Analytics review

Using quantitative data to see how your product or service is performing is a good way to learn about the behaviours, issues, or pain points of people using your digital services.  

When using analytics for testing, it is important to consider contextual information to support the data. 

For example, a bounce rate shows how many people come to your website and ‘bounce’ back off again, without clicking any other pages on your site.  

A high bounce rate, meaning lots of people only visit one page of your website could be good or bad, depending on the context and goal.  

• A high bounce rate could be very good if you have a single page for people to complete a specific task that people have found directly. 
• If many people are coming to your website and leaving without finding what they are looking for, or going elsewhere for similar services, that could be a metric to track and understand the problems people are facing.  

For public services, these could be services that are highly competitive such as leisure centre memberships or fostering. 

With tools such as Google Analytics, and the many other analytics software packages available, you can learn about: 

• the user journeys people take on your site 
• how long people may spend on each page or component 
• when people leave your site  
• other useful pieces of data to help you understand user behaviour 

Nielsen Norman Group has published advice and guidance about three ways to use analytics in user-centred design.