google analytics – Veronica Stenberg

Forget monthly reports – 7 reasons why you need dashboards for your business

Veronica — Mon, 19 Oct 2020 06:42:03 +0000

The purpose of a dashboard can be different depending on what you want to achieve. By applying specific dashboard reports for different target groups within an organisation, you help people who may not be used to working with analysis to more easily ask questions and make decisions that are based on data. Especially if you have key data in various platforms such as Google Analytics, a CRM, a booking plattform and so on that you need to be able to allocate into one comprehensive view.

There are a number of different opportunities in relation to following up on your marketing activities for both business management, sales, CX and the marketing department to understand perfomance and what you should act on in the near future. And by near future, I mean today.

Businesses often use a dashboard to identify and highlight key data in a format that is easily accessible, visual and easy to understand. By using a dashboard, you can avoid silo reporting of important data and you can get a holistic view of your business’ digital presence, performance and how it affects your business.

It is easy to adapt dashboard views to different target groups within an organization. If you have more than one agency they can also report into the same tool and give the business one report on how the digital presence performs in its entirety.

A dashboard provides focus and increases awareness of the role of the digital presence for the business. It enables you to work actively and efficiently with data that is available from more than one plattform. By utilizing automatic reporting you can quicker make decisions that will impact performance. From decisions to change focus in various marketing channels, redistribute marketing budgets to identify new needed actions based on data that is up to date. A crucial component in being able to work more data-driven is to actually make decisions here and now and not 6 weeks after receiving a monthly report. Then you base those decisions and actions on by then historic data. The faster you act the better you can increase performance.

From a business perspective, there are many benefits of utilizing dashboards to follow up, work with, and act on data:

Save time

By reducing the administration time to get the data you need for your reporting. As the data is ofter located in more than one plattform in order to get a holistic view of business performance.

Increase organisational efficiency

By reducing the time to obtain key data, and manually generate reports in order to analyse results and perfomance. Your organization becomes more efficient and can act faster from insight to executing any measures needed to optimize business results.

Get ahead start against your competitors

By giving your team the tools to effectively follow up on performance and act, they can thus spend more time and focus on working towards achieving the business’ goals.

Identify new potential

By actively working and following up on performance, your business will be able to identify new potential to increase sales/conversions, reduce friction in the conversion flow or act to redistribute marketing budgets accordingly to where the potential is.

Increase collaboration within your organisation

Place your business goals in the forefront for your team by making key performance indicators and data accessible and visible within the organisation. This increases the focus on the common goals of the business. An important key in getting everyone to work in the same direction.

Create a customer-focused mindset

Today it is increasingly important to follow up on the various customer journeys and experiences. By building a dashboard that handles customer-related KPI’s, your business can more quickly follow up on and view specific activities from the perspective of your customers.

Make the right priorities

When it comes to the digital presence, there are endless possibilities today in relation to what you can do. From testing new platforms, run experiments through A/B testing and more. By following up on performance against your strategy and correlating KPI’s, your business knows what activities to focus on and not. Since you will gain what works and what dosen’t. This ensures that both budgets and time is invested in the right activities for your business.

Photo by inlytics on Unsplash

How to start working with data to increase sales

Veronica — Mon, 21 Nov 2016 05:27:08 +0000

A cornerstone in your marketing activities is to work with the data you have. You don’t need to be a senior web analyst or a data scientist to do this. Today a Marketing Manager or CMO need to have the knowledge about key metrics and the competence to harness the power of data to transform it into ROI action for the business they market and work for.

Larger companies have already started working with more advanced techniques, such as Machine Learning, predictive analysis and so forth and every company, no matter how large or small, will have to improve the way and also increase the understanding of data, to be part of the future. Being data driven is now a competitive advantage and in the very near future it will be standard procedure for being able to stay within the competition for a customers attention or will to purchase.

Here is a simple framework that anyone can master that will help you start working with data, to turn it into insight and action. Without being complicated.

1/ Start small and use what you got
You probably have a website analytics software and perhaps a customer database of some sort. Establish what you have and then how you can use this for insight for simple improvements.

2/ Focus and ask questions
Remove the clutter of information by creating questions that are relevant to get the answers to. Such as:

What issues can you find on key pages such as decision and conversion process
Can you A/B test or test a new solution?
What patterns can you see?
Is there a trend?
Can you identify 3-5 tasks to test or changes to make?
(for more inspiration for questions, read this beginners guide to web analytics for businesses)
Can you segment the data you have?
Can you use the data in another platform? (for example CRM data to find look-a-likes on Facebook)
Can you ask your customer service department for insights and then cross-check with the data?

