When Analytics is the King, Segmentation & Targeting are Queens

When Analytics is the King, Segmentation & Targeting are Queens

Now officially, it’s been more than 1 year between Omniture and me, things are getting pretty serious! Since 5 years we’ve been turning around each other – it has to be said Omniture consultants are pretty tenacious – last year I finally gave up !

Time to take a look back…
Like in every relationship, at the beginning you cannot hold yourself to compare the new to your ex. My ex analytics companion was Google Analytics since a long time, so I compared every features available or not. No need to reinvent the wheel, there are already plenty of great posts blog which compare Google Analytics & Site Catalyst, please refer to them if you need a feature by feature comparison:
SiteCatalyst and Google Analytics comparison, conceptually speaking: Part 1 and Part 2.
From my point of view, I’ll just say that both have more or less the same basic metrics that you need but GA is much more easier to handle at first because GA is more user friendly and there is almost no set up when SiteCatalyst needs a lot configuration from the beginning which will ask for ressource in your team. Beyond the basic metrics on both tool, you’ll need time to customize it: eCommerce tracking, Campaign tracking, Social Media, Segmentation… all those features are not native in the tool and more or less easy to set up.
SiteCatalyst may be a pain in the ass to set up (excuse my French) but it’s more powerful, you can do a lot of things that you cannot in GA & it doesn’t come alone ! I’ll come back to that in a minute.
Finally, Google Analytics is FREE when SiteCatalyst is not.

However, I am here to talk about Adobe products : Site Catalyst, Discover & a little about Test & target, as to be honest I tend to use a lot more of Discover those days than Site Catalyst – essentially because it’s much more flexible to handle a large amount of data and I don’t need to call Adobe consultants to enable the functions that I need (as correlations, subrelations…).
Just a quick note to explain why I choose to speak only about Adobe products in this blog post – no bribe here – it’s just that lately I have been working exclusively with them and I get to know them and grew fond of some features. Plus, I passed my User certification & I am currently on a training for Implementation ! So why not use all this cool stuff I learned and put them into a post. 🙂

So let’s say that, as an analyst we want to Get useful data & Turn them into actionable insights to be able to Suggest, Recommend, Test in order to Optimize our website towards our Business Goals.

How specific features of Adobe products can help to do this in a upper level way?

My favorite first: SAINT Classification

SAINT Classification is useful to give sense to various unique items & allocate each item multiple categories. To be more specific, thinking about traffic channel driver performance, imagine that you are using a tracking code for each of your online advertising campaign, creative… such as on your landing url will look like www.monsite.com?cid=AA00112233 (‘cid’ being the default container for external campaign tracking) and your referring domain is wwww.referrer.com. Site Catalyst will be able to identify traffic coming from the referring domain and if you enabled it, Site Catalyst will be able to identify traffic from cid=AA00112233 (thanks to the GetQueryParam plugin), you could even breakdown Referring Domains by Tracking codes. However seeing metrics associated to AA00112233 is not really user-friendly for an analyst, except if you know by heart what creative, message and so on the code is referring to.
That’s when knowing about SAINT Classification become useful as you can import a reference file to Site Catalyst that will classify each of your tracking codes into comprehensive categories such as Campaign Name, Creative, Message and so on. You will be able to breakdown every category by every category thanks to Classification hierarchy. See below for classification examples:

Using SAINT Classification in this case, will help you to get useful data about your marketing effort performance : learn how a specific channel, campaign, placement, creative, message… is working and most of all leading your visitors to engage & convert on your website.

Second one, will be Processing rules, a bit nerdy but useful

This one is pretty handy as it happens that once your implementation is done, you realized that you have forget something and your IT guys are not available or it means waiting for too long
You have to be certified to use it as it’s kind of dangerous tool. So I did take the exam just because I love danger, ahahah… Anyway, let’s take a real life example: copy an eVar into a prop or vice versa. This one is very handy as if I want to know how many times someone is searching for a specific keywords and if this search turned into an order, I would use an s.prop5 to count the volume of searches and an eVar5 to know if this search converted. Imagine you forget to set up the s.prop, you can then use processing rules to tell Site Catalyst that eVar5 = s.prop5 for instance.

