Tag: Web Design & Analytics Osmania University B.com Notes

The Behavior section reveals what your visitors do on your website. Specifically, the reports tell you what pages people visit and what actions they take while visiting.

The Behavior Flow report visualizes the paths users traveled from one screen, page or event to the next. This report can help you discover what content keeps users engaged with your site. The Behavior Flow report can also help identify potential content or usability issues.

Use the Behavior Flow report to investigate how engaged users are with your content and to identify potential content issues. The Behavior Flow can answer questions like:

• Is there an event that is always triggered first? Does it lead users to more events or other behaviors?
• Are there paths through your mobile app or site that are more popular than others, and if so, are those the paths that you want users to follow?
• Did users go right from product pages to checkout without any additional shopping?

High bounce rates indicate two possible scenarios. Users took the information they needed and left. Or your website experience was uninteresting or unoptimized that they didn’t continue to browse through your website. It all depends on the type of content you have, so it’s good to click through the link to understand the purpose of each page.

Longer time spent shows that users stay engaged with the content. Consistent engagement, in turn, informs Google that it is a reliable source to rank higher in search results, too! Yay!

One metric that usually stands out here is Page Value. Mainly because it’s not a widely used metric. So how is Page Value calculated? When an order is made in one session, Google Analytics assigns equal weight for all the pages that influenced the total revenue. But remember, this is only calculated if you track revenue on your website. Obviously checkout pages will have the highest Page Values, but what’s fun is finding the unexpected ones that do too.

Page Value Formula = (Total Transaction Revenue + Goal Value) /(# of Unique Page Views)

Site Speed

Site Speed can be one of the reasons that causes high bounce rates. Users expect a seamless experience with all websites in today’s Internet. If they can’t do anything on your website, they’ll immediately leave. So, Site Speed is another report to help you to figure out the root cause of unhappy users.

Site Search

If you do have a Search bar on your website, the Site Search report can really help you improve your user experience. Search bars help users find content, but it also helps you understand what they want to find right away. If the content is not easy to find, they’ll depend on the Search bar for assistance. There’s an opportunity right there!

Usage Report

The Usage report breaks down sessions with and without site search usage. This information will help you figure out the answer to this question: do your visitors need to depend on a search bar to use your website?

With a simple website in the screenshot below, the data shows that 99.9% of users are visiting without even touching the site search. I’ll translate that for you. People can easily find the content they need on their own. There is less dependence on a help tool, so this is a great sign for the test website below.

Google Analytics’ Conversion reports provides metrics to evaluate your online business value, whether it is revenue or other valuable events i.e. signups, leads, subscribers. You can drill down through the conversion funnel with the preset tracking options or customize your own. Conversion reports can give you user insight as to how to attract your audiences to reach the bottom line: sales and revenue.

A completed activity, online or offline, that is important to the success of your business. Examples include a completed sign-up for your email newsletter (a Goal conversion) and a purchase (a transaction, sometimes called an Ecommerce conversion).

A conversion can be a macro conversion or a micro conversion. A macro conversion is typically a completed purchase transaction. In contrast, a micro conversion is a completed activity, such as an email signup, that indicates that the user is moving towards a macro conversion.

• Last Interaction: 100% to Direct (Typed in the URL + Ordered in same session)
• Last Non-Direct Click: 100% to the channel before Direct (Paid Search)
• Last AdWords Click: 100% to Paid Search (only one campaign click)
• First Interaction: 100% to Social (promoted Facebook post)
• Linear: Equal credit to each channel (Social, AdWords, Direct = 33%)
• Time Decay: More credit distributed to the most recent channels (Direct – most credit due to the paycheck time frame / Social – least)​

Google Analytics currently allows you to view eight social analytics reports.

These reports showcase the ROI and impact of your social media campaigns.

To find them, you’ll simply want to go to the “Reporting” tab on your dashboard. From there, click on “Acquisitions” and then “Social.”

