when it comes to digital analytics, its easy to think of the tools first. a lot of marketers and analysts make the mistake of not setting the objectives of their digital analytics programmes, nor understanding the business case for the organization. in the end, their digital analytics implementation fail to connect back to the business objectives. the tools, then, become some fancy-nice-to-have technologies that fail to prove return on investment and make it difficult to justify in their budgets. this is why a measurement strategy is essential and should always come first, before any measurement tool or platform. a measurement strategy translates business objectives into metrics and dimensions that can be measured on the website. simply put, it helps in answering that most dreaded question, “what is the website doing for our business?” how then, does one go about developing a measurement strategy? get your stakeholders together a company’s website serves many interests for various sections of the business. for instance, what may be an interest for sales may not be an interest for marketing or for the product team. as such, it is important to bring together stakeholders from around the business at the onset to hear what matters to them and what success would mean. such a stakeholder engagement would enable you to get alignment on the business priorities and objectives that should be included within the measurement strategy. of all the stakeholders in the business, you should ensure that you get the views from an executive level stakeholder. this is important as executives are the ones who set the direction for the business and what it should achieve. getting executives involved at this early stage will also gain you senior buy in for the project which, in turn, will enable you to get overall support for the project from across the whole organization. once you have heard from a good representation of stakeholders, it’s now time to get to the n