3/ Set aside 2 hours/week for this
Make this part of your routine and non negotiable. Rather spend 2 hours/week on this then emails. What activity will grant the most successful outcome for your work?

4/ Implement small changes and actions
Each week, identify 3-5 or even just one thing to change on your website, in your communication etc. And then make that change.

5/ Do this for 3 months
then compare before and after in terms of sales, customer satisfaction and other key metrics.

THE END GOAL: delight your customers/visitor/subscribers

IMAGE COPYRIGHT: broadly.com

How to optimise your business online presence or service (manuscript)

Veronica — Mon, 26 Sep 2016 05:30:56 +0000

If you are looking to improve your online presence, either it be through a website re-design or just to refine and improve your service experience and offering online, this is a manuscript you can use to help you in the process. Feel free to subtract, add and refine

Overarching questions & material

Information about your customer journey
Path to purchase
Internal purchase process – what internal touch points do you have for a sale to go through? who are involved?
How and when do you communicate with your customer during their purchase process? who does it? (department and responsibility)
Who are your biggest competitors? and how do your company differentiate from them?

Organisational questions (for internal use – meant to be answered by your company)

What is your biggest challenge/s today? and why?
Why do your business have a website?
What role does the website have in your business?
How can and should your company website can support your business?How do you measure the success today? (with the website and also your business – what is success)
What are your KPIs?
How can we measure success in the future?

Target audience

Who are they? define target groups (i.e working moms, business owners etc)
What do they need? what motivations do they have? What do they want? (Contact, book, buy, ask questions or answer to questions, learn more?) Define the pain points.
What “problem” solves does your business solve per target audience? (how do your business ease the pain or remove it completely?)
What information do you have about the existing customer today? surveys / studies?

Current site
Evaluate it against your current service offering with your customers in mind. Focus on their needs and questions and how the website can cater for this – within seconds:

What pages are important in their journey/path to purchase (if you are unsure, see the previous article on content audit)
Geographically – where do they come from and the service is available in their city?
Contact – who should they call? When? How? Are the contact details obvious and easily accessible if you offer your service in more then one location?
Can you offer price calculations for your service (if its a service that needs to be quoted individually you can ask for certain information beforehand and offer a rough pricing)
How do your company win your customers trust? (Testimonials from current customers, photos of people in environments they help in?)

Current customer
What is the goal of the website for a current customer, what should they do and what want to have to to do that? How do you take care of your customers today? Do you want them to buy more services from you? And how do they want to take care of them? what information do they need?

Your current customers – what do you know about them?
What percentage of today’s customer portfolio returns and purchases services from you again?
How long is the life cycle of the customers?
Why does a customer leave your business and choose another provider? (is it location, service offering? availability?)
How happy is your customer with your service and business today?
When a customer leaves you for another service provider – do you know which competitor they choose over you?
If you have more then one service and target audience – are there services that overlap between the different target audiences? Ie are there are solutions/services that different target audiences can buy from you?

Potential new customer – what should they do? Call? Fill forms? Book a time? Depending on the service you offer online – pin down what you want a potential new customer to do, i.e a person evaluating different options prior purchase – what do they need? and how can your website cater for this?

The sales process – applicable even if your website is generating leads for your sales reps or department:
What is your conversion rate today?
What is a lead? call / fill a the contact form / calculate a price / book or download?
How many leads do you get from the site today? And what happens then? and do you track how many leads are converted to customers?
What is the process? How do I book a time? How the process works today?

Or if your website sell gods or services – what is the process? before and after purchase?

Quick questions for your website analytics;

Where visitors come from?
Where do they leave the site?
What primary pages are important in the purchase process? investigate how they perform
Conversion rate? goal?
Geography – where do they come from?
Devices (in relation to mobile first)
Average time, pv / how long they stay? (on key pages)
Bounce rate on key pages
Exit rate on key pages
What keywords do your visitors use when searching and ending up on your website?
What exit rate do your lead form or sales pages have? (the pages that close a deal?)
What content do the visitors engage with? (download, forms, click to call, external and internal link clicks, etc)

Other digital touch points (not only your website)

What other digital touch points do your company have?
Social channels?
Newsletters?
Paid media?
How do they tie together? what purpose does each channel have?
Do they deliver? and what?
Are they on brand?
How can they support your company better?
Do you measure traffic and conversions from these?

