In the eagerness to use data to support your work it’s all too easy to dive into metrics without a clear direction, ending up overwhelmed or distracted by information that doesn’t actually help your organisation.
In this final blog of a three-part series, Duncan Robertson, senior associate for digital, presents his 10-step guide to getting the most out of your data and analytics.
1. Start with a goal
Before you look at a single chart or metric, be clear on why you’re doing analytics in the first place.
You might be tracking the progress of your key performance indicators (KPIs) or you might be looking for insight into what content is engaging your audience.
In his first blog, Duncan explored how to create KPIs to anchor your team and organisation’s work against your over-arching strategy. In his second blog, Duncan outlined how a content calendar can help you map out that work against your core audiences, messages, channels and asks, including the ability to record what’s working and what could be better.
With so much potential data available to be collected and interpreted, analytics should always serve a purpose. If you're just gathering data without a goal, you're unlikely to generate value from what you find.
2. Build a light-touch analytics strategy
Your analytics strategy doesn’t need to be long or complex, but it does need to exist.
Think of it as a roadmap: what data you’ll look at, when you’ll look at it and how it supports your broader objectives. Align your analysis with the rhythm of your organisation:
Weekly meetings: Focus on short-term performance. What content did well (or badly) last week? How can you use that insight in your next steps?
Quarterly reviews: Take a mid-range view. These might be campaign wrap-ups or progress checks on larger projects.
Annual evaluations: Dig deep into performance over time. This is your chance to track progress on strategic goals, identify patterns, and uncover hidden insights.
If you don’t already have these check-in points in your calendar, it’s time to add them.
3. Let your KPIs lead the way
Trying to track every available metric is a trap – it’s not just overwhelming, it’s counterproductive. Instead, be led by your KPIs.
As we have already outlined in our previous blog on KPIs, a KPI is a top-level description of the success you want to achieve through your activity. You should aim for a handful of comms KPIs, each aligned to your comms objectives and feeding up into your organisation’s objectives and KPIs. A good KPI framework will not only define your objectives but also specify which metrics matter most. This narrows your focus and forces you to understand what those metrics mean and how they help.
Even simple KPIs – like increasing sign-ups, growing followers or boosting engagement – can guide your approach if applied consistently.
4. Use dashboards to make data actionable
Dashboards are essential for turning complex data into usable insights. The key is to tailor the dashboard to your purpose:
Weekly dashboards should focus on headline stats – big numbers, top-performing posts, week-on-week changes.
Quarterly or annual dashboards can afford to be more in-depth, supporting strategic thinking with broader views of performance and trend comparisons.
A well-designed dashboard brings together key information at a glance and makes meetings more efficient. Rather than spending time digging through reports, your team can jump straight into discussion and decision-making.
5. Adapt the tools to fit your needs
Most analytics platforms – Google Analytics, in particular – are geared toward e-commerce or lead generation. But many organisations like charities, campaigns and educational institutions aren’t working in that space. Your goals aren’t always about sales but about influence, awareness, engagement.
That’s why custom dashboards or tailored reporting setups are so valuable. They let you simplify the interface, reduce noise and focus on what truly matters to your organisation.
And instead of pulling data manually from multiple platforms, you can bring everything into one place – making it easier to measure KPIs across channels without needing a full-time analyst to piece it all together.
6. Review and refine regularly
Don’t treat your analytics set-up as static. Just like any strategy, it should evolve. Set aside time – monthly, perhaps – to ask:
Are we still tracking the right metrics?
Can we simplify anything?
Is there a quicker or more effective way to do this?
Often, improvements come from cutting down – not building up. Maybe you can drop metrics that aren’t useful or streamline your reporting process to save time and reduce complexity.
7. Start simple, then scale
You don’t need a dashboard from day one. In fact, it often makes more sense to start small – track a few key metrics manually, get comfortable with them and then invest in a dashboard once it becomes too time-consuming to manage without one.
Think of your analytics setup as iterative: begin with the basics, expand thoughtfully and only add complexity when it delivers clear value.
8. Look for trends, not just snapshots
Numbers from one week can be misleading. Most organisations experience natural cycles – seasonal engagement patterns, time-sensitive spikes, content fatigue.
That’s why you should always aim to compare like with like. Use historical data to establish a baseline and benchmark against your own past performance. This is far more meaningful than comparing to industry averages that may not reflect your unique context.
Also, there needs to be a narrative around the numbers; data alone, without context or interpretation, is unlikely to be helpful in driving understanding and action. While metrics can reveal what is happening – such as a spike in website traffic or a drop in conversion rates – your narrative will explain the why behind the numbers: interpreting what the numbers indicate about user behaviour or organisation performance and tying these insights to possible causes or contributing factors.
9. Group content for better insight
When you're dealing with a content-rich site or multiple campaign strands, grouping content can help you make sense of it all.
For example:
Advice pages and event listings serve very different purposes. Grouping them allows you to evaluate each on its own terms.
Blog posts that are short-lived can be difficult to compare over time unless they're categorised meaningfully.
Social media content can be grouped by campaign, theme, or format (e.g., videos vs. text posts) to understand broader performance patterns.
Google Analytics allows you to do this using content groupings. You can also use campaign tags (UTM parameters) to track and compare campaign performance across platforms.
10. Use analytics to answer real questions
In the end, your analytics should help you solve practical problems:
Is the time we spend writing blog posts worth it?
Which social media channels are most effective for us?
If we only have the capacity for five posts this month, what should they focus on?
How do we run a campaign with limited staff and time?
Analytics isn't just about numbers – it’s about empowering better decisions with limited resources.
And this decision-making goes beyond comms teams – your wider organisation can greatly benefit from your analytics work too. By analysing engagement metrics from campaigns, social media, press releases and internal communications, valuable insights can be provided for organisations in terms of what content drives interest, builds trust or prompts action.
These insights can inform marketing strategies, product development, customer service approaches and even HR initiatives by identifying audience sentiment, preferred communication channels and emerging trends.
In essence, communications analytics bridge the gap between messaging and audience behaviour, providing valuable feedback loops that help the entire organisation make more informed, aligned and effective decisions.
Final thought
Analytics doesn't have to be overwhelming or overly technical. With a clear strategy, a focus on KPIs and an iterative approach, you can use data to genuinely understand what’s working – and where to go next.
Start small, stay consistent and build a setup that works for you, not the other way around.
Need help developing your analytics approach or building a custom dashboard? We're here to support you so please get in touch.
