Michael Stebbins is the VP of Marketing for the analytics firm, ClickTracks, which offers all sorts of hosted analytics solutions for businesses. If you’re new to analytics, I highly recommend you start with Google Analytics, as it’s free and easy to install, but for those looking for a more robust solution, ClickTracks is impressive.
Michael provided an extremely valuable template for asking the right questions and measuring results with analytics software. First, he categorized analytics users into 3 categories:
- Observers – Making up about 85% of analytics users, these people are mostly concerned with trendlines – specifically, are the numbers going up and to the right? (ie you’re getting more visitors to your site or increasing sales)
- Prospectors – These people spend a bit more time than observers digging through numbers. For instance, they might be interested in whether more people opened this month’s email over last months or if conversion rates are going up or which sites are sending them traffic. Like observers, they are still mostly reactive with their analysis and are concerned with trends.
- Interrogator – These people are concerned with finding solutions to problems, so they deliberately set up trials to test their hypotheses. For instance, they might be interested in things like which landing page converts better or how a public relations campaign is performing.
Michael outlined the three steps in any analytics test as follows:
- Ask: ask a tactical question related to the business strategy
- Check: pick ways to test this and choose 3-4 of the most possible answers
- Action: create action steps for each possible answer
He then gave a bunch of examples of implementing this. For instance, say you’re not getting as good return on investment (ROI) for some pay-per-click (PPC) ads you are running. This might break down into:
- Ask: Which 10% of ads are performing the most poorly
- Check: Check ads with high costs, low engagement, or low conversion. If you’re using Google Adwords, set up ROI calculations and you’ll be able to see the best and worst performing ads.
- Action: Stop running ads with poor performance and increase your investment in areas that are performing
Another example he gave was how he might increase traffic from blogs.
- Ask: Which bloggers send the most traffic and how can I reward them?
- Check: Analyze referral sources to see which blogs are sending the most traffic. Then look at other factors like which blogs send higher than average time on site (ie if your average visitor spends 2.5 minutes on your site and you have a handful of blogs sending you people that spend 4 minutes on your site on average, that’s great!) or higher conversions (if you know that your conversion rate is 1 in 10 yet some blogs send traffic that converts 1 in 7, those are the ones to reward!)
- Action:Action: Find ways to do something nice for those bloggers like sending them an Amazon gift card.
As you can see, with each of these examples, you are focusing on a specific question and looking for ways to answer them. When you do find the answer, it’s important to take specific action – like increasing spending on the ads with higher conversion rates or doing something nice for bloggers that send great referrals.
Personally, I haven’t yet used ClickTracks – I’ve been using Google Analytics – but I’m looking forward to trying it out.
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