As a marketer, this is my favorite report in the new Social suite because it identifies the networks and communities visitors are using to engage with your content and then lets you see how people interact based on where they came from. As a marketer, a content producer and a lover of social, this report rocks my world by giving me a better sense of where I should be devoting resources.

y tapping into Google’s Data Hubs and viewing the Activities Stream tab for Google+, marketers get an interactive look at how their content is being shared on Google’s social network.  This allows businesses to quickly identify their top content and find key influencers. For marketers looking to build larger engagement plans or identify brand advocates, this is an extremely powerful way to gain insight into how your content is being shared across Google.  You’re able to see who is starting the conversations about your brand, what they’re saying when they share it, and then gain direct access to these people via URL Ripples and URL Trackbacks.

To compare data from a single social network across these reports:

1. Add the secondary dimension Source/Medium to the Social Conversions or Multi-Channel Funnel report. This dimension should appear in the Source/Medium report by default.
2. In each report, use the advanced filter (found at the top of the data table) to restrict the data to one source or medium.
3. Confirm that you’re looking at the same transaction metric across these three reports. Use the Conversion dropdown menu at the top of a report change the metric.

When comparing data in these reports, keep the following in mind:

• The lookback window and attribution model differs across these three reports.
• The Social Conversions reports aggregate all social referrals into a single report and uses friendly names to aggregate traffic from various social networks. Data might appear with different names in the other reports.
• In the Source/Medium report, traffic from social sites will show up as a referral, unless you’ve used manual campaign tracking parameters.

Google Analytics Event tracking is an invaluable feature that allows you to record interactions with elements of your website which aren’t tracked by default within Google Analytics.

Events are user interactions with content other than page loads (pageviews). Downloads, link clicks, form submissions, and video plays are all examples of actions you might want to analyze as Events.

Simply by adding snippets of code to your site, it is possible to track event interactions to understand how long users spend watching your videos or even which fields on your forms users drop off at.

Some of the typical uses for event tracking are listed below:

• Tracking outbound link clicks to other websites.
• Understanding how many users clicked on mailto email addresses or click-to-call phone numbers. This can help you to better understand the number of enquiries you are getting from your site.
• Tracking PDF and other media downloads.
• Measuring interactions with video content, such as time spent watching a video.
• Tracking exactly where users drop off when filling in fields on your forms or checkout
• Monitoring the clicks on unique elements of a page, such as the “contact us” call to action on your about page.
• Collecting data about how many users filled in and submitted a form, although I would always recommend sending users to thank you pages whenever possible.

Anatomy of Events

An Event has the following components. An Event hit includes a value for each component, and these values are displayed in your reports.

• Category
• Action
• Label (optional, but recommended)
• Value (optional)

For example, you might set up a video “play” button on your site so that it sends an Event hit with the following values:

• Category: “Videos”
• Action: “Play”
• Label: “Baby’s First Birthday”

Category

A category is a name that you supply as a way to group objects that you want to analyze. Typically, you will use the same category name multiple times over related UI elements that you want to group under a given category.

Suppose you also want to measure how many times the video is downloaded. You could use:

• Category: “Videos”
• Action: “Downloaded”
• Label: “Gone with the Wind”

In this case, there would be only one category Videos in your reports, and you could see aggregate metrics for user interaction with the total set of elements for that single video object.

However, it’s likely that you will have more than one single object that you want to measure, and it’s worth considering how you want to categorize your reporting before you implement the call. For instance, you might want to analyze all separate movies under the main category of “Videos” so that you get aggregate numbers for all video interaction, regardless of which one users interact with.

On the other hand, you might create separate categories based on the type of video one for movie videos and one for music videos. You might also want a separate category for video downloads:

• Videos – Movies
• Videos – Music
• Downloads

In this scenario, you could see the total combined event count for all three categories in your reports. The Total Events metric displays all event counts for all categories that you have supplied in your implementation. However, you will not be able to view combined metrics for all Videos separately from Downloads, because detailed event metrics are combined under their respective categories.