Segmentation

According to eMarketer, an obvious trend for 2013 is fragmentation : “The expansion in the number of media channels has fragmented audiences” and well obviously you will need to identify and understand how your various type of audience is interacting with your website. I strongly believe in segmentation for better understanding of your audience & marketing decision making. Segmentation to analyze your marketing effort and especially to understand your different type of visitor. I am not afraid to be redundant, but this is one of the key to optimization.
A first step will be to consider the “how”, how am I going to collect the data from my different channels – well the point above already answer to part of this in details & you shall know as well that Site Catalyst identify automatically some of your sources (regarding search you do need to enable it first in your report suite manager), if you want to have a more detailed view use s.campaign and finally use SAINT Classification to categorize your campaigns from a business owner point of view.
The magic about that and segmentation in Site Catalyst 15 is that as your data are captured and collected you can use any of these as a dimension to filter your report and create segment!
Site Catalyst already set some out of the box segment for you:
they are quite helpful but you can go even into deeper details such as : look into customer behavior for visits from natural branded searches, behavior for visits coming from a blue banner, behavior for visits coming from a specific referring domain, from a specific cross-channel campaign and so on… Possibilities are endless, the pitfall here is to know what are the segments you need to look at, do some exploration but too much granularity will make you loose the advantage of segmentation.

Test & Target

Test & Target is another tool from Adobe, not directly related to Site Catalyst except if you use the plugin to connect both, which I highly recommend. Why? Because as its name points out Test & Target is a tool to Target your content and well it make sense to me to rely on your segmentation strategy to target content to the right user.
Aside from the targeting feature, Test & Target allows you to do AB or MVT Testing on your content : every kind of content such as text, image, landing page… and the testing can be used in the same time as the targeting. For instance, you can send an eDM to your database, this email will have a call-to-action a specific landing page – you can decide to have various landing page depending on the audience: if it’s a fist time visitors display this content or this one (AB Testing) or if it’s a returning visit display this or that message…
Have a look below of how far you can segment, test and target:

Elephants and Analytics Blog – TnT Illustration

This will allow you to test, test and optimize your suggestions that came from your data observations or even your gut feeling.
As a stand alone tool, from what I experienced I was not really happy with the tool, however I was conscious that it was a powerful tool, a difficult setup and a lot of followup if you want your business owners to really get involved and use it. Practice is from my point of view the best ally of this tool but not every one have the time or the patience to it.

Last and not the least: Reading

For those who know me, I’m a compulsive reader… I read as much as I can, daily, some time work related and hopefully most of the time it’s not work related.
However here are work related best reading resources I read religiously :
Adobe Digital Marketing Blog
Web Analytics Demystified
– and the rest are on Twitter, some name you should follow: @usujason, @erictpeterson, @tim_ash, @johnlovett, @benjamingaines and so on…

I am just ending Day 4 of Site Catalyst Implementation training (hopefully I will be able soon to implement Site Catalyst by myself…), and there is so much more I could tell now (form analysis, cross-channel analysis, context data…) but let’s keep that for another article and after some practice first !

Don’t make me think! Few simple and concrete web usability principles – Part 2

The 2nd half of the book and so the 2nd part of my article deals with the following subjects:

      1. How to get the best of your homepage design ?
      2. Why, When and How conduct usability testing?
      3. User-friendliness and Accessibility


Like in the 1st article, I’ll try to briefly expose what should be remembered from this book. It may not be 100% loyal to the book, 1st because of my interpretation and 2nd because I also express my own point of view.

1. How to get the best of your homepage design ?

Even if your homepage is not the first page that user will get through – it’s commonly known that an entry page is not always homepage, and the less it is the better as your landing page should be reflecting the path the user used to access your website.
Anyway, the homepage is still the page a user will go through during the navigation to have an overall impression, to look for guidance, to restart his navigation… That’s mainly why you need to make sure that on the homepage, people get it!
Here is what they should get:

      – an homepage should give the website identity and mission : a logo and an tagline should be enough – make it clear, short and it should convey differenciation and benefits
      – an homepage should show the website hierarchy : your navigation
      – an homepage should allow to search through a search box, shortcuts, teases and deals
      – an homepage should allow users to complete primary goals (sign up, registration to newsletter, fill a form for a free trial, …)

Your homepage should stay concise and understandable for any users and answers those:

      – what is this site?
      – what do they have?
      – what can I do here ?
      – why should I be here and not somewhere else?

