WSS09: Avinash Kaushik on Web Analytics 2.0
May
5
2009
- Avinash is the Evangelist for Google Analytics and writes the Occam’s Razor blog
- Web Analytics in An Hour a Day
- Wiley called a few months into writing the blog to turn it into a book
- “People like paying for free stuff”
- Donate all the (meagre) proceeds to DWB and the Smile Train
- About $60k to date
- Accountability
- The web has infinite amounts of accountability
- Didn’t learn much from President Bush, other than “faith-based initiatives”
- Magazine ads are faith-based initiatives
- Can’t measure actual impressions other than subscribers and news stand sales
- Web advertising isn’t at all because you can measure it
- Number of clicks
- Relevance (shown along with search results for the term)
- Measure effectiveness based on subsequent activities on the clicked-through site
- The web gives you more data than God intended
- Very good at giving you “The What”
- You can spend your life doing path analysis and end up with no real conclusion
- We don’t spend as much time analyzing “The How Much” or “The Why”
- Clickstream: The What
- Multiple Outcomes Analysis: The How Much
- Experimentation and Testing, Voice of Customer: The Why
- Competitive Intelligence, Insights: The Goldmine!
- Not in the business of generating pageviews — in the business of generating revenue for your business (Clarity of Purpose!)
- Very good at giving you “The What”
- HITS: How Idiots Track Success
- Bounce Rate
- Not an aggregate — an actual measure of behaviour
- Translates into: “I came, I puked, I left”
- Very easy to understand: 70% = suck. 30% = good.
- 20% is a fantastic rate (you always get traffic that’s not relevant to you from search engines)
- Only seen less than 20 on high-end video porn sites, and the best still had a 4% rate (you made it all the way here and left?!)
- Look at traffic sources and click the bar chart to compare sources to bounce rate to find your BFFs
- Magazines are in trouble because they follow the “Selfish Lover Strategy”
- Their ads take precedence over your content
- Not the New Yorker, which is almost all content
- Bounce rates are reflective of this — more ads and nav, higher bounce rate
- We think our site traffic is all the same person coming, but it’s really a huge mess of different people with different goals
- Segmentation and deep diving gives us the right view
- Pageviews, etc. are all aggregated data, no segmented
- How to improve the Reader’s Digest Advice and Know How page?
- ~320 links on a single page
- 10,158,033 pageviews, 9 average pageviews
- Look at the Depth of Visit stats though — 33% of people only looked at the homepage
- Go into segmentation and create a segment of people who’s depth was greater than four pages
- Use that segment throughout to figure out who is driving those people to the site, which keywords, what they looked for
- Analyze the amount of content on your site made up by each section then compare it to the total percentage of visits for it
- Might discover that you’re spending a lot of time and money to produce content that people aren’t as interested in
- Ecommerce
- Average conversion rate for top ecommerce websites was 1.72%
- What happened to the other 98%?
- They might be offline conversions, tire kickers, etc.
- Measure the conversions on your site for actual revenue, but also everything else
- These are ‘macro-conversions’
- What else does your website do to drive sales?
- Create profiles
- Research
- Coupons
- These are ‘micro-conversions’
- Example: Avinash’s own blog
- Set four goals: all posts, about, speaking engagements, RSS subscribers
- “If you read two posts I’ve written, you will be convinced of my greatness”, so driving people to the “All Posts” page means they will probably read two posts
- The last is a macro-conversion, the other three are micro
- RSS is the ultimate form of permission marketing — I can push “any damn thing I want” to you with your permission
- Can measure the value of that by finding out how much it would cost to purchase them as leads
- Speaking engagements value can be measured by asking organizers how much traffic was driven to them and who registered
- Can now measure the value in ‘fake dollars’ every month
- Average conversion rate for top ecommerce websites was 1.72%
- How do you measure conversions on something like a drug website where you can’t actually sell the product?
- You can measure things like watching videos, using calculators, surveys, etc.
- Facebook measuring success by the number of active users is stupid
- They should measure engagement
- Look at Visitor Loyalty
- Reconstructed data: most users came once in last 30 days, but a crazy high percentage came between 9 and 200 times
- Look at Visitor Recency
- Reconstructed data: 66% of people were on the site between now and 0 days ago
- Loyalty + Recency = Profits
- You should listen to the voice of your customers
- How do you do it?
- Not by looking at top content viewed — doesn’t show what they wanted but couldn’t find
- There’s no pageview if I can’t find what I want
- Surveys to the rescue!
- Not like NPR: 35 question survey in a giant scrolling page
- Greatest survey in the world has 3 questions:
- Why are you here? -> Primary Purpose
- Did you complete your task? -> Task Completion Rate
- If you were not able to complete the task, why not? -> Segments of Discontent
- Compare Primary Purpose and Task Completion to find low hanging fruit
- Look at distribution of data to find out how many people fit into each category
- Probably a small percentage (e.g.: mid-30s) who are there for your primary purpose
- Perceptions, Montreal-company, created an exit survey with 4 questions to do this
- Five Second Test: simple usability tests
- Ethnio: remote conversations with people who are on your website right now
- How do you do it?
- Most websites suck today because they’re created by HIPPOs (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion)
- One of the greatest gifts the Internet gives us is the ability to learn to be wrong quickly
- Magazines or television ads take a long, long time to produce the content and learn from it
- A/B testing is great
- Takes six and a half minutes to launch a test in Google Web Optimizer
- iPhone has shown us that you can sell an object of lust to a CEO and she will force her IT staff to support it so that hers works
- BlackBerry Storm page is horrible and creates no lust
- Palm Pre is all about creating lust
- Do an A/B test! You’ll quickly see that you can measure passion
- Competitive Intelligence
- Google Ad Planner lets you set up a very specific demographic then analyze which sites they go to
- Can add sites those people have also visited
- Site Profiles let you analyze the traffic and stats to specific domains
- Google Ad Planner lets you set up a very specific demographic then analyze which sites they go to
- Questions:
- We do a lot of work in the public sector and there’s sometimes resistance to accountability. How can public sector organizations with no bottom line tied their site use analytics?
- The Obama administration is the best thing that could have happened to the web from an analytics perspective. Sometimes it takes a generational shift to get the old people out and new people in. Worked with a security agency to measure how many people were downloading things and found that it was 19 clicks to get to a download. Blatantly embarrassing them is a great way to get them to make changes. This is an agency America doesn’t acknowledge exists but they have a website with a Kid’s Club! Their bounce rate was 96% when we started looking. Use tools like compete.com to look up share of traffic you get for top terms (e.g.: “enterprise software” for large software companies -> top entry got 40m visits, being 44th got 3,976).
- We do a lot of work in the public sector and there’s sometimes resistance to accountability. How can public sector organizations with no bottom line tied their site use analytics?
» May 5th, 2009, 12:20 pm • permalink • categories: Observatory • tags: analytics, avinash kaushik, data, google, web analytics in an hour a day, wss, wss09 • Subscribe to comments for this entry through the 
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