Analytics
What Are You Measuring?
My good friend, Jim Sterne — producer of the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit and fellow co-founder of the Web Analytics Association — would like to know.
Please answer 9 questions in 5 minutes to complete this web analytics survey from eMetrics.
The survey is attempting to find out which channels marketers and analysts are measuring, how they’re using that data to optimize marketing, and their main objectives for marketing optimization this year.
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
Finding Signal in the “Microhoo” Echo Chamber
I guess last Friday was a slow news day; GrokDotCom and 155 of our closest blogging and media friends “broke” the big news. Yawn. (I’m guessing Google execs wished they’d released earnings then, rather than the day before 
)
Look on the bright side: For followers of the online space, if you didn’t like the coverage you read, you certainly had other rehashes and “me-toos” to keep you occupied. In fact, the hardest thing about actually reading all this coverage would be keeping up with the onslaught every time Techmeme refreshed.
Yet there was a beacon of shining light above and beyond the rest of the noise, but since the blogosphere was so cluttered, many of you probably missed it: The Compete blog. Once again, they found a fresh perspective and unique angle of approach to the same old story.
Check out their “Microhoo” analysis. They have some perrrty charts too!
P.S. There’s also a marketing lesson here. As our editor, Robert, pointed out to me last Friday, the Compete blog is great at demonstrating the power of their analytics tool, in terms of the benefits received from using it, to derive insights about one’s audience.
P.P.S. Since we’re on the topic of visual inspiration found on blogs, it’s worth giving a hat tip to our friend and analytics blogger extraordinaire, Avinash Kaushik. In a blogosphere without the visual stylings of Kathy Sierra, Avinash has really stepped it up of late. If more “stats geeks” were as personable and kind-hearted as he, and genuinely focused on helping people learn how analytics don’t need to be uber-complicated (nor must they even look like actual data!) to be valuable, this Marketing Optimization space would attract a lot more executive eyeballs.
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Written by:Howard Kaplan
Happy Web Analytics
Some people say web analytics is hard. Others try to keep web analytics simple. But at least one company is trying to reduce web analytics rage with a smile on its face.
Most web analytics use an invisible gif to track Web traffic, but WordPress uses a small smiley face gif on their pages (scroll to the bottom-left of WordPress.com). Some bloggers are surprised to see a smiley face in their blog themes, but it’s actually part of the WordPress stats plugin.
Other than the smiley face, what images have you seen being used for data collection?
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Written by:The Grok
Unlocking Key Performance Indicators: Conversion Rate
After hitting on Take Rate, Bounce Rate, and Order Acquisition Ratio, it’s time to turn our attention to a metric near and dear to our hearts here at Future Now: Conversion Rate.
The Conversion Rate (CR) tracks how well your website is achieving its main objective. This goal will vary depending on the type of site. An e-commerce site’s main objective, of course, is to get people to buy product. Here’s how a commerce site would calculate conversion:
CR = Number of Sales / Visitors (A metric often related to CR, especially with content-driven sites, is Take Rate.)
The higher the CR, the better the ROI (Return on Investment). Improving conversion increases the amount of money you can make with the same amount of traffic. To determine exactly how conversion affects ROI, calculate your Order Acquisition Ratio.
Understanding what affects conversion requires an in-depth look at the entire online marketing strategy. To begin, break down the steps involved in the site’s sales process. For instance, a retail site would look like: Homepage -> Category Page -> Subcategory Page -> Product Page -> Cart -> Checkout.
Along with these steps, the Exit Rate for each must be calculated. Exit Rate shows how many people are not converting by leaving the site at various stages in the sales process — often thought of as a funnel, although it’s slightly more complicated in reality. Still, the funnel gives us a visual representation of where to find the biggest leaks, so we can fix them and optimize the experience to recapture money that would otherwise be left on the table (if you don’t mind me further mixing metaphors).
Each stage in the process is a micro-action that will lead the visitor closer to the macro-action of converting (e.g., purchasing). The best way to diagnose why various steps, or micro-conversions, aren’t performing as well as they should is to ask three simple questions:
1. Who is the audience at this step?
2. What action would we like them to take?
3. What information do they need to feel confident enough to be compelled to take that action?
When asking these questions, it’s important to recognize that a website is not one size fits all; it should be many sizes fit all. Multiple scenarios, or pathways through a site, need to be planned ahead of time in order to suit different personality types and how they prefer to behave online. It’s also important to take into account how close a person is to making a decision. Are they early on in their buying process and just researching, or do they know exactly what product they want? (Bryan’s recent screencast shows how to appeal to different buying modes and temperments.)
