It happened to me in Charlotte, before the advent of never-get-lost smartphones. I missed a turn and thought I would just take the next exit and turn around…except I couldn’t. There was construction, and I was diverted.

Instead of stopping and taking stock of where I was and what I needed to do, I kept driving—the wrong way.

If you’ve never created a survey to learn more about your customers (or would-be customers), are you truly a marketer?

Only joking—kind of.

As marketers, we’re always honing in on the best way to reach and market to our target audiences. A favorite way to do so is with customer surveys. We’re all familiar with the online questionnaire—whether we’ve created it or taken one ourselves. Simple online surveys are an easy, (usually) affordable, and pretty accurate way to get feedback from your customers that you otherwise might never hear.

In the early stages of a website design project with our clients, we prepare a Foundations Document. This document helps a take a long, hard look at what their website is currently doing (baselines) and what needs to change to better support their business (goals).

Since there is so much data available about website performance, it can be difficult to know where to start with choosing the data baselines they’ll want to track later on to determine website success. As you can imagine, we have answered lots of questions about this over the years. In this post, we compiled the top analytics measures we review on our website, as well as those we recommend to clients depending on their goals.