Did you miss out on MeasureFest this year? Not to worry we’ve written down the top 5 tips we think are most useful from across the day and included the links to the presentations given. There was a lot to learn throughout the day but the essential take-aways are from talks by Luke Hay and Grant Kemp, who ensured that we have fundamental knowledge and data in place before inspiring us with more complex exciting data and tracking.
For the talk given by our own Anna Lewis, see her post Careering through Analytics in which she explains her career and some top tips for managing analytics in various different roles.
1- Knowing which channel a user came from can often show their intent
Knowing which channel a user has come from can often tell you a lot about their intent. For example, a user coming from a marketing campaign will likely be familiar with your brand, whereas someone coming to your website from a non-branded PPC campaign may not be familiar with your website at all.
Knowing this, you may want to show different landing pages depending on which channel a user came from. Although a user coming from a particular channel may tell you something about them, it is worth remembering that it cannot tell you the full story and is only a small (but important) piece of the puzzle.
Luke Hay: Using Analytics for User Research
2- The Search Box can be a Goldmine
Knowing what users search for can be a Goldmine of Data. Tracking what Searches users are making can show you what they are interested in. For example, you may discover that 10% of users are searching for Product X (which you don’t stock) using your search function, and then think about selling this product in the future. How much revenue are you missing out on by not knowing what products users are willing to buy from you?
Luke Hay: Using Analytics for User Research
3- Speed Matters
When it comes to shopping online, speed matters. Here are 4 fun facts for you:
- 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less
- 40% of consumers abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load
- 79% of shoppers who are dissatisfied with website performance are less likely to buy from the same site again
- 52% of online shoppers’ state that quick page loading is important to their site loyalty
Despite this being somewhat common knowledge in the digital world there are still many many many websites that are not optimised correctly and take far too long to load. One of the things that can cause long load times is unnecessary and unused tags on your site. Think about having a clean out of all your tags twice a year. Get rid of any that aren’t used anymore, or just aren’t worth the trade of for load times. A good way to remember when to do this is to have a cleanout everytime you change your clocks, which as it happens is twice a year.
Grant Kemp: How to perform Google Analytics magic
4- Know your customers
Something often forgotten but should be remembered more often is that visitors from different countries may have different cultures and contexts.
Something interesting that we learnt from Luke Hay, a UX consultant and author is that less than 2% of people Living in India have a credit card, so if you have a lot of visitors to your site from India, or another country that made have limited ways to pay for your products is to make sure you have multiple payment methods available.
It’s also worth noting that 95% of emerging markets have less than 250mb of data available a month. Does your website use a lot of data to load? Does it load fast enough for countries with slow internet speeds? How can a visitor from an emerging country purchase of your site or even view content if your site takes too long too load or uses up all of their data.
Luke Hay: Using Analytics for User Research
5- Don’t guess – User Research is key
After many years of working in the Digital World you may think you have it all figured out. However, simply put you don’t. Just because one thing works for a certain client, that does not mean it will work for another. Every client or website you have will have different users, with different backgrounds, different cultures and different ways of using the web.
Before diving head first into a new project it’s best to find out who your users are, what they want and their goals and needs. User research can be made up of many different methods including, face to face, Google Analytics to see how users behave and even as simple as getting someone to sit beside you and use your site to see how they interact with it, because chances are they won’t use your site the same way you would.
Luke Hay: Using Analytics for User Research
Polka Dot Data offer a range of Google Analytics services suitable for websites of any size. Speak to our team today to discuss your training needs.