Deep Dive into Analytics: When Bounce Rate no Longer Floats your Boat

Get your hands dirty with analytics data. Marty Weintraub (Aim clear) started the session with ways on how best we can use the analytics. He suggested breaking the data by conversions which is the ultimate goal for any business.

Break the Analytics information by events:

• Conversion by source
• Conversion by geo
• Conversion by time of day
• Converted YouTube user profiles
• Conversion by new vs. returning visitors
• Visitor Loyalty can give insight into attribution (How many visits convert)
• Which browsers convert

Mathew Bailey (Site Logic) said there are three obstacles in analyzing analytics:

• Dashboard – Too much information, don’t know which number to look at.
• Velleity – Desire to change but do not do anything about it.
• Hamster wheel Analytics – Download data on Excel and wondering what to do with it.

Being an analyst one should overcome all the above obstacles and to solve the above problems. Slice the data into smaller pieces and start understanding it and follow the below four steps:

• Intent – Understand the intent. Segment the data into pieces. Know what are the keywords producing the traffic, which pages are doing better, which promotions is working, etc.
• Determine Expectancy – Know who your visitors are, what they are looking for, how did they find you. Did you provide the service the user was looking? Did we meet our goals, etc.
• Observe – Observe the bounce rate and try to understand why user is bouncing off.
• Behavior – Compare actual behavior vs strategy to know the flaws and revise the marketing strategy.

Tami Dalley (ROI Labs) has another way to approach web analytics information. She says we always need to have a plan:

• Create a project scope. Know what you want at the end of the day
• Setup a goal on analytics
• Pull Data by segments
• Analyze
• Take action

Conclusion: For taking a deep dive into the analytics, know your project scope, create goals and know what you want, setup tracking properly and efficiently manage your marketing spend.

Moderator: Brian Eisenberg, SES Advisory Board.

Contributed By: Justin Varghese