Back of the Napkyn | Digital analysis | Google Analytics | Conversion optimization

New blog - switch your RSS feed

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Myers) — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 15:19:00 +0000

www.napkyn.com/blog is the location of our new and improved blog!

If you're following along using RSS, http://feeds.feedburner.com/backofthenapkyn is our new feed.

While there, check out our new website beta and send us your feedback!

Some great new content has already been posted on our new web analysis blog.

See you on the other side!

Uncover your most valuable page to yield great insights

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Myers) — Wed, 26 May 2010 14:40:00 +0000

It's an important question. It's a big question. And if you can't answer it, you're in some serious trouble.

What's your most valuable web page (MVP)?

Don't just say 'my home page' because it may not be true. It could be deeper in your site than that. The answer could even change every month.

First of all, you have to know the goal of your site and your traffic breakdown. Look at absolute revenue and conversions - where are they all coming from? (Hint: Look at e-commerce and goal-completion tabs.) Identifying your MVP will allow you to observe the behavior of your customers, and also to have a great impact on revenue or conversion once you've identified opportunities for optimization.

For instance, a client of ours spends a lot of time and effort on email marketing. These repeat customers don't need to see the home page, they just click on the product-image in their emails and go directly to the thing they want to buy. Each month, this client essentially picks their most valuable web page (in this case, a product page) using email marketing.

Despite all their CPC, social media, and SEO efforts, it's their email campaigns that produce the most revenue - though it may not have the most traffic of all their mediums. Though it would be ideal to have a more diversified revenue stream, discovering their MVP has told this client a lot about how their online business works.

Have a bigger impact with optimization

For websites with lead-generation as the goal, this MVP could be a great SEO page with a midly effective call to action. Though it may not have the best conversion rate of all pages on your site, it could lead to the most conversions. If your MVP is under-performing (I guess all sports analogies would end here) in terms of conversion rate, incorporating best practices from other pages will have a huge, measurable impact on your business (some A/B testing might be recommended beforehand).

For all the talk of conversion rates, traffic-generation, and minor percentage gains, it's good to occasionally look at your website using an absolute lens, and find out where the money is coming from. After all, we're not looking for percentage points - we're looking for dollar signs.

[Video] Devices are tracking and optimizing our lives

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Myers) — Thu, 20 May 2010 14:10:00 +0000

For internet-oriented people, it's easy to lose sight of the bigger picture of how data and electronics are changing our world. I mean that in both the personal sense and the literal sense - how we design everything, from cars to the streets they're driven on, are now based on thoroughly collected and analyzed data.

Of course, we know that websites track how we use them, but as this IBM video points out, our clocks and cars can be networked and tracked and optimized to make our lives more efficient

Check out the video...

IBM points out that the data moves in a funnel when intelligence is added. From data to information, then knowledge, and wisdom. Funny enough, the experts who comment on this video are forgetting the same necessary extra step that the average e-commerce business forgets: ACTION.

Yielding wisdom from data is certainly a step in the right direction, but action is where money is made. They don't use the word explicitly but optimization and action are the key to moving any organization forward.

For instance (in city terms): We know that more people drive on Main Street on Friday afternoons because of the data collected from traffic studies. This is because the highways are usually blocked due to a sporting event downtown.
Action: Alter street signs to prevent parking during an expanded period to help ease congestion.
Follow-up: How is the effecting bicycle traffic on the street during the same period?

It's the same thing for e-commerce retailers:
We know that email traffic is our best-converting medium because of our analytics data. This is because it's from customers who have already engaged with the brand and trust it enough to give an email.
Action: Offer new content on a regular basis to entice repeat customers to return to the site.
Follow-up: Regular new content can also be effective at attracting organic search traffic. Has our organic traffic increased?

It's great that we live in a world where everything can be tracked and measured, but let's not forget that acting on our new-found wisdom is what separates industry leaders from also-rans.

Forget web analytics – being a web analyst is hard

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Myers) — Mon, 17 May 2010 13:30:00 +0000

I have been stewing all week over a great blog post I read by Evan LaPointe, a digital marketer out of Atlanta. The post was entitled “I don’t want an analytics job”, and it seems to carry over the same feelings and themes of an earlier post he wrote called “Web Analytics Sucks, and it’s nobody’s fault.”

These posts both excited and annoyed me at the same time.

On one hand, it was almost liberating to read that someone is living in the same trenches that we are at Napkyn. A lot of the points of frustration that Evan talks about – like navigating both internal politics and sub-par data as well as having the role of web analyst considered a low-level technical job rather than a high level executive job – hearing someone else say this stuff will make any analyst grin and buy in. It’s like reading a good Dilbert cartoon and thinking “Hey, that is SO where I work!” - it’s cathartic, but not productive.

Hence my annoyance. Evan touches on all the challenges with being an analyst, and outlines all the skills (data analysis) and opinions (Always Be Testing) that good analysts bring to the table. But his conclusion is that good web analysts don’t actually want to be web analysts, they just represent the next generation of executives-in-waiting – web analysis is beneath them. He says that web analytics actually want to be the ‘shepherds’ of a business, who use data to help guide the organization to ongoing successes. There’s already a job title for that – it’s a CIO.

So while I totally agree with the sentiments, I thought I would share my thoughts on what the real issue is.

Being a Web Analyst is hard.

I don’t want to reopen the whole “Web Analytics is Easy/Hard” debate, but I do want to agree with and elaborate on Evan’s key points.

