The Challenge

A morning with Avinash

Published by Esteban Glas on March 18th, 2009 | This post lacks all category except for: Marketing, Metrics

After waking up early and coping with morning rush hour traffic accross the city I finally made it to Puerto Madero in order to attend Google’s event featuring Avinash Kaushik as its sole star.

The event was scheduled at 9:30 AM, and it only started at 10:30… oh well.

Presentation title is: “Accountability, Analytics & You”

“I want to share with you what is possible to do through the web”

Avinash starts by presenting his book, “Web Analytics an Hour a Day”. People pay for something that is free (through his blog). He started as a blog. He is passionate about it, takes risks.

“It is astounding that a company (google) that does no Advertising has so much power”. Well, the “no advertising” is relative, IMHO, we see google everywhere, on every online add, ain’t that advertising of sorts?

“Faith Based Initiatives”: How can the success of an Ad in a magazine be measured? An ad on Yahoo’s homepage for the same product is not a faith based initiative, because it is relevant and can be measured.

Online Marketing: not faith based initiative.

“I am not telling you not to run ads on magazines, just telling you that it is not as accountable as the web”.

As with everything in life analytics can be as complicated as you want, but it is easy to start with it.

“Google holds your trust with us as the most important thing we can ever have, we realize how fragile it is. If you share your Analytics data is just used to benchmark; if you choose not to share there is a legally binding term that prevents us to share it”.

“Nothing I’m going to share with you is unique to Google Analytics, you can use any tool”

Showing Geo segmentation, content segmentation, how to break down data within Google Analytics.

“Bounce rate is one of my favorite metrics. I think it is a sexy metric, I love it because beyond pageviews and visits (which are analytics currency) it shows the user experience, it shows how much you suck”

“I came, i puked, i left, that is bounce rate”

“It is also a very actionable item.”

“Look at the top entry pages in your website and see which of those suck”.

Avinash is analyzing Clarin.com; it has 419 links, not counting buttons. They fotocopy the newspaper and make it a website. Shares http://tr.im/hmSG which is an article that tells where newspapers are going.

Measuring Success

Reports should be focused on outcomes. What you should care about (and what your boss cares about) is how much money you made.

“We improved customers satisfaction by n%” is another possible outcome, that can be shared.

“Life is not like a one night stand, people come many times to your website. You have to understand the behavior of the customers on your website” (picture of a conversion funnel).

“3 pages can account for most bounces. You can fire most of your company, fix those 3 pages and make a lot more conversions”

“It is idiotic to measure the number of members, it is not important how many sign up to your site (Using facebook as example, but when they start actioning on the site. If you are Facebook you want people to come over and over again, you need to analyze whether people spend a lot of time on the site or not”

Shows an example that shows that 66% of people return within the day to the website”

“A newspaper should measure the depth of the visits, this makes you think very differently about your business”

“See what the important segment of people need and want from your site. Take a look at people who puked and left, try to understand why they left”

“70% of the people working on a Newspaper we recently analyzed were writing content with a high bounce and no – return rate”

“The average convertion rate for the US on e-commerce sites is 1.72%. What was happening to the other 98%? It is very important that you quantify the value of that 98%. You can set different goals to see if there are other types of conversions”

“In my blog I measure hits to my about page, it makes me happy, in your company measure the ammount of people who visit the executives page, they will love it, they wont admit it, but they’ll love it.”

“All of the clicks on my blog are tagged, because the conversions happen elsewhere”

“The web is also reducing costs, there are a lot of different conversions of different types going on”

“Look at the whole company, always compute the total economic value of the site. For example, in my last company we saved $3,000 in consultants  each time someone applied jor a job through the website”

“If you do adwords don’t just measure visits and pageviews”

“Getting Visits is OK, making money is astounding”

“In my blog I had 64K visitors, 23K came from Search Engines, searching 11,5K different keywords. That is the power of the web. How do you find those keywords? You can use ‘search based keyword tool‘, what the tool does is bringing the search queries and the indexed pages back together”

“Custom reporting: every individual needs and is interesting in a different set of metrics”

“When you don’t segment your data don’t be surprised when you can’t make any important decisions”

Last part of the the talk: “Fail Faster; Experiment or ‘Die’”

“Most web sites suck because the HIPPOS (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion) created them. Never let your Hippo think they are the customer of the website. You need to prove them wrong fast. I recommend you use google website optimizer. I worked with a company that reduced the number of ads in their web page by 30% and increased their ROI”

“Don’t guess, don’t impose, Partner.”

“Competitive Intelligence”

Analyze trends, Identify Audience in smarter ways. You can even look at the competitor’s trends and audience of your competition.

Q&A

“If you share your data on Google Analytics you get access to 6 different metrics as benchmarks”

“Privacy is extremely important. People will share data with you if you are clear enough about what you are collecting. Google has created a plugin that prevents google from collecting data. We believe that Yahoo! and Microsoft will follow this trust mechanisms.”

“A+B testing makes each website more unique. A good example in teh US is if you go to BestBuy and CircuitCity websites, they look alike. Circuit City filled for bankrupcy, Best Buy invests on targeting their audience and testing to optimize the site for their audience”

“There are few things that are shared by most sites. Internal searh (on top right) is one of them. Carts are usually to the right, but a site improved conversions by moving it to the left”

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