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The Long Road to ROI is Paved with KPIs and Storytelling

February 25, 2014 by Daniel Laws 2 Comments

The road to ROI is paved with metrics but metrics don’t always resonate with management or the business’s goals and objectives.  The metrics often fall short on telling management where they stand with regard to goals versus actuals, what progress has been made, and how the number can help to guide the business.   In my opinion, mapping out the KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and storytelling through data visualization is one of the best ways to compel management to act. The long road toward data visualization starts farther upstream than most people think so I’ve got a few high-level recommendations to get you started! 

Acquiring the Data

The most critical step to killer KPI visualization is capturing the metrics for your chosen KPIs. In some case, metrics and formulas are needed to calculate KPIs and it’s important to acquire the necessary data. The best way to start the process of acquiring the data is to use an effective measurement plan.

As part of the measurement plan, you need to consider the configuration of the analytical solution which is capturing the data. Let’s be clear, this is not the first step in the process but still a major part of the process to killer KPI dashboards or data visualization. [Read more…]

Analyzing the Analytics

February 4, 2014 by Ralf Haberich 2 Comments

Everybody is aware of some simple facts in the Analytics landscape: An increase in Page Impressions is good. A high bounce rate is bad. Are you sure?

Word cloud pertaining to businesses and analytics

Shouldn´t you educate yourself on additional synergies within those facts? It is too naïve to say that generating more Page Impressions than the day or the month before is a positive development in your digital channels. An important aspect of Key Performance Indicators for example is that they all should be set in comparison with a time interval to be able to judge the growth or decrease of the figures.

In many metrics this is a key aspect. So, again: is an increase of Server Calls good? Simple answer is: you do not know. If you want to find out – compare. Not only with your historical data (and then of course with the same time frame a short period ago: yesterday with the same day a week ago, instead of yesterday with the day before). You also have to compare your data with the market trend. [Read more…]

eCommerce 101 – Part 1: Getting Started

February 14, 2012 by Chris Elvery 2 Comments

In this series I want to give the benefit of my experiences as both a traditional and online retailer and laterally an ICT Specialist, who has worked with numerous ecommerce businesses of all shapes and sizes.

1. Getting started

So what is ecommerce?

A stupid place to start you may ask, however the definition of this term is wide and varied and whilst it has become to mean selling “things” (mainly products) electronically, in actuality it covers the whole gamut of online trading – from marketing, selling, delivering, managing and everything else besides (see Wikipedia who say it much better than I could). This is relevant because in my experience many potential businesses see the “selling” part as the be all and end all of ecommerce without due consideration for all that that entails (just think of any traditional “bricks & mortar” business – it’s so much more than just “selling stuff”).

Why go online?

The web opens up the opportunity for businesses to specialise in niche areas and find potential purchasers of that product from all over the world. It also provides the opportunity for more main stream businesses to gain customers from a wider catchment than just their traditional “bricks & mortar” outlets. They see the web as a relatively low cost way of doing this.

Is there a market?

Great ideas are subjective. As such making the decision to develop or source a product to sell online needs to be based on more than gut feel. The beauty of the web is that you can gather so much data to aid your decision making process. This market research is absolutely essential in order to validate your ‘gut feeling or convince you the idea is a no go.

So what sort of market research are we talking about – Proper digital market research

  •  Find out if there are  existing competitors selling related products- (this is actually a good sign – where there are competitors there are customers therefore there is money to be made). Specific tools will give you some real tangible data on how much certain companies are investing in Google Advertising spend.
  •  Find out how people are searching for these types of product or service and in what volume. Analysis of Google Data can reveal numbers of monthly searches on related topics, products, services etc – this tool can give you an indication – Google Keyword Planner
  • Analyse competitors to see how well they rank for related keywords and phrases in this space. Specialist tools can analyse competitor sites to identify how much traffic your competitors are receiving. Further analysis can reveal the commercial value of that traffic by overlaying Google Pay Per Click commercial values etc.

Based on all of this tangible data you should be in a far better position to answer the key question – is there a market?

If it’s a completely new ideas, product, service and there is no competition online then it woudl be advisable to consider market testing before investing large amounts of money in a web build.

Think, Plan, Do, Review

Planning is key. This may be an extension of an existing business or it may be an entirely fresh venture – either way, having a plan with Goals, Targets and costs is key to success – as the old adage goes – “failing to plan is planning to fail”.

Have realistic expectations

“I expect to sell £1M of goods off of my new website but only want to spend £500 on a site and have no money for marketing”. A true story. Whilst there may be examples across the web where a business has managed to achieve this, it’s pretty rare. Whilst the cost of entry is considerably lower than more traditional retailing routes, there’s still a cost of acquisition.