Most organizations aren’t ready for information based decision-making, and while many firms know that analysis brings results, they do assume that an analyst will generate a ‘magic report’ rather than help move the business forward over time. This is frustrating, and it takes a lot of patience, diligence, and small wins to earn the right to change this perception. With every client we work with, this process takes time, and it always pays off.

Very few tools play well together in the digital sandbox. In a lot of cases, it would be easier if certain kinds of technology didn’t exist – their standalong datasets add zero value unless a ton of work is thrown at them to make them align with corporate data (pay for performance vendors and dynamic CMS systems come to mind immediately here). It’s awfully hard to internally sell the value of analysis if you spend half your time talking about what you can’t see clearly because of technology/disparate data issues. Tools vendors make analysts look bad.

I don’t think that most web analytics practitioners secretly wish they were a CIO. A lot of us live for that ‘eureka’ moment that happens when you uncover amazing insight about the business, or implement a small change that immediately creates a big impact. There’s a big difference between someone who love continuous improvement and someone who wants to run the whole business.

Just because it is hard to be a web analyst right now doesn’t mean that it will be forever. As more of us start to organically change the culture of the organizations we are in, performance management and analysis will start to trump “I think, I feel, I want” and we will get better seats at the table. These information oriented organizations will refuse to accept the vendor data shenanigans and we will get better and easier visibility into the entirety of the digital data.

I for one, love having my web analytics job. It’s not always easy, but panning for gold in the digital wild west has a lot of payoffs that make the frustration worth the while.

Cheers,

Jim

P.S. Evan, keep up the great writing and if you ever decide to move to Ottawa I have a job for you – we can work together to come up with the right title ;)

One great idea for catalog businesses going online

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Myers) — Tue, 11 May 2010 18:30:00 +0000

We're in the thick of working on our monthly digital analysis reports here at Napykn. At this point, we're bringing together ideas developed from last month's reports, looking at the most recent month's data and refining our techniques based on our readings from numerous online sources.

Recently, we've been working with a few catalog-based companies who are increasingly shifting their focus into online sales. One proven segmenting technique that we've been recommending to these clients is to register alternate domain names and direct their catalog-based traffic to these domains.

It's not a new idea. Anyone with a cursory knowledge of landing page optimization will tell you to register a particular domain name in order to draw in a particular group of visitors. But in the case of catalogers, we're using it to segment their traffic into two sources:

Visitors who use the website to make orders based on the catalog, and;
Visitors who found the website through other means (organic or paid search, referring sites, etc.)

For example, a catalog company with the domain redfiretrucks.com also distributes a catalog. In the catalog itself, suggest to readers that they visit redfiretruckscatalog.com (and then it can be as simple as just redirecting the traffic - or you can do more interesting things with behavioral targeting). This way, we will know which website visitors have read the catalog, and which visitors are a product of the company's online marketing efforts.

For $10-$15 per year, registering an additional domain name is a small investment to help give some order to the chaos of your online traffic.

Don’t let your thesaurus eat your leads

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Myers) — Tue, 04 May 2010 13:47:00 +0000

We don’t claim to be a copywriting company. We let each clients data guide the recommendations we make on their digital business and optimization strategy. That said, we fully appreciate the importance of good copy in the persuasion/conversion process, and there is no place worse for brutal copy than B2B.

Tell me what you do or you won’t get my business

I have worked exclusively on the vendor/consultant side in B2B for my entire career. After over a decade of looking at business websites, I have a pretty good idea of how to cut the wheat from the chaff to find out what a given firm does.

I look at the homepage, and if I still don’t know what they do, I click on “About Us”. If I still don’t know what they do, I click on “Products/Solutions”. At this point I will click on “Clients” and if I see some big names, I will just call the receptionist and ask... ”What do you guys do exactly?”

I have been doing some vendor research today, and I have bumped into at least 10 websites where I don’t really know what they do.

A few quotes for context:

“...leading center of excellence for catalyzing online direct to consumer interactions.”

What?

“Marrying the relational and serendipitous characteristics of the in-store shopping experience with the efficiency, convenience and flexibility of online shopping.”

Huh?

“A customer-centric, technology-driven, global company that delivers effective solutions for our strategic partners across multiple industries”

Sigh.

These are all real quotes by the way, and I could literally go on for miles with just sites I have looked at today.

Let’s talk about how unspecific, over-worded content manages visitor intent. Visitor A, who is a decision-maker and cheque-signer at a large company, desperately needs to bring an email marketing vendor on board. She types “Email marketing service” into Google, sees your paid link, and clicks to your site. She is then confronted with copy that assertively states that your “2.0 digital communications fulfillment solution remotely empowers increased effectiveness of gap bridging internet harnesses....”

You just lost your visitor.

Your competitor has a homepage that says this. “We have a world class email marketing tool that is being used by companies just like you. Click here to talk to sales or request a demo”

Now you’ve lost the sale as well.

Trust me, the data will show how treating your homepage like a practice exam for the SAT-Verbal will impact your goal conversion: badly.

Cheers,

Jim

P.S. We will be launching our new Napkyn.com site in a few weeks. Make sure to attach a link to this article in any flames about over-wordy content.

Wicked thesaurus image courtesy snorgtees.com

Proven online talent being secured by top retailers

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Myers) — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 18:15:00 +0000

The role of the Digital Analyst is becoming central to the digital marketing roster in any organization with a growth strategy today. This statement holds true for any and all sorts of companies of all sizes and shapes, but is particularly salient for B2C transactional businesses - eCommerce shops in particular.

