Overcoming overconfidence with analytics

Trusting your gut-feel is all well and good when it comes to finding a romantic partner, a hiking trail or even a cupcake – but when it comes to your business – you might want to be a little more circumspect.

Feeling cocky?

Alongside your “gut-feel” sits the well establishedoverconfidence effect; in essence it states that human beings are notoriously bad at estimating the efficacy of their own judgments; to quote:

Overconfidence has been called the most “pervasive and potentially catastrophic” of all the cognitive biases to which human beings fall victim. It has been blamed for lawsuits, strikes, wars, and stock market bubbles and crashes.

Data to the rescue

The nice thing about an online business is that you don’t need to rely on your gut feel at all. If I built your website you have Google analytics installed and you should be receiving a PDF every Monday that shows you what happened on the site the previous week.

Over the last year or so Google have dramatically revamped the analytics tool and while yes, they made it horribly complex, there are some amazing tools that will make understanding what’s happening to your business easier.

Dashboards

Instead of receiving the default analytics report, Google Dashboards allow you to set up weekly, even daily reports that track exactly what you need to know: goals, keywords, landing pages, pretty much anything you want. Below is an image of a top level dashboard report – click on it to see a larger version.

If you’re serious about driving value from your website and would like to improve your management reporting, reply to this email and book a session.