What to ask your agency about analytics setup

Every audit we run turns up some version of this. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on analytics setup, these questions are worth asking early.

More dashboards rarely produce more decisions. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

Data you do not trust is worse than none. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

Decide what you will act on before you track it. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

What this looks like day to day

Data you do not trust is worse than no data, because it gets quoted anyway. Three things worth confirming about analytics setup before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Filter internal traffic from day one — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.