Ad-hoc reporting is no longer considered satisfactory. To truly understand the impact of all of the pressure being applied digitally (Traffic generation, email marketing, performance marketing, etc.) businesses require holistic, standardized internal reports that speak to individual initiatives, as well as the cross-discipline impact of each initiative.

I am going to stop my self here, as the Analyst's workload and responsibilities are not the focus of this post. I wanted to talk a little bit about the status of today's rock-star hires in eCommerce circles.

Just yesterday, almost every post on the front page of the IR site was about someone's new gig. Gilt Groupe, Shutterfly, Deckers Outdoor, and Hancock Fabrics all brought top talent into their organizations reciently. Even though I know none of these people, each one of these hires inspires me to fist pump in the air.

You see, our industry has matured to a point where hires like these are justified. Gone are the days where you hired someone and hoped they could move the needles - folks are out there who have done it multiple times over. Hire someone today who you know can have an impact.

It's exciting for us here at Napkyn to work in lockstep with some of our customers. In fact, our work as a trusted virtual employee is creating the exact internal scrutiny described above. Working with digital analysts like Napkyn can help accelerate initiatives, and careers - it's the way online business is moving, and top retailers are taking notice.

How to track email campaigns in Google Analytics

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Myers) — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 17:23:00 +0000

One of the most common recommendations that Napkyn makes to our clients is to properly tag emails so that they can be tracked in Google Analytics. The key to actionable and insightful digital analysis is clean data that properly represents an online business - and tracking email sendouts is a pretty simple way of cleaning up your data.

How do we set up email tracking?

Unless you're lucky enough to use one of these fine email marketing services with automatic Google Analytics integration, you'll have to set up email tracking manually with a bit of coding.

First of all, let's stop thinking in terms of email tracking and start thinking 'link' or 'URL tagging'. That's the key. Your emails contain links back to your website, and if you want to monitor the impact of your email sendouts, you have to add tags to all your links. Tags are short additions to the URL that tell Google Analytics how to categorize traffic.

But not to worry, it's actually pretty simple.

Let's get started!

Great! A little effort now will make your data much more valuable in the near future. Let's use the Contact Us button on the upper right-hand corner of this blog as an example. It really doesn't matter if you're tagging a link in an email, on a blog, or on a website.

It links back to:

www.napkyn.com/contact.html

But I wanted all the traffic that was sent to napkyn.com using that button to be noted that it was coming from this blog and from that button. So I added some tags to the URL - this will not interfere with sending traffic to the right page, it just labels it. Now the button links to:

http://napkyn.com/contact.html?utm_source=contact_button&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=04152010

You can plainly see how I wanted the traffic labeled.

Source = 'contact_button'
Medium = 'blog'
Campaign = '04152010' (The date the button was placed on the blog)

Now, when I look at the Napkyn.com Google Analytics account, I can see that the source and medium have been labeled as we intended.

For an email, you may want to label your traffic differently than I've done here. For example...

Source = 'newsletter'
Medium = 'email'
Campaign = 'fall'

You can use the Google URL Builder or the excellent tool from Cutroni.com to make this process easier.

Of course, there's a lot more to digital analysis than proper link tagging. So give that wonderfully tagged Contact Us button a click, check out napkyn.com, or leave a question in the comments.

Why e-businesses need effective category pages

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Myers) — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 15:23:00 +0000

Imagine that you walked into a store and told a salesperson that you want to buy a blender. The salesperson walks into the store room, grabs one off the shelf, comes back and puts it in your hands. “You want it or not?” he says. “Not this one exactly,” you say. He walks away and returns with another blender. “What about this one?”

Any customer would grow tired of this exercise pretty quickly. Online, it’s no exception. Guiding your online customer to the right product and allowing them to browse for a moment before the sale creates a more pleasurable buying experience and will increase conversion rates.

Occasionally, because of various responsibilities, both clients and digital analysts can forget about this very basic premise. Buying online is a process, and walking with your customer through your online store using digital analysis can be a revealing exercise. With Analytics, we can walk with our customers and map the most common paths to a purchase.

We’re talking about visitors with ‘mid-range intent’ - people who know what type of thing they want, but not a specific product yet. Depending on your business and products, these ‘browsing’ customers may make up a large portion of your traffic. (For more information, see Kaushik's article on customer intent.)

Unless you’re Woot.com, or have a one-time special offer, there should be no hurry to get these types of visitors to the product page. If you shove a product in front of their faces and ask "This one?" too quickly, the customer may choose to leave. This is especially true if your online store is difficult to navigate.

This is where well-designed product category pages can be a boon to your online business.

Not only do product category pages allow customers to browse among the products they’re interested in buying, and compare features and prices, they can also be used to answer FAQs and build confidence in your company. Product category pages can serve as the intermediary where many important buying concerns are allayed.

You can consider this the opposite of sentinel pages. Sentinel pages are meant to act as filters, redirecting visitors who have no business on a particular website. Category pages should funnel pre-qualified visitors (people who have arrived through a search engine, or clicked on a category link) toward their intended product - even if they don't know exactly what it is yet.

You can also use category pages so that potential buyers are educated as they click through to their ideal product. With every click, they learn a bit more about your business. For example: free shipping, return policy, email campaigns. These bits of information can build customer confidence while they browse.

While highly targeted landing pages are an effective way of attracting and converting customers who know exactly what they want, digital analysts know there’s a ton of traffic that goes through index pages in any case, and still has to be qualified.