Choose your route to market

Many business I meet who want to start trading online go straight for the bespoke ecommerce build or shopping cart plug-in, as it’s what their developer told them to do. Maybe as a way of testing the water you should look at selling your products through someone else’s site? Through Amazon? Through ebay? Or through one of the many Pay as You Go Cloud based ecommerce solutions. You don’t have to go down the full blown ecommerce platform from Day 1, particularly if cash is tight.

What products?

I come across businesses all the time that see great potential for their product, but haven’t properly researched the market eg selling fresh food products; selling alcohol outside of the UK, high value products sent through normal post, selling concrete ornaments over the web, where the carriage was twice the price of the product! You get the idea!

 

 

 

 

 

 

How do I set my price?

One of the areas I’ve seen considerable growth in since the recession is manufacturing businesses wanting to develop their own route to the customer as well as their traditional route of selling to the wholesaler/ retailer. This can be fraught with danger – you don’t want to upset your traditional market by under cutting them, in some instances you don’t want to sell the same products at the same price. Obviously not an issue for a retail only concern, however you still have to get your pricing right. Typical retail pricing in the UK market is cost (e.g. £10) x 2.4 to give you retail including VAT (£24) – i.e. 100% (from £10-£20) markup or a 50% margin. This is all well and good, but there’s a whole bunch of considerations:

  1. What price are other people selling at online?
  2. Does that include P&P or not?
  3. Is it a sensible retail price point?
  4. Can I offer discounts for multiple purchases or offer free delivery for a certain order value? 

Obviously different business areas work to different margins, typically online businesses work to lower margins – it just depends on the market you’re in, so lots of research is required!

How will I fulfil the orders?

Back to the £1M of turnover off of a £500 website example above. Even if you could manage to achieve this, do you have the infrastructure and personnel in place to fulfil? After all that’s a lot of infrastructure. It’s also an awful lot of traffic to the site which means serious investment in SEO and Social Media. In the example, it was a £20 product with an average anticipated spend of £50 – so that’s 20,000 orders – or 385 a week and with the seasonality of the product it could well have been that 10,000 of those orders came in the golden 8 weeks up to Christmas! That’s a lot of picking, packing, invoicing etc. And if you haven’t got the systems to handle this, it’s an impossible task! You could consider a fulfilment house, of which there are many, including Amazon fulfilment, who, for a fee, will handle it all for you. 

How will I generate the traffic?

Also, the traffic required to generate 20,000 orders, even at a very generous 5% conversion to sale (the average is 2% or less and for most ecommerce plays it’s under 1%), you’ll need to drive 400,000 visitors to the site per year (8000 a week) and that’s a lot of time and effort!

Next time, we’ll look at considerations when developing your strategy.

2007 Web Analytics Data – Web Analytics World

December 31, 2007 by Manoj Jasra Leave a Comment

Below is Web Analytics World’s 2007 web analytics data from Google Analytics. This year’s number ones included Google, KPI and our Ultimate Web Analytics Comparison.

1.45 Pages Per Visit
77.90% Bounce Rate
79.20% New Visits
1.16 minutes per Visit

Top 10 Referral Share (973 Total)

  1. google 48.43%
  2. direct 17.50%
  3. google.com 4.21%
  4. kaushik.net 1.76%
  5. enquiro.com 1.46%
  6. yahoo 0.94%
  7. searchbrains.com 0.89%
  8. searchengineguide.com 0.77%
  9. bloglines.com 0.76%
  10. netvibes.com 0.70%

Top 15 Keyword Referral Share (16,460 Total)

  1. kpi 2.01%
  2. facebook vs orkut 1.61%
  3. orkut vs facebook 1.41%
  4. webtrends 1.27%
  5. web analytics comparison 1.09%
  6. facebook groups 0.99%
  7. manoj jasra 0.68%
  8. how google makes money 0.55%
  9. web analytics 0.51%
  10. omniture actionsource 0.48%
  11. what is seo 0.43%
  12. facedoubles 0.42%
  13. web analytics world 0.42%
  14. facebook photo upload tool 0.37%
  15. mobile facebook 0.36%

Top 15 Pages – Page Views Share (Total 640)

  1. Ultimate Web Analytics Comparison 12.67%
  2. Web Analytics World -Home 6.90%
  3. Social Networking: Facebook vs. Orkut 1.84%
  4. How to Create a Successful Facebook Group 1.67%
  5. VisiStat vs. Google Analytics 1.57%
  6. How Google Makes Money 1.45%
  7. Measuring Key Performance Indicators 1.26%
  8. How to setup a Podcast and Embed Audio 1.18%
  9. Web Page Load Time 1.16%
  10. Future of SEM: What WILL and WILL NOT Matter 0.97
  11. Omniture ActionSource: Advanced Flash Tracking 0.95%
  12. 21 Reasons Why You Do NOT Need Web Analytics 0.86%
  13. Future of Search Marketing 0.78%
  14. Google vs. Yahoo vs. MSN 0.78%
  15. Top 10 Mobile Facebook Apps 0.76%

