Metrics, Analytics and Conversion Optimisation – 56 Key Insights from FIRST

Mar 18, 2014 | Conversion (CRO), Google Analytics

Metrics, Analytics and Conversion

FIRST on Metrics, Analytics and Conversion:

  1. Top growth hacking tactic #3 for landing pages (copywriting): If you are asking for a lot, write a lot. If you are asking for little, write little. (Source: unbounce.com)
  2. Do you have technically savvy power users in your marketing team? – Marketers that understand how to leverage technology to make a difference to the bottom line? (Source: marketingland.com)
  3. Let people use the product and then simply ask them what it does: “What you hear can point to cognitive hurdles” – a chance to simplify. Protip: “When you can’t find old or young people, drunk people are a good approximation” – CEO, Bump. (Source: techcrunsh.com)
  4. Bryan Eisenberg might be onto something here: “The number one reason senior marketers don’t buy into the data and technology is because they’re worried that the results will prove their intuition wrong. And, that more often than not, those intuitions are wrong”. (Source: blogs.hbr.org)
  5. App developers, New Relic for Mobile Apps looks interesting – Realtime visualisation of how the app is performing across services, carriers and different OS’s. Essentially a live, “global app health check report” across all users. (Source: techcrunsh.com)
  6. Brilliant set of tools for e-com website optimisation: Usability, conversion and performance testing. Even good old Xenu link sleuth makes an appearance! (Source: practicalecommerce.com)
  7. Spot on: “Marketing as a science is really about running good controlled experiments to test hypotheses. This is the heart of the scientific method applied to any discipline.” (Source: chiefmartec.com)
  8. Ah yes good old advice from Jakob Nielsen himself on UX testing from the year 2000: “The curve clearly shows that you need to test with at least 15 users to discover all the usability problems in the design” – luckily we now have the ability to conduct real-time conversion/UX tests and measure the effect on revenue across thousands of people to discover “all the usability problems”. Costs have come down dramatically and ultimately the global consumer wins as a result of better experience and product design. (Source: nngroup.com)
  9. Remember, to get conversions you need clicks first. And clicks don’t “just happen” – your prospects/customers are clicking on content because they want something. Brilliant quote from the article: “It’s only once we begin to understand what gets people to click that we can really understand what gets people to convert.” (Source: unbounce.com)
  10. Introducing a CRO testing culture mitigates risk, something marketing doesn’t talk a lot about. And it also starts the process of implementing a structured approach for site changes, which means your organisation is “twice as likely to see a large increase in sales than other orgs [not focused on CRO]” (eConsultancy). (Source: blog.crazyegg.com)
  11. Interesting to learn that matching the linguistic style of your website audience increases conversion rate, and this also makes the audience more resilient to calling out excessively positive reviews as “fake”. (Source: unbounce.com)
  12. Digital analysts, don’t be afraid to push back on data requests, especially those that start with “it would be interesting to see…” – ask the “so what” questions early to avoid producing costly reports that have no inherent, actionable value! (Source: tim.webanalyticsdemystified.com)
  13. Does your organisation’s content exist to entertain, educate, inspire or convince? Take a look at KissMetrics’ Content Matrix to help you think strategically about content (halfway down the page). (Source: blog.kissmetrics.com)
  14. Make sure you evaluate your approach to data from time to time. – Have you fallen into this trap? You develop a belief > You go find data that correlates with that belief > You then use that data to cement/substantiate your belief. (Source: chiefmartec.com)
  15. Nice walk-through and mini case study on responsive email design: Conversion rate from mobile-optimised emails increased by 33.4%. (Source: litmus.com)
  16. 4 tools for Pinterest optimisation: Cyfe (daily quick trend summary), Tailwind (weekly in-depth view of how content is performing & competitor tracking), Pinterest Analytics (most popular images pinned from your site) and GA (traffic, conversions, revenue). (Source: blog.kissmetrics.com)
  17. Wider Funnel’s take on CRO: Maximise relevancy, clarity and urgency whilst minimising distractions and anxiety. (Source: widerfunnel.com)
  18. Seriously useful post on comparing the impact of applying different conversion attribution models in Google Analytics using GA’s Model Explorer. (Source: seotakeaways.com)
  19. Good intro to digital marketing metrics. For retail, the new customer acquisition metric (volume and cost) is one of the most significant KPIs to look at. (Source: marketingland.com)
  20. Finally some proof that there’s others out there suffering from real-time data addiction! (Source: web-savvy-marketing.com)
  21. A simple but powerful example of the importance of developing a testing and optimisation culture within your marketing teams. The goal: To improve each stage of the purchase funnel. (Source: exacttarget.com)
  22. Brilliant collection of CRO case studies, no less than 100, we like this one: “#28 Eliminating One Field Increases Expedia’s Profit by $12 million”. (Source: blog.kissmetrics.com)
  23. A nice and easy way to generate content, tied to measured business outcomes: “Everyone is encouraged to add ideas to the content plan and from here we then begin to scorecard the content based on whether it will assist our reach, revenue or brand reputation.” (Source: econsultancy.com)
  24. Gotta love Avinash: “Rather than ‘simplify’ things and put five metrics into a blender and puke out an ‘easy to understand’ number, my strategy would be to expose the focusing factors (contributing metrics) in order to encourage our leadership to look a little deeper to understand performance”. (Source: kaushik.net)
  25. Applying Gossen’s law of diminishing marginal utility to web analytics and CRO: Lead your organisation’s analytics and conversion optimisation efforts assertively, but know when to shift focus. (Source: webanalyticsworld.net)