Image copyright by: fleximize.com

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A beginners guide to web analytics, online business and website performance review

Veronica — Mon, 12 Sep 2016 05:10:27 +0000

This article is for anyone taking the first step to understand how website analytics can be helpful for your company to improve sales or leads though actively working with your website. It’s a list of initial and very simple questions you can use to evaluate performance and get insight for what actions you need to take in order to improve conversions and engagement.

The purpose of this article is to help someone who is an absolute beginner to connect the dots between analytics data and your website.

Web analytics is about asking questions and finding answers. If you log in to your Google Analytics account without a clear purpose and question to answer – you can spend hours just looking at numbers. Before you open up the the tab to explore how your website is performing – you should define what is important for you to get answers to so you can decide what action to take.

Before you start, make a list of what pages are important in your customers journey/path to purchase and make a note of one primary action or purpose for each page. (referred to as primary pages below)

I assume that you have the following in place to make the full use of this article:

Google Analytics (or any other web analytics tool)
Goals set-up for sales or leads (if you have leads – you should assign a value for your company on these)
Events – tro track what people do on your website (such as click to call, which email addresses that are emailed to, if and which documents are downloaded etc)
Internal traffic from inside your own company is removed (and any other sources that may be relevant – for example if you have a consultant or agency that help you out)
Google Search Console activated

Overarching questions:

Where visitors come from? and what is the breakdown between, organic, referral, direct and paid?
Look at the breakdown between new and returning visitors
Have traffic increased or decreased?
Where they leave the site? (and is this device or technology specific?)
Conversion rate?
Geography – where do they come from?

Primary pages:

What primary pages are important in the purchase process? investigate how they perform using these questions:

Bounce rate
Page views
Amount of visitors
Time on site
Do they download/pay/view a video/read that article – or whatever else your purpose is for this page? (Do the visitors engage with the content on these pages)
Exit rate
What technology do they use (device, browser) and is there any conclusion that can be made from this information in relation to the above questions?
Traffic source
What keywords drive the most traffic to your page?

And once you have your answers – you assign actions and implement any necessary changes – otherwise what is the point of having a web analytics tool if you don’t actively work with your website?

Image source: latestfashiontrends.over-blog.com

How to create a KPi framework

Veronica — Mon, 15 Aug 2016 06:55:24 +0000

The key to knowing if you are investing in the right marketing activities and have a website that works for your business is to set your purpose and goals and have your customers pain points/needs and journey (as in path to purchase and beyond it) well defined.

Once you have established what your end goal with your maketing activities is (eg sale, lead etc) you can create a simple KPI framework that will help you understand if your website needs improving to investing and evaluating marketing activities which should follow the flow of the different states.

You will find weak points and be able to improve upon:

content
improve SEO
landing pages
conversions
marketing activities and material

A quick and simple way to do this is to use the following three areas:

Awareness
Engagement
Conversion
Loyalty/after care

See this as a framework to defining the most important questions you want answered on a regular basis and important enough to be monitored. The benefit of looking holistically and mapping this against your customers path to purchase, (eg. see, think, do and care – or any other preferred model) is that you look beyond the end goal of just generating sales.

In order to be able to improve your entire customer journey and your marketing activities you need to understand the said journey to be able to build relevant content for each stage, that means you cannot only focus on generating sales as a KPI, in order to get to the end KPI, in this case a sale.

Then you add KPI’s that corresponds with each area. For example:

Awareness: CTR in bought media, unique visitors, search on specific keywords such as your business name, reach in social media

Engagement: page visits (specific pages for this), sign-ups for newsletter, follow on social media channels, online brand mentions, return visits, time on specific pages, (pre-purchase) search on your business name + product, bounce rate etc

Conversion: lead or sale generated (value, average order value, etc) download of an app, document download etc. ROAS (be sure to add any agency fees into this calculation)

Loyalty: return visits, page visits (specific pages for this such as customer service, after care instructions etc) This can also be follows and sign-ups that you can track from people who have purchased from you (however in this case exclude them from the engagement section)

Add a further layer to this, perform the exercise per target audience that you target and perform the exercise specifically for each target group if you have more then one segment or use:

New/potential customer
Existing customer
(or your target groups if applicable)

If you want a simple KPI framework template to help you get started, I’ve prepared one for you here.

