumb here. Pattern is when the amount of data makes you see waves in your graph charts. So, for example, when you have like monthly traffic, right, and you see that every weekend the amount of traffic goes down or increases, it depends on your website, yes.

So you start seeing the waves, then the amount of data is just fine to make some evaluations to start making some decisions based on it. 

Next, when you when your business starts maturing, growing when your website starts getting more traffic, you will be, of course seeing more and more patterns. You will see that, okay, so I'm a mostly visited from these and these sources, people from this ad campaign, they bring more food to the table.

Then you will be able to start making some decisions and these decisions, of course, first should be tasted. Yes. How to test them using A/B testing tools. This is the best method. What are A/B testing tools? If you don't know, these are just tools that let you test a few versions of the same element of your website or content, button, whatever to see which one performs better.

And of course, there is some learning curve when it comes to A/B testing. You'd need to know how to make these correctly. I definitely do not recommend going ad hoc or going commando at A/B testing. You actually really need to learn. However, when you do that it should go pretty smoothly.

And then you will able to, well, test versions to see which one performs better, which one improves the funnel or your bottom line. And at this stage, your progress there will be, or making progress will be the easiest because you will be picking the low hanging fruit. You will be correcting the most visible errors in your website, in your web in your ad campaigns, things like that. 

And, and what, what next. When your business matures even more than the low hanging fruit will be no more. So you will be doing A/B tests for smaller and smaller elements of your website.

And so the impact will be smaller as well. 

So you need to adjust to that and expect that to happen at some point. And then you will have actually two options. First, continue with these small changes and the small improvements or, option B, make a big change, big improvement - introduce a new product line, things like that - to skip this stage of like, of doing small things and actually try to run in front of the competition and not being like a step in front of them.

And yeah, and that's basically it. These are the three most important stages of how you can use web analytics tools in the three stages of your business from the start to maturity. And I hope you will find it useful. So thank you very much. And the next episode will be published tomorrow or in two days.