Presenting a variety of products with a range of prices and features means your customer doesn’t have to go searching elsewhere to find what they want. Don’t narrow these customers' view right from the start, or they may go look elsewhere.

Don't trust your instincts

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Myers) — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 13:00:00 +0000

All too often, when it comes to online businesses, we tend to simply go with our gut feeling. Will a video on the homepage increase bounce rate? What sort of discount will result in the most sales?

Most online business owners and managers just don't have the time or mental energy to perform the tasks required to determine these best practices. Well, a blog post by the Harvard Business Review has some harsh words for business owners who just shoot from the hip: There's a much better way of doing business.

Andrew McAfee states that while there are some cases where human intuition has become a useful tool, in modern business, there's no reason to ignore data and critical analysis.

Overall, we get inferior decisions and outcomes in crucial situations when we rely on human judgment and intuition instead of on hard, cold, boring data and math. This may be an uncomfortable conclusion, especially for today's intuitive experts, but so what? I can't think of a good reason for putting their interests over the interests of patients, customers, shareholders, and others affected by their judgments.

However, if talk of statistical analysis makes you think of punch cards and supercomputers, you're way off track. There are a plethora of (sometimes free!) online tools that can help online business owners and managers make the best decisions based on real data, generated by your website visitors and customers.

Of course, here at Napkyn, we help business owners and managers make sense of this data using digital analysis. Quite often, we find underserved segments and opportunities for conversion that intuition and guess work would never have stumbled upon.

So you don't have to trust your gut anymore--unless you're thinking about lunch, of course.

Sentinel pages, part deux

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Myers) — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 18:47:00 +0000

So let’s think about ways to apply the concept of the ‘Sentinel page’ to your business.  

First, think about the biggest group of mostly irrelevant traffic you have. By this I mean a segment of visitors that either cannot or most likely will not convert, either because it is not possible or because your site will not properly speak to the visitor’s intent. For example...

eCommerce Business that only sells in the US: Anyone outside the US would be a ‘sentinel segment’.
Irrelevent Products: Like a company that sells snowmobiles. I am guessing latin america would be a ‘sentinel segment’.
Any business with high amounts of organic search traffic: Almost every business gets a certain kind of traffic from natural search that is irrelevant.
Name confusion: If you had a site that sells ‘bermuda shorts’ and you see that you get a sizable group of visits that are looking for ‘bermuda vacations’.

Now we have a statistically significant segment that will not likely achieve the goals of your site, and your site will most likely not satisfy their intent. Let’s build a landing page to push them to.

Write targeted copy that attempts to satisfy the requirements of this segment. You know they aren’t going to convert, so try and give them what they are looking for. It will get you goodwill, and increase the quality of the data the rest of your site is generating because the sentinel page will separate out most of the irrelevant segment.

For example, in the case of the eCommerce business that only sells into the US:

Build a page for European visitors. Use a tool like BTBuckets to autoforward all visitors from Europe to your ‘European Visitor Landing page”.
On the page, let this visitor type know that you don’t ship to Europe, but provide some helpful links to either interesting pages for your product category, or directly to sites that DO ship to Europe (you could even become an affiliate!).

By creating an interstitial ‘sentinel page’ between a group of irrelevant traffic and your main site, you can both increase the effectiveness of the segment and the accuracy of your web analytics data.   I can’t wait for the next great idea I get from a client.  

Cheers,
Jim

Use ‘Sentinel’ pages to separate wheat from chaff

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Myers) — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 13:27:00 +0000

I have never had a client call where I didn’t learn something new and interesting. As the digital analyst, we end up in an interesting intersection in a clients staff and vendor ecosystem where we get to see and talk about everything that happens online. We are monitoring the effects of detailed traffic generation initiatives, multivariate and landing page programs, advanced email campaigns...you name it.

One of our customers is an enterprise marketing software firm. Their product is designed to allow major online brands to survey their site visitors and better understand their motivation and needs. It's great stuff. However, there is a ‘powered by’ link in the surveys that leads back to their site. This generates a fairly significant number of consumer traffic to a business to business website. This means:

Bounce rates on pages with this ‘application referred’ traffic are very high.

Associated conversions to this traffic type and all associated pages are very low.

For a site whose goal is to generate as many quality sales leads as possible, this traffic segment creates havoc with reporting.

Napkyn’s recommendation to the client was to create a specific landing page for this visitor type, with messaging designed to manage the overall intent of this segment, which is to find out ‘What happens to the information I just put in this survey, and is it safe?’. The landing page will still have a sales lead specific call to action, as a small percentage of this segment are potential customers. However in satisfying the initial information requirements of the overall segment, we will increase the lead-flow from this traffic type, and decrease the negative impact on overall page reports.

Everybody wins.

At this point in the conversation, the client said, “So what you want us to do is build a ‘Sentinel page’. It will sit between certain types of traffic and the main corporate site to separate the wheat from the chaff, and ensure that our overall site data stays clean.”

Eureka. I hadn’t thought about it that way before, but I liked it so much I stole the phrase.

So how can we apply this to your business? What should a Sentinel page say to weed the valuable visitors from the irrelevant traffic? We'll be looking at these angles in my next post.

What do you think?

Cheers,
Jim

Notice anything different?

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Myers) — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 13:26:00 +0000

A lot of changes and progress have occurred at Napykn over the past few months. The biggest change? Me. I'm Ben. Happy to be on board as the new digital analyst (and blogging enthusiast). But that's not all.

