There is so much power in your business’s data—the answers to questions you didn’t even know to ask and solutions to help make your business more profitable. All this and so much more hides within your business’s data.

But if you aren’t collecting data, you cannot measure your business. With these nine steps, you can build a measurable business to analyze and improve yearly. And I’ve even thrown in a bonus step to help you manage all that data you’ll collect!

1. Connect your website to Google Analytics

Connecting your website to Google Analytics 4 is the first step in making your business more measurable. Without GA4, you aren’t collecting the data you need to analyze and measure your business. 

Take the time to set up your GA4 account to work for you. Again at a minimum, follow these five steps to optimize your GA4 account. 

2. Set up a Big Query account

As we move forward, you will have less access to historical data in Google Analytics 4. When you create a Big Query account, you can pay a fee to access the necessary historical data.

There is no cost to set it up—consider it a safeguard that may be extremely useful in the future.

3. Create a strategy to track your links

You should be tracking the links that you are sharing across the web. Whether it is a link in an email newsletter, social post, downloadable lead magnet, PR initiatives, or even your email signature—you should have a strategy to identify how someone is coming to your website. 

Why would you do this? To understand where your traffic is coming from. How do you do this? With Urchin Tracking Modules, more commonly referred to as UMTs. These simple codes can be attached to any URL and allow you to track your marketing efforts. 

A UTM can be anything you attach to a URL after a question mark. But creating a consistent naming convention is essential as this will make tracking easy for you and allow you to compare data across campaigns and launches. 

https://www.yourwebsite.com/landing-page?utm-source=google&utm-medium=email&utm-campaign=spring2023-ads

In the above example, we’ve used UTM source (which source drove the traffic to your site), UTM medium (which channel type drove traffic to your site), and UTM campaign (the unique name you give to each campaign). You can use more or less, but this is a great place to start.

It is also crucial to create a master document to track your UTMs and update it as you add new UTMs. Over the years, you will create a lot of UTMs, and it is best to keep all your tracking information in one place so you can easily refer back to it. 

4. Create a URL directory

You should create a URL directory for every section on your website. 

A great example of this happens with a blog. You should always include /blog in your blog URLS:

www.yourwebsite.com/blog/blog_title

These folders will help you group content pages to help you identify content, and it is also a best practice for SEO and your User Experience. You should have a “folder” in your directory for each main category to help you easily track and analyze your data.

5. Create unique thank you pages that live on your domain

Anywhere on your website asking visitors to complete an action should have its unique thank you page. It should have a unique URL that lets you know which action a visitor took on your website.

If you have a newsletter sign-up, quiz, form, and download, each should have a separate thank page. If you are an ecommerce business, you can also have unique purchase pages. You don’t want to send visitors to the same www.yoursite.com/thank-you as you won’t be able to track how many people took which actions. 

In your URL directory, you should have a thank you “folder.” Depending on your business and website, you could have more than one folder containing your thank you pages. Some great examples include the following:

• mydomain.com/thank-you/optin-name

• mydomain.com/complete/optin-name

• mydomain.com/order-complete/product-name

6. Ensure 3rd party tools allow you to inject HTML code  

If you are using a third party tool that is external to your domain (MailChimp, Typeform, ConstantContact, etc.) it is essential to ensure you can inject HTML code into it or put your Google Analytics information into it. 

You’ll also need to ensure you can redirect to a thank you page if there is a completion. Both ensure you can track your data effectively and measure your business.

7. Ensure you can export CSV data from your CRM or sales tool

Before you sign up for a CRM, ecommerce platform, or other sales/marketing tool, you want to ensure you can export CSV data from said platform. 

This will allow you to export the data quickly, allowing you to analyze and compare the data in Excel easily. Without this, you’ll be spending hours and hours copying and pasting data into spreadsheets instead of working on the things that matter most to your business.

8. Understand how much visibility you have at every step of the buyer journey

For ecommerce stores and anyone that sells a product, you need to know when each step of your buster journey is happening. Spend time identifying each step and finding the data that gives you that information. 

If you don’t have this data, you must find a way to track it. Because you need to see all this information within GA4, you can combine it with the traffic source. This lets you understand where people are coming from and which traffic sources result in the highest-value transactions.

And as we mentioned in #5, when choosing your ecommerce platform, you need one that will allow you to inject HTML and Javascript code into all pages. If you use a platform that doesn’t allow you to do this, you will face limitations in what you can track and analyze.

9. It’s best to house your sales pages in your own domain

Often, people turn to platforms like Leadpages and Kajabi to quickly and easily make sales pages. While this may seem like an efficient way to create sales pages, you won’t be able to track those pages without a unique code added to your Google account.

Because of this, you won’t have a clear picture of how people are moving through your website. 

While it may take more upfront work to create your sales pages on your website, it will be worth that effort in the long run. When you have www.yourwebsite.com/sales-page versus www.thirdparty.yourwebsite.com/sales-page you can track who is coming, where they come from, and any important actions taken while they are on your website.

10. BONUS: Make your measurable business more manageable

If you want to go a step further and make your now measurable business more manageable, create a data hub for your business.

You can do this in excel, a Word Doc, or a third-party platform like Notion or Asana—whatever works best for you. It would be a place to store everything from your URLs and UTMs to your emails and creative. A data hub can help you keep track of what you have been doing for your business and help you analyze it in the future.

Why would this help make your business more measurable? Let’s say you change your homepage, and suddenly your traffic drops. Wouldn’t it be nice to know what you changed to help you analyze why this drop may have happened?

With a central data hub, you can track everything and better understand what is happening within your business. And when you hire someone, you have a whole host of data to share with them in one easy-to-access place!

While these nine steps might seem like a lot to do, they’re a starting point for your business. And when you start doing them consistently, it will become second nature. Plus, with your data hub, organizing and maintaining your data systems will be a breeze!

If you want to make your business more measurable and manageable, I can help! Book your free discovery call, and let’s unpack how we can optimize your business by making it measurable and manageable.