To help understand why visitors may not be taking the necessary micro-actions to move closer to converting, the Hierarchy of Optimization provides a useful guide in addressing potential problems. This hierarchy forms a pyramid and starts with basic requirements, then moving higher up toward the top, where persuading visitors to take the action is the highest aspiration.
Let’s look at them in reverse order…
- Functional. Does the site offer something that the visitor needs?
- Accessible. Is the visitor able to access whatever it is that the site offers?
- Usable. Are there unnecessary difficulties or roadblocks that cause friction for the visitor?
- Intuitive. How well is the site’s sales process structured? Is it compatible with how the visitor likes to buy?
- Persuasive. Does the visitor truly want and understand the problem by clearly knowing that it will solve their needs? Do scent trails carry through to the more funnel-like, conversion point on the site (e.g., the checkout process)?
If your CR is less than 10%, you should focus on optimization — but there’s always room for improvement. Along with taking steps to remove obstacles that impair the visitor’s buying process, causing them to waste their time thinking instead of doing, the most potent tool is empathy. Anticipating your visitors’ motivations will help you to answer their questions at each step — and that requires a good deal of planning.
Remember, a website exists to help its visitors achieve their goals. Give people visiting your site all of that, and the ROI will be well worth the effort you put into it.
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Written by:Ronald Patiro
Unlocking Key Performance Indicators: “Take Rate”
[This series will take an in-depth look at important web metrics, one-by-one. Enjoy!]
Key Performance Indicators or KPI’s (define) are the critical Web metrics you should be monitoring to evaluate the effectiveness of your site. Key performance indicators may differ depending on the business topology (ecommerce/retail, lead generation, content or self-service/support), but understanding them broadly is critical to any organization’s online success.
In this first installment of Unlocking KPI’s, we’ll discuss the “take rate”; the amount of people taking you up on a given offer on your site. It’s not necessarily your “conversion rate,” because that term is generally reserved for the site’s primary goal, or macro-conversion (e.g., acquiring a new lead, processing an e-commerce order). Take rate is used to measure micro-conversions. These can include:
- Newsletter subscriptions
- Downloadable materials such as ebooks
- Case studies
- White papers
- RSS subscriptions
- “Add to Friend” links for social networking sites
- Up-sell and cross-sell offers added to shopping cart
To calculate take rate, simply find the number of successes for the action being measured and divide it by the number of people exposed to the action.
Example: Lets say I write an ebook about where to find the best pizza in Brooklyn. 8,000 hungry people downloaded this ebook from my site last month. And during that month, my site received 80,000 visits. Of those visits, there were 40,000 unique visitors.
Take rate = 8,000/80,000 = 10%
This can also be done with unique visitors.
Take rate per unique visitor = 8,000/40,000 = 5% 20%
So now that we have the calculation behind take rate, lets look at what influences the take rate. Ultimately, the presentation of the material you want visitors to take has to be perceived as relevant and valuable. The specific elements that will influence how a visitor perceives your presentation need to be tested and optimized to find out what is working best. You will know you are moving in the right direction when your take rate increases.
Here’s a list of some main elements to test on your site that will influence its take rate:
- Call to Action. Does it consist of an imperative verb and an implied benefit? Is it clearly noticeable?
- Title. Is the title of the section containing your offer relevant and noticeable?
- Point of Action assurances. Are you easing the visitor’s concerns about taking the action? For instance, two commonly overlooked assurances regarding newsletters are privacy policy (i.e., that their email address will not be shared with third parties) and telling the visitor they can cancel anytime.
- Benefits associated with the offer. Are you speaking in terms of benefits that the people who accept your offer enjoy? Are you picking the most persuasive benefits relative to the segment of traffic you see the page attracting?
- Tell the visitor what to expect. If the material is downloadable, tell the visitor how large of a download is required. If it’s a newsletter, tell them how often its sent.
- Location of the call to action. Are you presenting the call to action (e.g., text link to white paper download, newsletter sign-up) above the fold? Is it in an area where the visitor can expect to find what your offering?
- Targeted keywords. What are the keywords you targeted to attract people to the page the offer is presented on? Are they relevant to your offer?
- Look and feel. Does the offer look like a banner ad? Is it contrasted against the rest of the page enough to stand out and be noticed?
Now that you have a framework of understanding what a take rate measures, and elements of its presentation to test to optimize, lets have a final look at why take rate is important to your site.