We've re-vamped the blog, as you can see. And along with this spiffy new template, we're re-committing ourselves to posting new and interesting articles on a regular basis. Jim's got a great one lined up for April 1 that's going to open some eyes, and I'll also be contributing a few anecdotes during April.

The best part about our blog is that it's the result of our everyday interactions with our digital analysis clients and their data. When we notice something cool, we'll be throwing it up here for you to pick apart. Also, expect to see news and notes from around the office and the internet as a whole.

So don't forget to subscribe to our RSS feed before you bounce, because there's a lot of good stuff coming your way.

Magnifying Glasses, Microscopes and Web Analytics.

noreply@blogger.com (The Napkyn Team) — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 16:51:00 +0000

We have been talking to and working with a lot of companies this year for web analytics, and an interesting trend has been emerging with the executives that we are dealing with. Most digital decision makers we talk to either want to have Napkyn deliver ‘magnifying glass’ focused consulting on a few critical business metrics every month, or they want us to pull out the microscopes and look for new revenue potential in the specifics of their data.

In understanding these two types of executives, their motivations and ultimate goals, we can quickly see what value a good web analyst can immediately bring to an organization.

Executives who are responsible for a digital channel tend to fall into one of two types:

Analytics for performance management (macro level analysis) : Macro executives view WA data as a set of health metrics that can be used to understand the digital business. Their ultimate goal is to have a small set of business critical metrics that they can monitor to assess their online success. An example of this would be Patrick Byrne at Overstock, who says that he continually monitors their net promoter score as an operational success metric.
Analytics for performance optimization (micro level analysis): Micro executives are a fast growing group (especially in digital retail), and they focus on using their website data to continuously improve the results and returns of their site. Keyword reports, landing page data, shopping cart step analysis are all areas where reams of data are modeled and tweaked.

Macros tend to be more traditional executives, often in roles where the website is only one part of their overall mandate (i.e. business to business). Micros tend to be almost exclusively digital marketers, and often have the vast majority of their marketing spend online (i.e. eCommerce).

The Napkyn Analyst program includes a performance management component. By listing the top 5 things a Macro really cares about and then reporting monthly on the health of these 5 things, we can create a really transparent ‘state of the union’ report. No decision-maker will look at their website the same once they have a strong ongoing understanding of the health of their traffic, their primary goal conversions and their marketing ROI. The problem with this being the endgame of analysis is that it is entirely too reactive. Knowing that traffic has gone up (green) and conversions have down (red) is important, especially if you can isolate root cause. There is no component of a straight performance management initiative that relates to optimization.

Napkyn’s analyst program includes an optimization top 3 report and optimization index in each monthly report we deliver to a client. The purpose is to isolate segments of under performance in the web data, make recommendations on ways the under performing segment can be optimized, and then track the results over time. This is a huge selling feature to Micros, who don’t have the time and the expertise to build a plan around this kind of continuous improvement initiative. But how valuable can optimization be if not taken into the context of the overall health of the business? Perhaps we grew the conversion rate of Australians by 300%, but hurt our overall sales by alienating North American Traffic. Context is king.

What we see happening with our Macro and Micro executives is that they start working with Napkyn to meet their specific goals “I only care about the Magnifying Glass reports” and after about a quarter of ongoing deliverables become equally as interested in the other half of the document “I’m losing that many conversions from that landing page? What should I do?”

I could carry the metaphor into how our reports are like bifocals....but I digress.

The important point is that a good analytics process allows you to see the big picture in such a way that you can understand and action on the specifics that you isolate.

What’s your process? Is it profitable?

Cheers,

Jim

Analytics use in the Internet Retailer 500: Interesting Findings

noreply@blogger.com (The Napkyn Team) — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 15:06:00 +0000

Like any fast growth company, we use cold calling at Napkyn as a way to start off long term relationships (and sometimes get hung up on). We take pains to follow the number one rule of cold calling: Never waste anyone’s time. The best way to follow this golden rule is to do some homework on a company before you call them.

Which leads to today’s blog post. After this recent article profiling the impact we have had at Scentiments (#384 on the IR 500) we have been signing up new customers across the IR 500 who want to better understand their data and grow their sales.

So we are reaching out companies with under $75 million revenue (#s 315 to 500) on the Internet Retailer 500. In the interest of making every sales call useful for us and the companies we’ll be calling I have been profiling analytics tools usage.

I was so intrigued with the results I did some rough analysis to share with readers of this blog. Feel free to ping me with agreement or hate-mail on my findings.

Interesting Finding 1: Freedom Reigns in eCommerce

On one hand this report didn’t shock me. I know that free tools represent the vast majority of analytics deployments, and that the free tool vendors are quickly adding high value enterprise features.

On the other hand, if I was running a multi-million dollar a year business, I might care enough about my mission critical sales data to make some kind of financial commitment to the best possible tool for my needs.

So what can we take from this?

The free tools meet 100% of the business requirements of an eCommerce decisionmaker.

OR

Why would an eCommerce firm pay for a full-featured tool if they aren’t going to use it?

I think that the real answer is somewhere in the middle. Your average eCommerce executive isn’t taking advantage of their analytics data because they don’t have an analyst. Its amazing the number of $25M+ companies that we talk to every week that can’t seem to get their hands on or in some cases keep an above average analyst at a reasonable cost. Well I guess its not all that surprising. After all web analytics as a profession is relatively new and most of the top people are either scooped up by the big boys (i.e. Amazon) or hang out a shingle and find themselves on the “charge a high fee” side of the supply-demand curve.