Action points

This is what you need to do in order to achieve this. If you know your customer and your website fairly well, you will have a draft ready within a few hours which you can refine, build on or modify as you go along:

Identify your customer journey, map it out using a simple model that works for you (for example see, think, do and care is straightforward and easy to follow and corresponds well with the above model)
Choose 1-5 performance metrics to track for each step – which is the answer to your questions.
Track through a report or simple Google Analytics dashboard, or anyway that works for you
Evaluate, optimize and improve upon both your website, media investment and modify the KPI framework as you go along

What is attribution modeling?

Veronica — Fri, 15 Aug 2014 13:38:33 +0000

The word attribution modeling have been bouncing around in the digital marketing world for some time now. It may sound like this is something very complicated that only the analytical-uber-menschen-geeks can grapple and handle. But alas, its i not. In this article I will help you understand what attribution modeling is and how this can help you measure the effect of your marketing campaigns in a better way.

Also called: marketing attribution, attribution marketing

Attribution modeling is a method which helps you understand which digital marketing channels (your digital touchpoints) that have been involved in the process of a customer purchase, lead or sign-up. (Whatever you define and track as a conversion).

Today a visitor can find their way to your website via an banner ad, return to your website via a recommendation for the product from someone on Facebook, return via your AdWords campaigns and lastly use a search engine to find their way back – and finally buy that product they have been researching all this time.

This journey may not necessary be this linear, the same customers are more likely to bounce around your various digital “touch-points” aka digital marketing campaigns, your social media pages or website – before they make that final purchase.

This is where attribution modeling comes in handy – because by using this method you can:

Gain insight to distribute your marketing budgets accordingly for better ROI
Improve your campaigns or remove completely from your marketing mix – where you discover poor interaction, influence and results
Compare your digital marketing channels results against each other
Revise your CPA (cost per acquisition – e.g the cost in marketing per order generated from it)
Reduce time to conversion
Understand your customers journey better
Re-schedule your campaigns
If you run AdWords campaigns, compare keywords against each other – to see which generates more sales, thus allocate the budget accordingly

To use attribution modeling you set up rules which assigns different levels credit (or points) to a particular channel depending on the interaction and thus get the credit for the conversion (sale, lead) in the end. Then the rules you apply calculates the credits (points) and then visualizes this information for you.

For example – you can build rules/models that assigns credit/points to the last channel the customer when through before a sale. To re-use the example above;

A visitor can find their way to your website via an banner ad, return to your website via a recommendation for the product from someone on Facebook, return via your AdWords campaigns and lastly use a search engine to find their way back to the product page – and finally buy that product they have been researching all this time.

Then search would get 100% of the credit/points.
Or you can build models/rules that assigns credit to the first interaction, or all interactions, time, positions etc.

You can utilize this functionality in Google Analytics Premium.

To find out more about attribution modeling:

Learn more about the different types of models and why they are useful.

How to use attribution modeling in Google Analytics (free account) – with the help of Excel

Image source and copyright: www.oxyma.nl

How to find more information on mobile devices & visitors – a resource guide to upgrading your website

Veronica — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 16:51:56 +0000

A resource guide to where to find the information on what you need to know when considering upgrading your website and digital assets to reach further then just desktop devices. This is my go to list for information. I hope you find it useful.

Ourmobileplanet
Get to know the mobile adaption and penetration in your country or region, compare data year on year to predict trends in your region. Thus the needs you require to cater for, in terms of information availability on your website, marketing activities, technology, and user habits etc.

How to go mobile
Review and experience your current website through a mobile device, this will help you with ideas when transforming your website to an adaptive or responsive solution.

Google Keyword Tool
A great way to look up the potential increase of visitors from mobile devices alone. Just choose mobile devices only when you enter your credentials into the form.

Google mobile ads
Learn more about how to create mobile campaigns and advertisement and how secure your brand perception on mobile devices.

Get to know your website visitors/customers
Investigate your Google Analytics account (or other web analytics software you use). Look at the user statistics under Audience – Mobile – Overview. You will get an overview of the total amount of visitors during your specified period of time and how many accessed your website from a desktop versus mobile device – during that time period.
Compare with the amount of desktop visitors – then it’s up to you to make a decision if you think this is enough to justify a rebuild of your website – or that you don’t need a adaptive/responsive upgrade of your website.

A note on adaptive versus responsive webdesign

Adaptive means that you decide on a set of sizes for your images and content and which size the website should display depending on the screensize of the device, i.e you have three sets of the same image that are presented depending if its a desktop, an iPad or an iPhone visiting your website.

Responsive is more fluid, you design without a set width and height, your canvas, in this case your website has no borders, and you re-arrange and re-scale content accordingly to devices depending on a set of variables you decide on.