Blackbeaks Blog….All things Analytics

I was in a client workshop last week in Chicago and I really had to get back to basics. Being a consultant in the web analytics field gives me the opportunity to work with some of the brightest minds in the space as well as with clients who are very advanced with their analytics. However it’s always a great feeling being able to help folks that are early in their adoption of web analytics tools and processes and still get the wow effect with some of the simplest insights you can glean from the tools.

This article reminded me exactly of what I was doing last week in Chicago and hosting workshops talking about the simple stuff that Avinash discusses brings you right back down to earth. I’ve been looking to the future of web analytics, debating the finer points of engagement and talking shop with some real indistry stars but it’s easy to get caught up in all that and forget that most folks simply want to know how to use the tools to get some payback. So I thought I’d share the insights from my Chicago workshop and hope you can learn from it.

The company were using Google Analytics (GA) – the free system you can add to your site which is pretty good to get some decent insights.

Benchmarking

The first thing I showed the company was an opportunity that they weren’t taking advantage of, benchmarking themselves against their competition. While it will never be an apples for apples comparison benchmarking at least gives you some idea of how you’re doing. In GA you can switch on a benchmarking service by agreeing to allow Google to aggregate your visitor data – something you should carefully consider if you don’t want Google to have your information. However the trade off is very good. Some data from a website I work with is below and shows that I am doing slightly better than average in the industry that the site is in in terms of visits.

You can do the benchmarking by clicking on Visitors > Benchmarking.

There are other ways to benchmark yourself like Alexa.com which will give you direct comparisons to other specific sites (competition for instance) however the panels are quite small and US centric.

Looking for trends

The second thing I tried to show was how to look for trends. It’s sometimes quite difficult to spot the good stuff. One thing I do is work with standard deviations to allow me to notice which trends to look for – it goes back to my days as a quality analyst back in the early 1990′s but it works very well. I’ll discuss how to apply standard deviations to your KPIs in another article as it requires a full explanation, however the basic idea is that you look at all your numbers over time and work out the upper limit and the lower limit of your average numbers. In this way you can determine whether the trends are “out of the ordinary”. Using standard deviations I determined that the following trend had a peak in early Feb that was “out of the ordinary” limits.

The red circled area was above normal levels so like any good analyst I asked why and looked a little bit further. The first thing you need to do in this situation is put the trend into context. Which traffic source is causing the lift?

I had a look in GA at the Referring sites (Traffic Sources > Referring Sites) to see if there were any other trends I could spot. In other words I drilled down and I started looking specifically over the date period I was interested in.

As you can see from this trend there is a much clearer trend in the referring sites list. This meant that one or more of the sites in question had affected the numbers over the time period in question. Drilling down further into the top referring sites list which appears below the graphs in Google showed that one site in particular (and I hide the name so that the numbers can’t be linked to any companies) drove much more traffic over the given time period than anything else.

I had now found the reason for my peak in traffic. The next thing I had to do was monetize this, otherwise the data is simply nice to know.

Monetizing the referring source

I checked how many actions came as a direct result of the individual referrer which is quite easy to do in GA. I found out that 11 actions had come as a direct result of the traffic lift which resulted in a value of $1650. This is not a lot of money but tracing back what happened over that time period was very interesting.

A branding campaign had happened in which one particular site had basically allowed my clients to put free advertising on the referrers site. The free advertising wasn’t designed with any sale in mind and yet 11 actions had taken place resulting in revenue. This was very interesting for everyone concerned and really opened their eyes.

To wrap this article up I would say that I did go into a lot more depth and would happily share more of such examples if you feel this is useful. I’ve really only covered looking at Reach. Engage, Activate and nurture haven’t been covered here. However what I’d suggest first is that you try this out yourself. Happy drilling!

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