Interesting Finding 2: Analytics double dipping is prevalent.

Exactly one quarter of the IR500 firms examined are using multiple web analytics tools. The majority of these were Google/Omniture deployments, with Google/Yahoo deployments in second place. There were some interesting pairings as well, including one Coremetrics/Omniture deployment (who will win there?). Please note that I only counted pure analytics tools. Products like Test and Target don’t count.

To me, there is only one reason that a company should utilize two analytics solutions: they are evaluating one to replace the other. Having two instances of an business critical solution makes no sense, it’s like having two CRM systems at once, or two inventory management systems.

That said there is a different reason that we are seeing so many eCommerce websites using a paid solution and a free one: the paid one has not been deployed properly. There are two reasons that a tool as important to eCommerce as web analytics hasn’t been deployed properly.

There are no business best practices aligned to the deployment: If you don’t set up your WA tool based on the questions management wants answered, it won’t work properly. That’s when you find Google analytics deployed to provide reports coverage over the areas that the paid solution wasn’t set up for (i.e. “Yes, we paid a boatload of money for Ominiture. But we also needed GA to track paid and natural search.”). As an aside, this is a terrible way to run an information driven decision-making initiative...but I digress.
OR

The executive who owns the eCommerce website doesn’t care about the data: Most eCommerce websites still have decentralized reports, with one specialized report coming from the SEO guy, a different report coming from the email tool...the executive only really uses the WA solution for traffic and conversion rate. This means that none of the reports will line up, proper segmentation is impossible, and optimization initiatives will create, at best, nebulous reports.

Either way, both of these findings (Lack of Analyst + Lack of Tool Deployment/Lack of Respect for Data) point to a somewhat scary conclusion: businesses that generate tens of millions of dollars a year in online sales don’t use their web analytics data to run their decision-making process.

Cheers,

Jim

Napkyn Featured in Internet Retailer

noreply@blogger.com (The Napkyn Team) — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 19:15:00 +0000

It has been a crazy few months of growth, and today Napkyn was written up by Internet Retailer, the leader in eCommerce news.

One of our clients, Scentiments.com (number 384 on the IR500) was featured in a story where they discussed the revenue impact that ongoing analysis has for an eCommerce business.
Howard Wyner, CEO of Scentiments, says in the article that "Since employing Napkyn we have seen real improvements in conversions and were able to increase return on investment for our existing marketing initiatives."

Every business that takes their website seriously is running analytics. The problem is finding the time, the expertise, and the business best practices to turn the data into information, and the information into money.

Napkyn's managed web analysis/optimization services help you grow your business. Just ask Scentiments.

Cheers,

Jim

PS. If you would like to learn more about Napkyn, drop us a line at 613-216-2273 or Click Here to have us contact you.

Segmentation and Conversion: Closer to the Heart

noreply@blogger.com (The Napkyn Team) — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 20:46:00 +0000

In a previous post I referenced the importance of considering only ‘convert-able’ traffic when looking at a goal conversion rate, i.e. only look at US visitor data if you don’t ship or service outside the US.

The reason that you always look at conversion when analyzing web data is because it allows you to always answer the “So What?” questions you receive when talking about data.

Lets use a few made up 'boss conversations' to illustrate:

No Conversion Data

“Ms. VP, our time spent per session has gone up 200% with European Visitors”

“So what?”

“....it’s just interesting is all....of course I’ll leave.”

Conversion Data

“Ms. VP, our time spent per session has gone up 200% with European Visitors”

“So what?”

“Well, as time on site has gone up, conversion has gone down. Looking further into why, I see a high number of european views of our About Us and Shipping pages. I think we should add more up front information about our overseas shipping program and see how that impacts these numbers”

“I get it now. Make the change, keep me in the loop, and I want to give you a raise.” (or something like that)

You get the point.

Now if you want to take things a step further, there is a way to tie segmentation into conversion analysis to create an even clearer picture.

While there is such a thing as no-value visitor (one whom you can never convert), the majority of your visitors are normally people you can. Breaking down this group into segments based on how close they potentially are to your business allows you to better tie conversions into both analysis and optimization planning.

The example below is for an online merchant who has an average order size of 60-100 dollars, and the potential for repeat sales. The first thing we do is make a list of all the subsets of their traffic based on how close they are to the business, from cold to hot.

New Visitors, unbranded natural search
New Visitors, branded search
New Visitors, Paid Search
New Visitors, Direct Type In
Repeat Visitors, all search
Repeat Visitors, Direct type in
Visitors from Email Marketing Campaigns
Visitors who have created a wishlist or account (but no first purchase)
Visitors from Shopping Cart abandoner triggered email
Existing Customer visits

Each of these segments of your visitor population will have a completely different conversion rate, likely moving from quite low on the cold end of the spectrum to well above site average on the hot side.

This exercise alone will have you looking at your traffic in a totally different light, and asking a whole new set of questions that will allow you to optimize your business. Once you add in the percentage of traffic for each segment, you start to see significant opportunity costs in addressing the lower end of the spectrum. This will ultimately lead to the ability to plan to move visitors up the scale through mechanisms that don’t have adverse affects on the hotter categories.

Let’s go back to the discussion with the VP:

Conversion and Segmentation Data

“Ms. VP, while our conversion rate went up slighly last month overall, it was due to increased conversion from existing customers who got our summer specials email. Removing that visitor type means that we would have had lower than average conversions.”

“So What? We had a better month.”