While the Event object model is entirely flexible, you should first plan your desired reporting structure before deciding upon your category names. If you plan to use the same category name in multiple locations, be careful to correctly reference the desired category by name. For example, if you plan to call your video category “Video” and later forget and use the plural “Videos,” you will wind up with two separate categories. Additionally, if you decide to change the category name of an object that has already been recorded under a different name, the historical data for the original category will not be re-processed, so you will have metrics for the same web-page element listed under two categories in the reporting interface.

Action

Typically, you will use the action parameter to name the type of event or interaction you want to measure for a particular web object. For example, with a single “Videos” category, you can analyze a number of specific events with this parameter, such as:

• Time when the video completes load
• “Play” button clicks
• “Stop” button clicks
• “Pause” button clicks

Except when it’s time to move on

Some organizations will never adopt marketing optimization. The culture may be too entrenched in old ways. I cringe when I see companies start on the path of testing and then turn around and redesign their website wholesale without considering the progress and learning they’ve already made.

Never give up

As Winston Churchill said in a famous speech, “never, never, never, never give up.” testing and optimization are not one-time events. You’ll face opposition, confusing results, and disappointments, but they will melt away when you experience big wins.

Be a leader

You have a decision to make about what you stand for in your career. Every idea you want to sell depends on the influence you have with colleagues, friends, and clients. The foundation of that influence will be based on what I’ll call soft or hard credibility. Soft credibility is based on your personality, charisma, and personal connections, whereas hard credibility is the data, evidence, and goal alignment that you bring.

Share successes far and wide

Many of clients have used our results analysis presentations to create an internal event in the organization. The champion invites members from throughout the company to see the results of tests, guess the winners, and discuss what was learned. The presentations are a lot of fun, especially for those departments that aren’t normally involved in external communications. Make sure to invite people from all functional areas.

Tie results to revenue

When you present results, don’t just show the improvement in conversion rate or KPIs. Tie the results to revenue to show real cash impact.

Involve other departments

You’ll need the support of others to get your tests running: it, finance, marketing, branding, and more may present barriers. Save yourself surprises by involving them early.

Conduct skunkworks tests

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try an under-the-radar approach. Pick a few target pages with low political visibility to gain some quick wins. Landing pages outside the main website can be good candidates for this. Then, use the winning results from those tests as ammunition in your campaign for support to move on to more important optimization areas.

Use expert support and insights

Bring in a conversion-optimization expert to tell decision-makers how your website needs to improve. The credibility of a third party can carry more weight than internal voices alone, even if were bringing a similar message.

Create a tangible opportunity

Get support for testing by creating a tangible problem that testing solves. Gather visitor (dis)satisfaction survey results, show real quotes, and record feedback from real customers. Videos of customer frustration can be powerful motivators.

Get senior-level buy-in for testing

No matter how strong your project results are, you’ll face an uphill battle without senior management support.

What is success for your senior decision-makers? Start by finding out how they’re incentivized so you can show how optimization will help them reach their goals. If you can help them look (and get paid) like rock stars, they’ll support your projects and reward you in return.

Qualitative tools to uncover why things happen

Qualitative tools help you collect qualitative (non-numerical) data to learn why your website visitors behave in a certain way. They include:

• Website feedback tools (on-page and external link surveys) where visitors are asked questions about their experience
• Website session recording/replay tools that show how individual users navigate through your website
• Usability testing tools where a panel of potential or current customers can voice their thoughts and opinions on your website
• Online reviews where you can read more about people’s experience of your brand and product.

Quantitative tools to uncover what is happening

Quantitative tools allow you to collect quantitative (numerical) data to track what is happening on your website.

• General analytics tools that track website traffic (e.g., Google Analytics)
• Website heat map tools that aggregate the number of clicks, scrolls, and movement on a page
• Funnel tools that measure when visitors drop off from a sales funnel
• Form analysis tools that track form submissions
• Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) tools that measure customer satisfaction on a scale from 1 to 10
• Tools that use the Net Promoter System to measure the likelihood of people recommending your website/product to someone else on a scale from 0 to 10.

