It's quite often the case that a client won't understand why they're getting quite so little in the way of enquiries from, or sales through, their website - when prompted, they'll say that they looked at Google Analytics and they were getting over three thousand visitors a month.
"Ah", tends to be our reply. "Are they the right visitors, though?".
The problem
Not all visitors are equal. If you're selling your services online, but can only handle UK clients, then visitors from overseas...well, it's nice, but it's fair to say that the vast majority of them are not relevant.
We're not discounting the fact that it's possible that it's a potential UK client who's currently overseas, or someone looking from overseas who may in due course be a client within the UK. But the vast majority, though, are unlikely to be relevant to your business.
But that, then, immediately skews all metrics that you may have which feed off it. If you're measuring your conversion rate - the number of visitors to your site who 'convert', be that into being a customer there and then, or into an enquiry - expressed as a percentage of all visitors, then it's potentially doing you a disservice.
If you've got 1000 visitors and make 2 sales a month, then a conversion rate of .2% doesn't look great. But if you're only shipping to the UK, or only handle UK customers, and only 100 of those 1000 visitors is in the UK, then actually, the conversion rate looks a little better, standing at 2%, because arguably the question that the conversion rate should be answering is "how many visitors who we could actually sell to did we convert into customers?".
Some may say that that's cheating - ignoring inconvenient statistics to make the important ones look better.
Perhaps, if one measures in absolute terms. But when measuring the improvement of performance of a website, one tends to look at relative changes, rather than absolute numbers. As long as you're still comparing apples with apples, then it's fine - you cannot introduce a change in how you calculate your conversion rate by discounting all non-UK visitors and then claim that you've improved your conversion rate by a factor of ten. That's cheating.
But if you measure one month and get 2 sales from 100 UK visitors, and the next month get 3 sales from the same number of UK visitors, it would not be cheating to say that your UK conversion rate has improved by 50% month on month.
The solution
The answer on how to implement it lies in judicious user of filters.
We do it with our own custom Looker Studio dashboard - we don't discard the overall numbers completely, because it's useful for us to be able to see them.
But we have a section which reproduces the headline statistics - users, engagement time, bounce rate, etc. - but only for UK users. Through judicious application of a filter that only measures visitors from the United Kingdom, we can compare and contrast from month to month.
This can be beneficial in other ways - if your headline number of visitors drops by 20%, whilst it may - at first glance - seem like a bad thing, the key is actually what happened to your (in this example) UK visitors within that time. If it bucked the trend and went up by 15%, then great - your positioning of your site is attracting more of the visitors who are relevant to you, and fewer of the visitors who are not.
This judicious use of filters applies not just to Looker Studio, but also Google Analytics and, indeed, Google Search Console - and pretty much every other metric that you might be measuring.
The inverse applies as well - if you want to market to a specific country other than the UK, then you can just as easily set up reporting to track only activity from that company, allowing you to measure the results of your marketing.
Conclusion
We've said it before and we'll doubtless say it again - measure first, market second. But with that comes the caveat - make sure that you're measuring the right things, and surely the most essential of those is your target audience.