“Our better month was because of a discount to people who have bought from us before, about 6% of our traffic. The majority of our underperformance comes from paid search new visitors, about 30% of our traffic. This group has no familiarity with our company, and our paid keywords all push visitors to our homepage. If we were to craft one or more custom landing pages for this visitor type, we would be able to educate on our business, increase sales, and optimize this segment over time.”

“I like the cut of your jib. Bring me a proposal for the landing page initiative, and pack your stuff. You’re corner office material.” (or something like that)

The more you understand who your visitors are in relation to 'the heart' of your business, and why they do (or don’t do) what you want online, the better you can influence decisionmaking with information and have an impact on your business.

Cheers,

Jim

This post’s takeaway: Try making a list similar to the one above for your business, and look at each segment’s conversion rate for the month of July. See what kind of questions it brings up and how much easier it is to define a plan of action.

The best things in life are free....kinda.

noreply@blogger.com (The Napkyn Team) — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 15:05:00 +0000

One of the most interesting things about working at Napkyn is that every discussion with a prospect or new customer is a fascinating one. The reason is that every serious owner of a web presence, whether is it a store, lead gen site, non-profit, or even blog is running analytics. Because these analytics tools are only 2% utilized, each discussion we have tends to be informative (for both sides), and interesting, aligning different reports with different unique business requirements.

While every business we talk to has individual needs, there are definitely questions that are pretty standard. A few of them have been discussed in the last posts, but today's post deals with a biggie:

Should I use a free analytics tool, and which one should I pick?

This is a topic worth a book, not a blog post. In order to keep this interesting (and under 20,000 words, I am going to do two posts on the issue. This one will be on the biggest points to consider when examining free analytics tools, and the next will be a discussion and comparison of the ‘big two’ of Google and Yahoo’s analytics tools. (before I start getting emails with suggestions of other tools that should have made the list, finish reading the post....explanation to follow)

There are a few high level points that should be considered when thinking about free analytics tools:
They aren’t actually free: Any free or open source tools you use come with zero support. You have to do the integration yourself, you need to troubleshoot yourself, and you need to learn how to use the product yourself. This means you are going to end up paying a consultant or you are going to offset the direct cash spend with the indirect spend of the time of you and your team. It is for this reason alone that many firms choose a paid vendor, and is definitely something to consider when going the ‘free’ analytics route.

Additional Reads on this topic:
Why Web Analytics Tools Fail - Judah Phillips
Web Analytics Tool Selection - Avinash Kaushik

Just say no to log files: Without spending too many words on the issue, log file based analytics tools read what happens on your web server, require a lot of maintenance, and don’t deliver a lot of great data for the purposes of your average marketing question. If your current analytics tools is log file based, it is time for an upgrade.
(You will notice that each of the additional reads gives pros and cons to both page tagging and log files. I firmly believe that the disadvantages of logfiles completely outweigh the advantages, especially when you think about the advantages of doing ongoing analysis with the new breed of page tagging tools, feel free to comment with your two cents)

Additional Reads on this topic:
Should I use Log Files or Tags? - SCL Analytics
Wikipedia Entry on Web Analytics Logfile vs Page Tag

Stick with the big boys: If you aren’t a fulltime analyst, or someone who is excited about being an early adopter of technology, don’t choose a tiny company for your web analytics. There are some really cool products out there (woopra for example), but as mentioned in the first point, you are going to be learning and doing a lot on your own. The bigger the user community you are a part of, and the bigger the company that you are working with (i.e. Google or Yahoo), the easier it will be to get ramped up.

Additional Reads on this topic:
Forrester Web Analytics Forecast: WASP Data - Stephane Hamel
Wikipedia Description of Early Adopter (if you qualify, feel free to disregard the big boys statement)

No plan, no value: This is one of the biggest issues we deal with when talking to companies that have been running analytics for years but don’t feel they are getting any value. Most firms know they need analytics, so do a basic deployment of a tool without thinking of the data needs of their business. This means that they aren’t able to ask good questions, or get good answers. Before you choose or deploy, think about what you want to accomplish, what questions you want to ask, and what reports you want to see. Remember also that your analytics tool should be reporting on every thing you do that affects your digital channel. Doing a lot of email? Track it in your analytics. Decided that twitter will grow your business? Track it in your analytics. Do 60% of your call center sales originate on the web? You get the point.

The next post will cover what we feel to be the two free analytics software options for companies that want to make to get into data driven decisionmaking. Google Analytics and Yahoo Analytics are both very valuable, and very different. Learning more about them will help understand the vendor landscape, and help make better decisions about building your digital analysis plan.

Cheers,

Jim

Why bounce rates are important...and not important.

noreply@blogger.com (The Napkyn Team) — Thu, 21 May 2009 15:44:00 +0000

There’s nothing like a solidly contrary title to start off a web marketing blog. One of the most fascinating and frustrating things about web analysis is that every metrics is relevant in certain contexts, and irrelevant in others. Depending on your business and the segment of traffic we are examining, metrics like time on site, page depth of visit, even goal conversion are totally different in terms of importance.

The example this blog will be using is bounce rate.

According to the Web Analytics Associations standards document, bounce rate is the ratio calculated by dividing single page visits by entry pages. In plain english this means that a bounce occurs when someone has a single page session. They entered your site on a specific page, and then left the site without going any deeper.

Your overall bounce rate number is the percentage of people who had a one page visit to your website.

I have had discussions with multiple firms in the last few weeks who were concerned about their ‘bounce rate’ numbers, specifically the overall number.

