The Fun With Google Analytics session featured three guest speakers – Arnout Hellemans of Onlinemarkethink, Ayat Shukarly of Invesp and Christina Sanders of 97th Floor.
For this blog we’re going to focus on Ayat Shukarly’s talk, who was first to take to the stage.
Ayat began her talk by reminding us that conversion rate optimisation (CRO) is a process, which includes both qualitative and quantitative research.
Qualitative Research
Ayat spoke first of qualitative research, which continues to be important in our economy of experience where everything is commoditised. We need to provide experience to attract and retain customers, and conduct qualitative research to understand what’s happening and why it’s happening.
Ayat seeks to understand the following in the polls and research that form part of her qualitative research:
- Motivators
- Barriers
- Hooks
- Satisfaction
- Demographical information
Quantitative Research
Next, Ayat offered 7 tips for leveraging analytics reports and avoiding ‘analysis paralysis’ – the condition of being overwhelmed by information from analytics!
Ayat gave the audience 7 questions to ask themselves when using Google Analytics. They were:
1) So, what?
2) What KPI does this measurement support?
3) How is it supporting that KPI?
4) What does the measurement tell me?
5) What is the dollar impact of that measurement?
6) What actions do I take based on the measurement?
7) What would drilling deeper tell me?
Analytics reporting must be driven by business objectives – that’s the message that Ayat stressed during her talk.
As well as telling the audience how to ‘dig deeper’ into their GA metrics she found some areas to investigate further, including a significant lost dollar value.
Here are some basic and advanced things she recommended marketers look into when analysing GA data:
Basic
- How many daily visitors you receive
- Your average conversion rate (sales, registration, download, and so on)
- You top-visited pages
- The average visit time on site and how often visitors come back
- The average visit page depth and how this varies by referrer
- The geographic distribution of visitors and what language setting they are using
- How “sticky” your pages are. Do visitors stay or simply bounce off (single-page visits)?
Advanced
- What is the value of a visitor and how does this vary depending on where they came from?
- What is the value of a web page?
- How do existing customers use the site compared to new visitors?
- How do visits and conversions vary by referrer type or campaign source?
- How does bounce rate vary by page viewed or referring source?
- Is my site engaging with visitors?
- Is my internal site search helping or hindering conversions?
- How many visits and how much time does it take for a visitor to become a customer?
