Revealing Behavior: Web Analytics Strategy 101

Revealing Behavior
Web Analytics Strategy 101
Ravi Singh

–– About this Talk ––
This talk is about Web Analytics Strategy,
Managing an in-house analytics program,
And leveraging analytics to optimize your product.

The Analytics Mission
Analytics involves measuring, testing and storytelling.
But it’s real purpose is to TAKE ACTION to improve,
based on insights from well-interpreted data.
If you won’t take action, don’t bother with analytics.

Innovate wisely…
Making changes is risky—you may alienate customers,
or over-invest in the wrong things and not know why.
You can be very busy innovating yourself
into failure if you are not measuring outcomes and
taking the right actions all the time.

So how do you make sense of it all?

What is your business mission?
How does your product support it?
What are your “KPIs”?
Who will you report to?
What actions will you take?
Strategy!
Dr. Strangelove © Hawk Films

Strategic Analytics Process
1 Planning 2 Implementation 3 Analysis 4 Improvement
Business Goals
KPI Worksheet
Analytics Spec
Reporting Plan
Tool Configuration
Development
Validation/QA
Data Collection
Automated Reporting
Executive Dashboard
Investigative Analysis
Optimization Analysis
Action Plan
New Tagging
New Campaigns
Experimental Testing

Analytics Planning in a Nutshell
State your
business goals
Define your
KPIs
Determine your
audience
Design your
reporting
strategy
Plan your
analytics
requirements

Key Performance Indicators
Total
Revenue
# of Leads
Conversion
Rate
Site Traffic Registrations # of Logins
Email Open
Rate
Call
reduction
Customer
Satisfaction
Bounce Rate
Visits /
Page Views
Session
Length
Top Content Top Products
Average
Order Size
Campaign
Results
Top
Countries
Time Zones
Unique
Visitors
Pages
Visited
Social
Shares
Error Rates
Top
Keywords
Entry/Exit
Page
You may measure everything,
but your KPIs are the few
metrics you monitor closely
Total
Revenue
Site Traffic
Bounce Rate
Average
Order Size
Unique
Visitors
Entry/Exit
Page

Know Your Audience
Executives High-level, trended, broad business-oriented metrics.
Will always have unexpected and interesting questions.
Marketers Effectiveness of online and email campaigns, conversion rates for
e-commerce, lead generation.
Product Managers Overall product health, customer satisfaction, positive trends,
effectiveness of features, areas for opportunity.
Developers Evidence of robust activity throughout the application, system
downtime, UI errors and other failure points.
User Experience Actual vs. expected user flows, level of engagement, user errors,
and major drop offs in key flows.

Design the
Right Reports
for the Right
Audiences
Executives
Marketers
Product Managers
Developers
User Experience
End of Year
Summary
Ad Hoc/Deep
Dive Reports
Weekly Email
Dashboard
Campaign
Summaries
Monthly
Presentation

Plan before implementing
 Start by recalling your KPIs, Audience and Reporting Strategy
 Identify all the things you need to measure
 Carefully document your tagging strategy, parameters, metadata
Only then, move on to implementation

6 Tips for Implementation
1. Choose your platform wisely
2. Don’t be lazy with your tagging
strategy–it will serve you or haunt
you for years
3. Use JS for sites and SDKs for
applications
4. Filter activity from your company
network and dev servers
5. Validate your data collection
before go-live
6. Use tools that work together to get
the big picture

What can
Analytics
help you
achieve?
© Shepard Fairey © 2012, NY Times

Analysis Tips
Start Broad, Looking Across your KPIs
Dive Deep
where
something is
unexpected
Revenue Traffic Conversions Bounce Rate Error Rate
Product Mix
Average Price
Items in Cart
Promotions
Seasonality
Investigate and
correlate to get better
understanding
• Track closely over time
• Make modifications
• Run experimental tests
Take action

Analytics Organizational Maturity Model
Ad hoc analysis
Omnichannel
Personalization
Segmentation
Optimization
Basic tracking
Standard dashboards
Automation
3
2
1

6 Tips for Analysis
1. Start broad, go deep, correlate
2. Use different methods to gain
understanding, including surveys and
user feedback
3. Build hypotheses before designing
solutions
4. Measure & optimize marketing
effectiveness (SEM, SEO, Email,
Display, Social & etc.)
5. Look for meaningful segmentation
as you analyze – regions, devices,
demographics, new vs. returning
visitor

Where do we go from here?
1. To keep up progress,
create or update your action plan every month
2. For deeper insights,
implement more sophisticated tagging strategies
3. To drive more value,
plan new campaigns and track their performance
4. To optimize,
test different designs to find the most effective ones

7 Tips for A/B Testing
1. Have an informed Hypothesis
2. Have a clear Control
3. Test only worthwhile designs
4. Let the test run until your sample
size is dependable
5. Avoid changing too many design
variables at once
6. Make sure you are learning WHY,
not just WHICH won
7. Start a betting pool to get people
engaged

What did all this mean?
4 take aways
Measure so you can take action
Analytics is a full-time job, a strategic program
Advocate for analytic insights because they’re not intuitive
Analytics will drive better design decisions and business outcomes

THIS IS THE LAST SLIDE
Thank you.

Revealing Behavior: Web Analytics Strategy 101

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