In planned scenarios, the take rate can be viewed as a leading indicator for the short-term performance of your site. Viewing a take rate as a micro-conversion point to indicate interest in your macro-conversion goals will tell you if people are moving forward in their buying decision process. If your take rate increases, you’ll qualify more people to move to your macro-conversion goal — like plugging holes in a leaky bucket.
For the next installment of Unlocking KPI’s, we’ll cover the ever-important “bounce rate.” Until then, if you have any questions, we’d love to hear from you in the comments.
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Written by:Ronald Patiro
Why We Teach Analysis Without the Analyst
The eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit is right around the corner, on October 14 - 17 in Washington D.C. It is THE event for web analytics for schmoozing other professionals interested in optimization.
Here is some video footage of my presentation from the last eMetrics Summit San Francisco this May. Maybe this short clip will wet your appetite for the event and perhaps even get you thinking about optimization and the opportunity cost game.
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
Web Analytics is Like Eating an Artichoke…
Most people have to put in so much energy to get so little out.
You shouldn’t feel bad if this is your situation. It’s unfortunately quite common, as many of the people who attended Search Engine Strategies San Jose and the Web Analytics Association Base Camp confirmed for me in the last couple of weeks. As anyone who attended last year’s Emetrics Summit knows, there’s a real shortage of analysts out there — talented or otherwise. You can see it in job search queries for “web analytics jobs” like this one.
Finding this “free agent person” is like finding a wooden nickel. Not likely.
On the other hand, I’ve met many organizations where all they do is hire someone just to go through the reports, create pretty Excel or Flash presentations, then distribute the reports to a group of people. They should consider changing the name of this position to “reporter” because all they do is spread the news. Don’t worry. Many of the analytics companies are or should be developing web analytics widgets to replace the human reporter. I’m sure you can find something more valuable to do with these people, anyway.
So what can you do?
1. Learn to squeeze more of your current web analytics. Do something quick and actionable like use Google Website Optimizer to run some simple tests on your website and improve your conversion rate like our friends at Jigsaw Health did. This advice can earn you a raise or a promotion, so this week I’ll make time for two more free samples. If you contact me directly, I’d be happy to point out a simple test you could run on your site. Just ask Scott McClintock from Fujitsu how I helped him make thousands of dollars from one of these simple tests.
2. Stop your addiction for useless data. If the information is not actionable or tied to your bottom line ignore it for now. Focus on one key metric or report and focus on taking action based on the report. Practice getting really good at that alone, then move on. I could tell you story after story of companies that focused on a report company-wide and the success they have because of it.
3. Move away from the idea that you need tools, talent, then process, to process, people (talented or not) then tools. The process must be focused on business optimization or in other ways how you you make more revenue by helping customers get what they want so you can get what you want, more revenue. Let us know if you would be interested in attending a workshop that teaches web analytics without the analyst early next year.
How would you finish the line? Web analytics is like…
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
Google Analytics, Numbers & The Mac
Web analysis and Macs have reached a new level today. First, if you haven’t heard, Apple announced iWork ‘08 yesterday and, as rumored, it includes a new spreadsheet program called Numbers. I ordered my version last night and can’t wait to start playing with it, to create what Steve Jobs calls “gorgeous looking spreadsheets very quickly.” (Here’s what Apple’s Numbers ‘08 has to offer.) I’m looking forward to converting the Marketer’s Common Sense Guide to E-Metrics website conversion rate analytics Excel calculators over to the new Mac format.
Hat tip to Barry at RustyBrick for pointing out Dashalytics, a Google Analytics Mac dashboard widget. If you have multiple websites, no problem. You can easily have multiple widgets open to track statistics on multiple sites.
The widget allows you to see:
- visitor traffic overviews
- details on visitors
- pageviews
- bounce rates
- averages
- time on site
- new visit percentages
- browser types
- connection speeds
- top pages
- referring sources in percentages and actual sources
- top keywords
- and more
You can download it from the Apple website.
Simple and better looking number ahead…
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
Data Visualization 2.0
Over the last few years, we’ve had a flurry of new techniques beyond the conventional ways — tables, histograms, pie charts and bar graphs — to display data. Smashing Magazine points us to some of the most interesting modern approaches to data visualization along with related articles, resources and tools.
Have you been able to use any of these visualizations in your workplace? Please share 
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
Do You Know How to Showcase Your Data?
One of the key elements of becoming a great web analyst is knowing how to best present your data.
Take a crack at the Graph Design IQ test and let us know how you did in the comments. What other resources like these have you used to learn about presenting data?
(By the way, anyone who has this responsibility should take Edward Tufte’s Presenting Data and Information course.)
Update: Anil asks are Pixels the new Pie Charts?
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