Top 10 Browser Share (27 Total)

  1. Firefox 48.03%
  2. Internet Explorer 45.78%
  3. Safari 3.43%
  4. Opera 1.64%
  5. Mozilla 0.38%
  6. Camino 0.37%
  7. Netscape 0.14%
  8. Mozilla Compatible Agent 0.12%
  9. Konqueror 0.05%
  10. gzip 0.02%

Top 10 Country Referral Share (154 Total)

  1. United States 51.71%
  2. Canada 7.97%
  3. United Kingdom 7.01%
  4. India 5.46%
  5. Australia 2.73%
  6. Germany 2.23%
  7. Netherlands 1.73%
  8. France 1.48%
  9. Belgium 1.24%
  10. Italy 1.16%

Web Analytics Metrics: Travel Sites

September 10, 2007 by Manoj Jasra Leave a Comment

In this multi-part series we are going to analyze numerous websites across different categories to help our readers better understand what metrics they should be measuring for their own website. Metrics cannot be reported without a proper web analytics implementation therefore it’s important to be as thorough as possible because it’s better to over collect data than under collect.

Today we are going to be looking at metrics to track for travel websites and for this post we have selected 2 travel sites which we are going to analyze. The first is a travel portal for visitors in British Columbia Canada, BCTravelGuide.ca and the second is a website dedicated to Caribbean vacations, Sandals.com.

BCTravelGuide.ca

Instantly we noticed that BC Travel Guide is categorized by Regions and Activities in British Columbia therefore it is important for this site’s owners to be able to understand the popularity of these various categorical segments. Metrics needed to be tracked for each segment include visits to each individual region/activity, the amount of time spent per region/activity and the referring sources. Measuring these metrics will help this website’s owner better understand which sections visitors find most engaging allowing them to capitalize on the popularity with additional offerings or advertising. Furthermore these metrics also help site owners understand the areas visitors find least interesting and are therefore are performing the poorest.

BC Travel Guide also offers 2 calls to actions located on every page which allows visitors to list their BC Travel business for free in BC Travel Guide’s directory. A few different metrics can be measured here including a comparison between the 2 calls to actions as to which attracts the most clickthroughs. Secondly, it is very important to measure the clicks down to actual conversions (in this case the number of free listings created). I would recommend creating a funnel which measures All Site Visitors >> Clicks to “Free Business Listings” >> Listing Creations.

BC Travel Guide also has an “Advertise” call to action and similar to “Free Listings” this site should measure the number of clicks to this call to action and the number of real requests to advertise (emails, form completions). This site also has a great opportunity to experiment with design and location of their “Advertise” call to action with a simple A/B Test.

 

Finally we noticed that the last step of this site’s navigational process is to land on a listing for a given Region/Activity combination. For end users who have their businesses listed in BC Travel Guide I am sure it is important for them to know how many visitors are actually looking at their listing as well as how many are clicking through to their website.

Sandals.com


From the menu above from Sandals.com you can see that they offer their visitors many different options to book vacations. By implementing the ability to track the performance of each site section Sandals.com will have the ability to comparatively see the popularity of each section. Additionally in their analytics suite they could run a page popularity report for an entire year and quickly pick out seasonality trends for each site section.

 

Many travel websites allow visitors to check rates and availability for their destinations. Each element of the ‘Availability’ form on the left is an opportunity for Sandals.com to better understand their visitors. The web analytics should be setup so that users have the ability to segment the reports by all destinations and resorts as well as check in/check out dates. Why is this important? Imagine that through analytics reports analysis that you are able to figure out that visitors enjoy booking Caribbean cruises from May to June. By leveraging this wealth of information Sandals.com could offer more information on cruises or even discounts during this time, making visitors’ site experience extremely remarkable.

 

The next metrics are both related to conversions on Sandals.com. The first is Sandals.com’s toll free number. Although phone numbers can be difficult to track using web analytics, the leads that they generate can be captured by a CRM and be imported back into your analytics suite. If your toll free number is unique only to your website, then the number of leads generated by the number can be attributed directly back to the w
ebsite. The site’s second conversion is a “7 days Sweepstakes.” Not only should you capture the number of people who actually entered the email address, but the email address themselves for promotional purposes later on.

 

The last couple of metrics that I’d like to point out for Sandals.com to measure are: the number of log-ins (total and by users), time between log-ins and activity after login. Creating a community is an excellent way to offer targeted content to your visitors as well as remembering their preferences. However if you are noticing a very low number of log-ins then you should consider offering more content outside of the login or more perks for creating an account.

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