Successful Web Analytics: Google Convention

A very long video, admittedly, but Avinash Kaushik is THE authority on web analytics. This video is him at a Google convention. Great stuff regarding web analytics.

(Shared via Google's YouTube)

Web Analytics Look Forward: 2013

(Shared via: InfoTrust)

Analytics: What it all means with profit in mind (Part I)

This blog has delved into some of the the theories behind, and features of, Google Analytics and its importance in today's digital world. With the ease of set-up, and number of resources available to master the the data collection and information, a brand is absolutely behind the curve if they are not utilizing some form of analytics to track and assess how their website is doing.

But as we have touched on and discussed, it is important to know the goal or mission of your website to determine what type of success it is that you are looking for. As Adam Egbert, discussing web analytics at Adobe points out, “There are obvious distinctions between sites that have different objectives. A site selling products is different than a site showing videos which is different than a technology discussion forum.”

It is crucial to know these distinctions because as has been a frequent topic on this blog, the sheer amount of data collection and analysis available to a brand is only useful if they know what it is they are looking for, and looking to get out of said data. While page views and content sharing may be the end game for a personal blog related to photography or animals, conversions and ROI information are the most critical for eCommerce.

Egbert notes, “The Online Retail industry is a $135 billion behemoth that will grow to $234 billion by 2014 in the US. E-commerce represents 3.7% of all retail sales in the US and is expected to increase to 5.5% in 2014. It is one of the few segments that enjoyed a positive growth rate in the year 2009. (U.S. Census Bureau, William Blair and Company estimates).”

Every trend or new piece of news seem to all say the same, obvious thing: the move away from brick-and-mortar retail is a very real, very quickly transitioning beast.

Ecommerce makes the buying and selling process easier on both the supplier and the consumer, and as costs continue to plummet online due to decreasing overhead, the trend will continue forward. Having a brand that requires eCommerce, means having a legitimate and real need to be able to track and predict out of that eCommerce regardless of the competing market that brand finds itself in.

As I have been fortunate enough as of late to use my new employer as a prime example of the analytical theories and practices we discuss in this blog, I will get to do the same once again. My employer is an international safety equipment retailer and has their eCommerce portion of their business synced up and tracked with Lead Lander.

Lead Lander is an automated, user-friendly analytics system specifically with eCommerce in mind. While it tracks the general data that other services like GA do, everything fed back to the user by Lead Lander has ROI and profit as the clear goal. After spending some time with it, I do see the benefits that my employer gets out of the service.

Establishing new markets and assessing old ones

Without a doubt, this particular goal/topic, the competitive safety equipment market, is a shining example of the importance of analytics on commerce.

“One of the most striking examples of differing objectives directly relates to online retail sites. While many other sites may be more concerned about content consumption or customer engagement, online retailers say, “Show Me the Money!” Due to differing objectives, there should be a corresponding difference in Key Performance Indicators and data dimensions used to analyze those sites, respectively,” says Egbert.

The Lead Lander analytics program has allowed my employer to successfully address that distinction and incorporate it into the brand's future plans and expansions. The biggest way that the analytics have aided the company is through the data feedback of physical location of every individual site user as well as the company and industry within which the site user is a part of.

Over the last five or so years that the company has had eCommerce set up and some form of analytics relegated to product conversion and sales, the information has allowed my employer to determine which international markets are perfect for expansion, and which should not be focused on.

For example, it has been concluded that countries such as India and China are not viable marketplaces for our products because of the varying levels of safety standards. In countries where safety requirements are lax, those corporations have no incentive to rent or purchase safety equipment worth thousands and thousands of dollars. Now, a country like the United States or any in the European Union, companies are far more likely to embrace and use our eCommerce website because penalties and fines for safety violations are astronomical.

The analytical data supports the findings. Countries with lesser safety-focused workplace cultures and regulatory commissions are blips, few and far between, in the visitor information and behavior portion of the data. Whereas companies located in the United States, Canada, Europe, and the growing South America, flood our website with visits and catalog and storefront perusals.

To use an example from Egbert, “consider a page from a content-centric site (perhaps a blog post) compared to a page from a retail shopping site (let’s say a product detail page). Both are at a similar level of granularity in their respective sites. However the data we want to collect around each differs substantially. For the blog post we may want to know if a user is engaged with the content, indicated by how long they spent on the page or if they read or wrote comments.

For the product detail page, we are more concerned about what the product is and how the user got there (Browse, Search, etc.). We want to know if the visitor adds this item to their cart or if they share the product with their friends. Most of all, we want the visitor to purchase!”

It cannot be stressed enough that step one, regardless of which analytics software a brand uses (but they must use something!), is having a clear and defined goal. For my employer, as things continue to take off more and more and the brand expands, all analytical data is driven by the overlying goal of pin-pointing new international markets for our products and safety culture.

The company does not exist in a marketplace that relies on quantitative sales solely as the equipment is not cheap, so continuously acquiring new leads in non-competitive geographic marketplaces is the primary goal. Knowing this has allowed me the ability to cater an analytics bundle proposal specifically to what the company's aspirations are, and without that level of focus and clarity, no amount of analytics can help a brand continue taking steps forward.

In the next post, we will follow up with tools that can aid in analyzing and deciphering goal-oriented data with my employer as an example, once more.