Reading Kaushik (Part 7): Excellent Analytics Tips

Tip #3: Turbocharge Your SEM/PPC Analysis

  1. Measure your Bounce Rate
  2. Understand how vendors work
  3. Measure cannibalization rate vs. organic
  4. Experiment and Test
  5. Understand the multi goal of your site
  6. Measure the value of long tail keywords

Tip #4: Make Your Analysis/Reports “Connectable”

  • Make dry stuff more approachable
  • e.g. Flirters = Visitors with three pages or less
  • You can always include the definition if people are interested in it
  • You can link it up in a persona way

Tip #7: The Adorable Site Abandonment Rate Metric

  • Site Abandonment Rate = [1 – (total orders placed on the website) / (Total add to cart clicks)]
  • Checkout Abandonment Rate = [1 – (total number of people who complete checkout) / (total number of people who start checkout)]
  • Now you can segment, test and improve your rates

Tip #13: Measure Macro AND Micro Conversions

  • Macro Conversions: Buy something on your site
  • Micro Conversions: Write a review, sign up the email newsletter, etc.
  • Not all visitors want to buy something, therefore measuring micro conversions reveals more truth

Tip #15: Measure Latent Conversions & Visitor Behavior

  • Don’t just focus on immediate results — look a month later on the behavior of the acquired visitors
  • Especially for community-based websites (social networks, boards, etc.) later behavior is more important than just the sign up
  • Measure Loyality, Requency, Frequency

Tip #16: Brand Evangelists Index

  • Survey: Not at all satisfied, not satisfied, satisfied, very satisfied, extremely satisfied
  • Problem: Satisfaction rate is not very informative
  • Solution
    • Aim for delight
    • Penalize for negative rating
    • Index the results for communication
    • => Brand Evangelist Index (BEI): [[(Very Sat + Ext. Sat.) – (Not Sat. + Not At All Sat.)] / #Responses ] * 100

Tip #18: Make Love To Your Direct Traffic

  • Direct traffic is traffic that is driven by people who seek you actively out
  • Problem: Direct traffic can result from improperly tagged links / urls
  • Avoid:
    1. Missing WA tags on landing pages
    2. Untagged campaigns
    3. Improperly tagged campaigns
    4. Improperly coded redirects / vanity urls
    5. Non Async tag
    6. Links encoded in JS can be problematic
    7. https to http and vice versa don’t send referrers
    8. Multi and sub domains problems

Tip #19: Identify Website Goal [Economic] Values

  • What is the economic value of micro conversions?
    1. Assign campaign codes & track offsite converting goals
    2. Track online micro-conversions in offline systems
    3. Get the current “faith based” number from Finance
    4. Estimate relative goal values
    5. If everything else fails, just use $1