Tools to test changes and measure improvements

After you’ve collected quantitative and qualitative feedback and developed a clear sense of what’s happening on your website, testing tools allow you to make changes and/or report on them to see if your conversion optimization efforts are going in the right direction. They include:

• A/B testing tools that help you test different variations of a page to find the best performer (recommended for high-traffic sites, so you can be certain your results are statistically valid)
• Website heat map + session recording tools that allow you to compare different variations of a page and the behavior on it
• Conversion-tracking analytics tools that track and monitor conversions
• Website feedback tools (like visual feedback widgets or NPS dashboards) that help you collect qualitative feedback and quantify it, so you can compare the before/after response to any change you made.

Stage 1: Research Phase: Identifying the areas of improvement

Only one in every seven A/B tests gives a winning result.

As a general practice, most marketers tend to copy CRO strategies that yielded results for other firms thinking the same would work for them. But, they fail because every orange button cannot convert and every long form page cannot falter.

1. Analyze what are your visitors doing?

Analytics allows you to make decisions based on facts and figures rather than pure instincts. In the CRO process, there are multiple ways to derive data to understand your results. For instance, you can fetch relevant information from your web analytics tools such as real-time data tracking, bounce rate, incoming website traffic sources, audience, demography, site behavior, and much. Google Analytics is one of the best tools to obtain in-depth quantitative data on what people are doing on your site.

2. How page features shape user behavior?

By using visitor behavior analysis tools such as heatmaps, session recordings, interview feedbacks, customer surveys, analytics, net promoter score, and so forth, see how different features on a page are influencing user behavior. For instance, you might find that the search tool placed on your landing page is getting you more conversions than the showcased product categories. Getting such insights can significantly help you eliminate unwanted features and focus more on the ones that convert users better.

Understanding User Behavior/Qualitative

Customer psychology typically lays down the fundamental ground rules for CRO elements to follow.

Two essential elements that aid in understanding customer psychology are:

1. Principles of Persuasion: Human beings are highly susceptible to suggestions and cognitive biases. To quote an example here, knowing that an item is popular amid the masses becomes even more popular no matter it’s actual worth. At the same time, the rarer and more exclusive an item is, the more valuable it becomes. Understanding such human psychology is essential to effectively define your goals and draft a CRO plan that adds to your company’s profits.

Furthermore, adding social proofs in the form of reviews and testimonials on your landing page or wherever relevant can add to your efforts. As most case studies published over the internet report, social proofing aids in more conversions!

2. Customer Behavior: A research carried out by NN Group states that most people browsing through the internet don’t read; they merely skim through the posts. Another study reveals that younger people are more interested in browsing through flat designs as they are more “trustworthy” than their older counterparts.

Studying the behavior of your target audience gives an insight into “why they do what they do” over the internet, and how you can use this information to build a better-converting website.

There are two primary ways to study the behavior of your target audience:

• Conducting tests and taking in-person interviews: Conducting tests and taking in-person interviews: Closely watching your customers interact with your website in real-time can give you significant data and insights on a plethora of things. These can include, the pages they most visit, the amount of time they spend on your website, the areas where they’re facing maximum problems such as finding difficulty in filling a form, unable to generate passwords, payment drop-off, and much more.
• Reading case studies and following guidelines on user behavior: Many existing pieces of research and case studies can vastly aid in understanding the collective psyche of your customers, which can, in turn, serve as an excellent source for improving your website’s overall look and feel and increase conversions.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is an integrated it tool that offers numerical data about your website’s overall performance, reports on visitor activities, engagement, traffic inflow sources, content performance, and ecommerce sales.

Customer Surveys

Customer surveys reveal information about the actual psychological thinking of customers – what convinced them to buy a product, what drew them away from the site, and so forth. It’s one of the best ways to learn strategies for effective site optimization.

Usability Tests

Usability testing is a smart way to evaluate the ease of using a website from a customer’s point of view, their engagement rate on a particular page, stumble spots and similar fall-off. It’s a powerful weapon that only aids in crafting a better user experience but increasing conversions.

User Interviews

Interviews provide deep insights about your site, respective pages, and target audience. They’re more about gathering qualitative data than its quantitative data. Interviews can effectively lead to drafting campaign-changing test hypotheses.