Overall bounce rate numbers are at best a health metrics for your web business. On it’s own it doesn’t really mean anything, but it can be indicative of areas of interest that actually do mean something.

Example 1#: One of the firms I am working with asked me to examine bounce rate issues as they were well in excess of 50%. I put together two quick segments, one for their ‘true conversion’ segment (they only sell in North America) and one for ‘rest of world’. The bounce rate for their true conversion segment was much lower than rest of world.

So when you look at it, high bounce indicated success. They were able to relay information to non-prospects that allowed them to move on and not waste their time. They were also able to relay information to real prospects to let them know they should stick around and engage the site.

Example 2#: An eCommerce company I work with asked me to examine bounce rates as they were super high, in excess of 80%. As bounce rates are a combination of pageviews and first page of session data, a good place to start to see real numbers is under “Landing Page” reports (which is what Google Analytics calls this type of report).

Over half of all visits started on the homepage, and the bounce rate was much better than expected at around thirty percent. The other half of their traffic initiated visits on something like 27,000 other pages within the site...and all of them had bounce rates in the high nineties! It turns out that this site generates a ton of natural search traffic from visitors searching for very generic non-branded terms (think ‘jogging pants‘ instead of ‘Roots Yoga pants’), which implies a lack of buying intent in the visitor.

So in example one, bounce rates showed that the website was doing a good job at speaking to its primary stakeholders. In example two, bounce rates helped identify a significant underperforming segment of traffic in unbranded natural search visitors.

Moral of the story: Bounce rates are important as early warning signals that allow you to start asking questions of your analytics. Bounce rates are not important as a success metrics for your website.

Cheers,

Jim

This week’s takeaway: Look at your overall year to date bounce rate in your analytics tool. Make a list of the top three reasons you think you have this rate, and see if you can prove/disprove with data.

Your True Conversion Rate: A better way to look at goal conversion

noreply@blogger.com (The Napkyn Team) — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 17:19:00 +0000

If you ran a telemarketing company booking attendees for a conference, would your success rate depend on the people on your list, or every person in the world with a phone?

If you were a car dealership, would your close rate be based on people who came into the dealership, or everyone in town with a driver’s license?

Fairly easy answers. Let’s start applying the same principles to your web business.

When you open up your web analytics tool, one of the first number you look at (or should look at) is your conversion rate. Your site has a defined goal, regardless of whether you sell something direct; generate leads, names or donations.

This goal conversion number most likely is generated by answering this question:

What percentage of all the people that came to my website completed a defined objective.

This doesn’t take into consideration the fact that many of these visitors are unable to complete this objective at all…and frankly you don’t want them to.

Quick example: Let’s say that the car dealership mentioned above had a website, whose goal was to generate names and requests for contact from a sales person. This dealership really only wants to generate names in the defined geographic region in which they can sell cars. When then does their goal conversion rate include visitors from Asia? They won’t be buying a Passat in Texas any time soon.

eCommerce conversion numbers suffer from the same issue. If you don’t ship outside the continental United States, why does your conversion rate include every visitor in the world? Not only does this make your numbers inaccurate, in many cases it makes the goal conversion numbers lower than they should be.

I was doing some work last week for a new client whose primary goal is signing up for trials of their software online. While anyone can sign up, their exclusive sales focus is on the North American Market. After creating a quick custom segment in Google Analytics, it was easy to see how they were really performing at achieving this goal.

Once you know what the purpose of your online presence is, think about who you want to achieve it. The associated reports might surprise you, and delight your boss.

Cheers,

Jim

This week’s takeaway: Try building a filter in your analytics tool around your primary conversion segment. If you need some assistance, drop us a line.

Feelings – Nothing more than feelings…

noreply@blogger.com (The Napkyn Team) — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 12:50:00 +0000

Welcome to the Napkyn blog. It has been an exciting month, with new clients coming on board, a brand new website coming out within the week and fantastic feedback and results on our unique approach to understanding your digital business.

All the work we have been doing at Napkyn during this recent period has been executed alongside a clearly defined plan. To some extent, we know (give or take a little) where Napkyn is based on our 2-year plan, and what we need to be doing to meet and exceed our targets.

I know, that’s “business 101” stuff.

The reason I mention all this is because this level of planning, reporting and analysis is still sorely lacking for most companies at the digital level.

Every day I talk to business owners and executives who are still focusing on traffic generation and website uptime, and making all other decisions based on gut-checks and guesses.

One company I am in talks with is a fast growing pure play retailer in the apparel industry. They have had substantial year over year growth in sales because of their quality product and attention to customer service. However in a discussion a few weeks ago, their CEO asked me if I thought they should terminate the agreement with their search marketing company because he ‘felt’ that their results had been slipping.

From a seasoned executive who knows his inventory to the product and calls customers personally, this is a pretty odd question to ask. The reason was because they had no historical understanding of what this vendor had accomplished and no baselines set when they came on board. Is this simply because the economy is poor right now? Would you be in worse shape if this vendor hadn’t been driving qualified traffic? Are they a wasteful spend?

A holistic approach to digital analysis is vital for any business that spends more than a dollar a month online. Otherwise you don’t know where you came from, and you sure won’t know where you’re going. Thousands of dollars will continue to get spent on nothing more than feelings.

Cheers,

The Napkyn Team

This week’s takeaway: When you make a major change to your business, like adding a new vendor, establish some firm baselines for metrics they are supposed to influence. It will help you ‘feel’ a lot better once you have to start justifying the bills.