The design of a website especially the homepage and main pages could be a very frustrating and conflicting process. Each team: design, IT, marketing, stakeholders, CEO… want to be a part of it which is certainly a good thing but when you get to a conflict of opinion – which may happen on every feature, every pixel, every color… “who hold the truth?“.
Hopefully, I can answer to this question : “Nobody” pfiouuuu, that’s a relief!

Nevertheless, the real question should be :”How can we realise this feature to provide a good user experience to our web users”. I would say by asking the web users their opinion & testing. This bring us to :

2. Why, When and How conduct usability testing?

I kind of already answer to the Why question, but let’s sum up the reason why you should conduct a usability testing:
Mostly because, using usability testing will improve your revenue through enhancing customer satisfaction & retention, but also:

      – if you want web users to complete the goals you have in mind when building your website, better to ask them directly if they get it or not! (the purpose, the value proposition, the concept, how it works…)
      – if you think that web users will use your website the way you build it for: you’re wrong!
      – if you want to avoid endless discussion with your team, please ask the web users to settle this for you
      – if you think that you are objective (and you’re better not be…): you’re wrong!
      – if you think this is useless: try once with neighbours, friends or anybody to browse the same website (with a similar goal for all : like buy a pair of Nike on Ebay for instance) and watch! You’ll be amazed!
      + it’s easy and fun to do

How not to do usability testing... (Image credit: blog.templatemonster.com)

First of all some guidelines of usability testing concept from Jakob Nielsen and a definition from Wikipedia:

Usability testing is a technique used in user-centered interaction design to evaluate a product by testing it on users. This can be seen as an irreplaceable usability practice, since it gives direct input on how real users use the system.


Here are few guidelines for testing:

      the sooner in your process the better
      – testing with one web user one is better than nothing
      – testing is an iterative process
      – 3 to 5 users is enough
      – don’t hold the testing because of problem to find the perfect tester- take “anybody” to test “if your grandma can use it an expert/ targeted audience will do”
      + most of all here the Steve Krug’s guide to conduct your testing.

1 rule that I think would be amazingly great, useful and revenue oriented: “Each web dev team should make once morning a month a usability testing and debrief over lunch”.

To conclude about usability testing, I think it’s really a great tool to increase user satisfaction and thus revenue, which finally is the goal in a ecommerce website :). Using usability testing is one tool among others, like AB Testing, Focus group, Card sorting… but each tool have a “perfect timing” during the process of building or enhancing your website.
This leads me to conclude on:

3. User-friendliness and Accessibility

Few guidelines to “behave” and make your web users happy:

      – don’t ask for useless or really annoying form fields: this will lead the users to ask himself why are you asking him those informations and either he will lie or he will quit
      do not hide informations from the users: anything you would want to hide thinking that you can “trick” the web user in filling in registration form first, hold it!
      – no marketing only flash slide intro… which get on the user way to accomplish something
      – do not punish the user for not filling exactly how you think they should – for instance don’t erase all the credit card information because the cardholder name is missing (you should adapt to the web user not the opposite)
      do everything to make the web user navigation on your website easy!

Accessibility meaning that people with disabilities can use the Web is considered as part of usability.
I’ll not dig into too many details for this part as there are already a lot of guidelines online about this subject and the rules to follow.
Nevertheless here is a quick list, you can follow:

      make things usable for everyone will help users w/ disabilities (fixing common issues)
      – use CSS and allow your text to resize
      add alt text to every image & link
      – make your forms work with screen readers
      – make all content accessible by keyboard
      – use client-side image map

That’s it for today (and for the book also)!
You can go on with reading the following book of Steve Krugs “Rocket Surgery Made Easy” (focus on Usability Testing) and also follow his work on www.sensible.com.

From my point of view, this book is a good reminder of a lot of usability guidelines we easily forget and also a great great guide to do some usability testing! I hope this will help you too and lead you to pick some tips, buy the book or conduct some usability testing!

Tracking checkout conversion rate with Google Analytics or Omniture Site Catalyst

About conversion rate, I would like in this article to dig a little deeper into checkout conversion rate and how to measure it. Currently, I’m doing an AB Test to compare the performance between a classic step-to-step checkout with a less classic “accordion checkout” (not to be confonded with one-page checkout).
Few things to define before talking about tracking with either Google Analytics or Omniture Site Catalyst.