Stage 2: The Hypothesis Phase: Construct an Educated Hypothesis

Using the information gathered in the research phase, you can now draft your hypothesis. At its core, a hypothesis is a proposed explanation of your research that typically comprises of 3 parts.

• A particular change: based on insights derived from quantitative and qualitative data
• A particular effect: a goal, a conversion metric or a similar element, which needs improvement.
• A particular reason: the thinking behind why a specific change can bring about the desired effect.

Stage 3: The Prioritization Phase: Choose an Order

Here, a number of frameworks can help you through the process. Of these, the P.I.E. framework formulated by Chris Goward at WiderFunnel is what we most recommend:

Stage 4: The Testing Phase: A/B, Split, or Multivariate?

Before running a test, understand the basics:

What is statistical significance, and why is it critical?

How long do you need to run a test?

What should I use—A/B, Split, or Multivariate test?

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the practice of increasing the percentage of users who perform a desired action on a website. Desired actions can include purchasing a product, clicking ‘add to cart’, signing up for a service, filling out a form, or clicking on a link.

At a very high level, the CRO process involves:

• Conducting qualitative research and user behavior analysis
• Conducting quantitative research
• Conducting a heuristic evaluation for the site
• Conducting competitive analysis
• Prioritizing problem areas on the site and creating a conversion roadmap for your website (what pages need to be fixed)
• Creating new designs based on the testing hypothesis
• Conducting AB testing (or multivariate testing)
• Creating a testing hypothesis
• Analyzing the testing results

Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who complete a desired action on a website, during a time period. Any valuable engagement your visitors make may count as a desired action, as long as it fulfills your webpage’s goal. Remember, every page should have a primary goal.

Conversion Rate = (Number of Conversions / Total number of Visitors) *100

• Conversion rates differ wildly depending on the conversion goal (ad clicks, checkout completions, newsletter signups, etc.)
• Most people don’t share their conversion data publicly anyway.
• Every website, page, and audience is different.

There is no actual, ultimate industry figure you can rely on or compare yourself against with 100% confidence. Obsessing over an average percentage figure, and trying to squeeze as many conversions as possible just to stay in line with it, is not the best way to think about conversion rate optimization. Once again, you’re better off focusing on developing an in-depth understanding of what actually matters to your users, so you can give it to them and then, conversions will naturally follow.

Product pages have two conversion goals:

• Macro conversion rate for product pages is total orders for the website divided by the number of visitors who visit the product pages.
• Micro conversion rate for product pages is total clicks on the “add to cart” button divided by the number of visitors who visit the product pages.

The same concept applies if you are SaaS website. Your website conversion rate is the total number of monthly subscriptions divided by the total website monthly visitors. The SaaS pricing page, where you list the different plans for your product, has two conversion rates:

• SaaS pricing page macro conversion rate: total number of visitors who “subscribe” divided by the number of visitors who visit the pricing page.
• SaaS pricing page micro conversion rate: total number of visitors to click on the “subscribe” button on the page divided by the number of visitors who visit the pricing page.

Conversion Testing is the process of conducting an AB or multivariate test to increase the website conversion rate.

An iterative process by nature, CRO helps you in making assumptions about your website visitors and then testing these assumptions to measure how your market actually responds.

As a long-term process, CRO achieves sustainable, repeatable, and consistent increases on conversion rates through researching, testing, and analyzing visitors’ behaviors on your website. A good CRO program increases your site’s revenue month to month, reaching significant cumulative annual growth.

Being successful online is all about cultivating as many new customers as possible. With that fact in mind, it’s no wonder that many organisations assume that they should try to share their message with as many different people as possible. After all, the wider your reach, the more potential customers you can get.

Content marketing success starts with knowing how to find your target audience. After all, how can you begin creating content before you know who your audience is.

Good content marketing takes time. A lot of it. You can’t afford to waste that time with content that isn’t perfectly focused on your target market. You need to find who your people are.

In the modern, digital world of the day, we’re constantly bombarded with huge amounts of information. In fact, users on WordPress are producing about 82.6 million new posts a month. If you’re not out there speaking to a specific group of people, there’s a good chance your message will end up drowning in that sea of unfocused noise.

