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!)
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
    • 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
  • 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).

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