1. Conversion rate

Well, this design should do the trick

Conversion Rate illustration
Illustration from the great great Conversion Rate Experts blog

Our subject being checkout, we will assume that the website is an ecommerce one and as a consequence the main goal/action we want the user to take here is “placed an order”.

2. AB Testing

Also here i think an illustration will express it better than words

Few words about the AB testing subject here.








3. Checkout ergonomy and design

Just want to highlight the difference between : accordion checkout, classic step-to-step checkout and one page checkout. The checkout being the step just after the basket, not to be considered lazy but once again examples is better than words:

  1. Accordion checkout: Following the principle of an accordion, this kind of design hide and show the step following the user progression without leaving the page, it’s a “vertical” design using Ajax most of the time. When the user is taken to the checkout the first section is open and he can see the titles of the following sections just below.
  2. Classic checkout: The classic checkout is more a “horizontal” design, each step of the checkout = one dedicated page.
  3. Single Page Checkout: This kind of checkout design can be horizontal or vertical, the principle here is having everything on the same page and every fields open, better option for short checkout process > everything is visible at a glance.

Context being clear now, lets get quickly to measurement! First of all, most of the checkout being in multiple steps – whatever the kind of design you choose – I would advise to measure 3 things:

  1. Checkout conversion rate = sales / number of carts initiated
  2. Overall conversion rate = sales / unique visitors
  3. Fall out step by step = % of visitors who drop on each step
  4. The 2 first performance indicators can show you trend and the 2nd expecially allow you to compare your rate to market conversion rate: knowing that the formulas can depend but either way the 2nd formula is supposed to be the one the market use and communicate about.

    The fall out indicator is the one you should/could take more time to analyse and set up on your webanalytics tool.

    With Google Analytics

    You first have to set up your goal. In our case, you goal is the last page of the checkout, usually the Thank You page then you have to set up the funnel which is each page/section of your checkout process. This is useful only if your checkout is a multiple page checkout : new step = new page. For one page checkout or accordion checkout, I would implement events tracking to get info about the steps within the page, but I will dig into this in a later article. Here is what you should get from GA:

    Why do I love Google Analytics: because it’s flexible, any webmarketer can do this without involving development team!















    With SiteCatalyst

    You will first have to set the “pagename” in the tracking page properties. But most of the time, this should have been done when implementing Omniture SiteCatalyst the first time. With this, it’s also really easy and flexible as you just have to drag and drop your pagename into the “Fall out report” to build your report!
    Here is what you will get:
    What I do love about SiteCatalyst fallout report, is that you may need developement team help but you will be able to track PAGE and SECTION in a page so any kind of checkout design can be tracked!








    Well, tracking is the first step of optimisation: go this article to learn more about few tips to enhance your checkout flow and decrease your checkout abandon rate.

Average conversion rate by country in 2011

Average conversion rate by country in 2011

France is doing pretty well !
Conversion rate by country 2011
Read more on Kissmetrics

So what ?
Conversion rate is on the best KPI to review the effectiveness of Ecommerce sites.
An average of 98% of your visitors don’t buy/convert on your website when browsing. Despite all the improvements in ecommerce websites in recent years, abandonment rates are increasing. But it’s quite normal, knowing that not all your visitors are here for the right reason, some just need information, decision-making can take time and knowing also that consumers are now consulting an average of 10.7 sources when making a buying decision – double the rate of 2010..

Let’s just focus on the checkout abandon rate for instance (actually, it’s because i’m working on this right now 🙂 ). This video Checkout in real life cannot happen in real life, but it happens on a website for an average of 60% of your potential buyer – by potential buyer, I mean a visitor who put a product in his basket. This could be improved by many means, a common list of Todo / Not Todo emerged through the years :
– display trust seals (VeriSign…)
– allow guest checkout and if not explain why you need all that personal information about your buyer
– display a contact number or chat or FAQ… anything to reassure
– show how many steps left and give the buyer an overall impression of his progression
– work hard on your form (get some insights about form best practices here)
– read more here.

And also innovating but keeping conventions in mind, testing and tracking remains to me the best way to improve this rate.
I’m currently running a AB test for my company, comparing onepage-accordion checkout to multiple page checkout, I should be able to share the results in a few ! Knowing for some companies this modification result in a significant increase of their conversion rate… you can guess how much i’m expecting here !
Fingers crossed !