It’s true that great content tends to naturally attract an audience. It does not, however, guarantee that it will be the best audience for your brand. That means visitors that are likely to:

• Connect your content to your product.
• Buy your product because of your content.

Before you can start listing your target audience demographics or browsing through the types of target audience, you need to understand why you’re segmenting your list of would-be traffic in the first place. A target audience profile is simply a specific group of customers most likely to respond positively to your promotions, products, and services.

How To Understand Your Target Market

What do customers stand to gain from choosing us (instead of a competitor)? What features do you offer that no one else does? Is there something you can do better than anyone else?

Who is my competition? It’s likely you know who your obvious competitors are. However, some quick searches on Google and social media (particularly on Facebook and Twitter) can often reveal upstart competition you may not have been aware of. Try searching a keyword or two that are related to your industry.

Who are our current customers? If you’re not sure who buys your product or service, someone in your organization almost certainly does. Consider asking your company’s executives or sales teams for this information. It may also be necessary to segment your types of customers.

What problems does my company’s product or service solve? If you’ve been in business for any length of time, you should have some understanding of why your product or service exists. Your content should be related to that purpose, too (that means resisting the urge to share irrelevant memes just because they’re funny if it’s not connected to your mission, it doesn’t belong in your content marketing).

Often, your target audience analysis will be based on specific factors like location, age, income, and so on. For instance, if you’re a makeup company, there’s a good chance you’ll want to appeal to women who can afford your products and live in an area you can ship to.

So, why is a target audience important? The simple answer to that question is that the channels, language, and information you use to connect with your audience might not be as effective with one demographic as it is with another. Finding your target audience definition will help you to create a tone of voice that really speaks to your customer.

Essentially, a target audience analysis gives you direction for your marketing and ensures more consistency in your messaging, so you can build stronger relationships with customers. After all, if you know:

• What kind of people you’re talking to, you’ll know how to speak to them, where to find them, and what they want from your brand?
• How those people talk, you’ll be able to adapt your keywords and SEO strategies to rank for the right words and phrases.
• What your customers want, you’ll be able to adapt your value proposition so that your brand is relevant to a specific need or problem.
• How they compare and choose products, you can adjust your marketing campaigns to make your offering seem the most compelling.

Considering your target audience demographics

There are countless different types of target audience out there. In fact, the market for any single brand is likely to be unique to that company. After all, every company has a different set of values, a different purpose, and a one-of-a-kind strategy for sales. As you begin to discover the answer to the question: “Why is a target audience important?” you’ll learn that you often have to combine numerous characteristics to get an effective user persona. Aside from the things mentioned above, remember to look at:

• Income or job title.
• Family or relationship status.
• Needs and aspirations.
• Problems and concerns.
• Which social media websites they use.
• Favourite websites.
• Buying motivation.
• Buying concerns.

Personality-driven target audience profile

Personality is a critical component of effective marketing, and it’s something that should show up in all your campaigns. When you’re thinking about how to identify a target audience, it’s always worth thinking about what’s valuable to your customer, and what isn’t. How do your clients spend their free time? What issues do they care about? For instance, if you decide you want to connect with a millennial audience that cares about social responsibility, you might invest more into showing off your ethical side.

A geographical or “local” target audience profile:

There are very few brands that can afford to target customers from around the world. Not only is it more difficult to earn attention when your scope is that large, but you probably won’t be able to deliver your services and products to people from every country anyway. Unless you offer digital services, think about how you can connect with new customers locally. How far can you afford to travel to offer services, and what’s the maximum distance for shipping your products?

An age-based target audience profile:

People of different ages act in different ways. Interestingly, the person most likely to use your product won’t always be the person you target. For instance, if you’re conducting a target audience analysis for a baby, then your target audience is more likely to be parents, than newborns. When you don’t have an obvious age-range for your customers, as in the case above, try and keep your target market as narrow as possible. For instance, if you sell enterprise-level software, research the most likely ages of CEOs in your industry. This will help you to design promotional strategies that appeal to the right age-range.