A full house was in attendance for this SES NY session in which panelists discussed how to squeeze the most out of analytics and turn data into action.
Specifically, Avinash Kaushik, Author, Blogger, Analytics Evangelist from Google shared the following.
3 Tips to Getting More out of Analytics
1. Measure bounce rate
As Avinash described this is essentially when someone comes to your website, vomits and leaves. OR in a less disgusting but not as funny way this is a visitor who having not found what they were looking for left the site immediately.
Be sure to measure bounce rates to understand the number of individuals who are abandoning the website. While some of the traffic will be irrelevant and therefore always likely to bounce, the majority are bouncing because the information they want (while it may be on your website) is not at their fingertips.
Reduce bounce rates by trying the following:
a. Stop sending traffic to the home page. It doesn’t make sense and it doesn’t work. Please listen to your online marketing consultants and update programs accordingly.
b. Create unique landing pages. While sending traffic to product pages is better than the home page, it’s still not ideal. Create a page that is specific to what the visitor searched on.
i.e. If someone searches on tulip bouquets and they click on your Ad, they should be taken to a unique landing page about tulip bouquets, not a general page displaying all the kinds of floral bouquets you offer.
To be quite honest, this person does care about daisies. If they did, they would have searched for daisies. If you make it difficult for your visitor to find the tulips, they are going to hit the back button and find your competitor.
2. Stop the Ego Bids
Don’t define your keywords based on what you want to rank for. Define your keywords based on what phrases convert. Last time I checked, the warm fuzzy feeling of an ego ranking doesn’t pay the bills.
Help whoever is behind the ego keyword bidding understand the money the company is missing out on by going after ego keywords and you should be able to overcome this hurdle.
3. Experiment or Go Home
Don’t let the Hippos get you down! Everyone needs to be testing variations of the campaign.
A hippo, defined as HIghest Paid Person’s Opinion, can often drive the direction of a campaign even against best practices.
The way to create change is to love your hippo (internal or client side), understand the thought process behind his/her direction for the campaign and then work on a compromise.
And testing is just the way to accomplish this. Use A/B testing to find out what visitors respond to. Test by sending 75% of the traffic to the Hippo page and 25% to the test page.
Monitor and measure results to determine which ad and/or landing page drives the most conversions. If it’s the test page then you have the data to back up making a change.
At the end of the day, web analytics should be leveraged to help the business make more money.
Determine what metrics are going to help achieve this goal and then measure, report and refine.