  26. Small Data (simple analytics) is completely under-hyped. In comparison to Big Data, it provides faster decision-making speed, easier access to data and is much cheaper in both system and resource cost. Time to roll up your sleeves marketers, product managers and CMO’s – login to Google Analytics! (Source: forbes.com)
  27. Business Analytics focused on profitability: Taking a macro approach with web analytics definitely helps to provide a different, more complete view of clicks and visitors that drive the biggest bottom-line business benefit. Great post! (Source: kaushik.net)
  28. Looking forward to the final report from Aberdeen, and agree with David’s early assessment: “Self-service BI enables more widespread use of analytics at least partly because it means scarce IT skills aren’t frittered away…Consequently, IT has more time to get BI into the hands of more users.” (Source: blogs.aberdeen.com)
  29. How to optimise YouTube One Channel using Analytics: Keep track of viewership, traffic source and especially watch-time. This one is important as YouTube is now optimising its search and discovery algorithm against it. (Source: blog.kissmetrics.com)
  30. PLA Optimisation Tip #2: Suppress poor performing products (remove them from their current category and move them to a low bid Ad Group). (Source: searchengineland.com)
  31. Nice three part series on CRO covering implementation of GA Experiments as well as a number of other popular testing tools. Solid data is one of the best ways of creating organisational change for digital. (Source: webanalyticsworld.net)
  32. Facebook appears to be winning the war for app install ad dollars: Best performer in Q1, evaluation based on clicks/installs (conversion rate), user quality and new app user volume. (Source: appsflyer.com)
  33. What could you possibly learn from multi-channel funnel data from over 36,000 GA clients with millions of purchases across 11 industries in 7 countries? A whole lot. Very few companies have this sort of data to share – read this post, there are significant leanings here. (Source: adwords.blogspot.co.nz)
  34. Focusing your organisation to be more “data driven”..? – Assuming you have the technology and the people, here is a nice run down of the areas to tackle as far as business process is concerned. (Source: practicalecommerce.com)
  35. These GA custom segments are useful, check with your web analytics team that they are indeed setup. (Source: michele.webanalyticsdemystiefied.com)
  36. Use the Lean Analytics Cycle to drive change quickly: 3 brilliant case studies that teach you how to apply lean (start-up) thinking to analytics. This is good stuff. (Source: kaushik.net)
  37. Correct. in the absence of any context “conversion rate” is meaningless. (Source: webanalyticsworld.net)
  38. Step-by-step instructions to track GA e-com transactions with Universal Analytics. Why does this matter? Better information about how customers interact with your business across many devices and touch-points, including mobile apps. Offline data can also be brought in. (Source: cutroni.com)
  39. How would a laser-sharp focus on a single metric change your bottom line..? Apply Lean Analytics: “Measure everything, but focus on one thing at a time”, also called One Metric That Matters (OMTM). (Source: practicetrumpstheory.com)
  40. Connect marketing expenditure with profit: “77% of CEOs have trouble linking marketing efforts to tangible results, such as revenue…” (Source: econsultancy.com)
  41. Have you calculated the opportunity cost of not doing anything with your organisation’s post-conversion thank you page(s)? (Source: getelastic.com)
  42. Pinterest analytics tool for business accounts is now live. Good start, but some sort of conversion tracking pixel would be even more useful. (Source: blog.hubspot.com)
  43. Big Data blah blah blah. Are you acting on insights gained from readily available (and free) Small Data..? Ask for a user account to your organisation’s Web Analytics and start digging. (Source: forbes.com)
  44. Reasons for Clicks > Visits: https, JS window.open and Flash links in IE, open in Safari for apps (see article for more) – Campaign tags like GA UTM are always best. (Source: webanalyticsworld.net)
  45. If you only implement half of these you’ll be significantly better off knowing what really works, and what doesn’t. Don’t delay acting on your discoveries. (Source: econsultancy.com)
  46. Apart from the obvious, there are other reasons why key metrics are important: They shape organisations, so chose well: “Players play to the metrics their management values, even at the cost of the team.” (Source: blogs.hbr.org)
  47. Solid app behavioural/usage analytics will prove to be a key feature to continue to attract developers to build apps for Android. Especially important for Google to do this given in the short term developers are still making more $ from iOS apps (or are they?). (Source: google.com)
  48. GA can now automatically convert all transactions to the primary currency on a site. (Source: analytics.blogspot.co.nz)
  49. Most Valuable Customers = {Purchase frequency, average order value, customer lifetime value, price sensitivity, affluence}. (Source: econsultancy.com)
  50. Quick summary of the 5 mobile tracking techniques: How they work, privacy and user control (UDID, MAC, OpenUDID, ODIN and cookies). (Source: businessinsider.com.au)
  51. Link Webmaster Tools to AdWords and use the paid / organic combined impression share report to figure out what % of all Google search impressions you are neither reaching with a paid ad, nor via an organic listing for a given keyword. (Source: lunametrics.com)
  52. Lesson #2 learnt from thousands of usability studies: Site categorisation needs to make sense. It shouldn’t take close to a minute to find the category for a small vacuum cleaner (watch the videos). (Source: moz.com)
  53. Did you know that there is a direct correlation between page load speed and revenue? Amazon found that revenue increased by 1% for every 100 milliseconds improvement. (Source: getpocket.com)
  54. A good reminder that correlation is not the same as causation. (Source: gigaom.com)
  55. Pretty graphic but is colour really “up to 85% the reason people decide to buy” – yes, product colour maybe, but not the logo or website “colours”. Testing multiple page variations is always best. (Source: socialmediatoday.com)
  56. Nice tutorial on applying Chi-Square to an A/B conversion optimisation project. Good excuse to dig out your Statistics 208 textbook from university decades ago…and a reminder that Stats and Marketing go great together. (Source: blog.hubspot.com)