Archive for June, 2007
Posted on June 28, 2007 by Robbin Steif
Why does conversion *rate* matter anyway?
All that seems to matter are conversions: How many sales you made, how many leads you gathered, how many people met their needs on your web site. So why (and when) does anyone care about the rate of conversion? After all, if the New York Times linked to your site, you’d have a lot of extra traffic, but it might not be well-qualified. All those extra visitors would increase the denominator of the conversion ratio, but there might only be a couple of extra sales. Your conversion rate would probably plummet during that time period — but you made extra money. So why care about rate instead of absolute conversions?
There are some specific (and very common) situations and mindsets that cause website owners to care about the conversion rate:
When you are paying by the click (e.g. Google AdWords). If you pay a dollar a click, for example, and you get 5000 clicks, that’s $5000. Let’s say your average order size is $25. If your conversion rate is 2%, that translates into 100 orders, or $2500. So you lost money on the deal — because your conversion rate is too low (and because you are paying too much for the click, when the average ticket is only twenty-five bucks.)
When you are working with affiliate marketing. There are probably affiliate marketers who charge by the click (see above.) But most of the affiliate deals we see are pay per action — you pay Shopzilla or Pricegrabber or whomever for the conversion or for the lead. So why care about rate — after all, you only pay when the customer converts! The problem arises when affiliates see lots of traffic going to your site, but not lots of money coming back to them. They aren’t happy, they will want to cut better deals with your competitors. Likewise, if you have a great conversion rate, they’ll want to do special favors for you.
When you are getting traffic from organic search. It’s true that the traffic is free, in the sense that you don’t have to pay for each click. But whether you pay an SEO firm or an internal employee, your are probably paying *someone*. That’s an investment, and you want the highest return you can get on that investment – so the higher your organic conversion rate, the higher your ROI.
When you are paying for online PR. You might get lucky and get a link from the NYTimes, or better yet, your story might get picked up by the blogosphere, then picked up by the mainstream media, and you’ll be on CNN by nightfall. Those are the stories we hear about. Most of the time, creating your own buzz is a lot of hard work. Time equals money, so you can apply the same logic here as we did to SEO: the higher the conversion rate, the higher the ROI.
In fact, you could reasonably argue that the only forms of traffic that are “free” are referring links – sites that link to yours because they like your site — and bookmarked or typed in traffic. The latter group is often repeat users, and depending on your product, should have one of the highest conversion rates of all your segments.
And that’s why everyone cares about conversion rate.
View Comments (2 Responses) | Categories: Conversion Science, Google Analytics
Posted on June 26, 2007 by Robbin Steif
Before I start (again) – this is the last reminder that the Criticize GA’s Documentation Contest ends on Tuesday the 26th. Which is probably today already if you are in Australia.
I have been doing a series on filters for Google Analytics, and am almost done. I have two more posts coming up, and then it feels like I have finished.
However, I read the Google Groups for GA and I can see that the combinations of problems people have are always amazing. So if you have a filters question that I haven’t answered yet — and it is not about cross-domain work, since that will be a different series — please send it my way. You can comment or send email to my last name at lunametrics.com — whatever is easiest for you.
Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics
(see, there is all the info you need to send the email)
View Comments (3 Responses) | Categories: Filters, Google Analytics
Posted on June 25, 2007 by Robbin Steif
Before I start – The “Criticize GA Documentation” contest ends on Tuesday, June 26.
We now take a break in our regularly-scheduled programming (which was filters for GA). That’s because I need to return to an old topic, Regular Expressons (RegEx) for GA, and add a much-needed post: Regular Expression Braces.
Braces are curly brackets, like this {these are braces}. GA never mentions them. So, I don’t know if they are an unsupported feature, or a problem with the documentation.
Braces repeat the last “piece” of information a specific number of times. They are used with two numbers, like this: {6,8}. That particular example means, repeat the last piece of information at least six times and no more than eight.
For example, there is a place across the street here in Honolulu called the Rainbow Bazaar. If I wanted to pull a report with all the correct spellings of their name, I could search the report (in the little box at the bottom of the page in the new GA version). I would use the following RegEx:
baza{2,2}r
This means, pull all the keywords that have a baz followed by at least two and no more than two a’s and which are also followed by an r. Hence, bazaar. (Notice that the last letter is my last piece of information.) Or I could use those same braces to pull misspellings, a more interesting report.
The problem with regular expressions is always knowing what they are “working on.” In this case, what is the last piece of information? A set of square brackets or parentheses would make a piece of information. (And in fact, a great use of braces would be to capture all the IP addresses in a block of 0-255, like this: [0-9]{1-3} . It’s true that you will also capture 538 and 627 and all sorts of numbers above 255, but you really don’t care, since the IP block will never go higher than 255, anyway.) In the absence of a well-defined piece of information (defined by parentheses or brackets), you are working with the last character.
Here are all the other RegEx posts:
Backslashes \
Dots .
Carats ^
Dollars signs $
Question marks ?
Pipes |
Parentheses ()
Square brackets []and dashes -
Plus signs +
Stars *
Regular Expressions for Google Analytics: Now we will Practice
Bad Greed
RegEx and Good Greed
Intro to RegEx
Minimal Matching
Lookahead
Robbin
View Comments (6 Responses) | Categories: Google Analytics, Regular Expressions, Web Analytics
Posted on June 20, 2007 by Robbin Steif
Last night, my 16-year-old daughter said to me, “So far this year, I have made $800 and only spent $500.”
I walked over to look at the ancient version of Quicken she insists on using. (As soon as she starts to pay her credit card bill electronically, she will want to upgrade.) Even though I think I am better than she is with Quicken, she showed me that if you hover over the Income and Expenses legend in the dashboard, it shows you the totals for the year.
But the best part came as I began to turn away and suddenly realized that she was drilling down. (Remember, this is my teenager, who gets a really big allowance so that she can buy her own clothes and balance her own checkbook and in general, learn finance.) “Look,” she said to me, “I spent half of my money on my cell phone and on meals with my friends.” And there on her Quicken dashboard was her visualization of expenses for the year by category.
If I told her that she is a budding analyst, she would get really angry. I can hear it already, ‘I don’t want to be you.” But isn’t that what we should interview for – people who think like analysts?
Robbin
View Comments (1 Response) | Categories: Web Analytics
Posted on June 19, 2007 by Robbin Steif
My post on the Google Analytics Documentation contest is my most read post of all time, not in small part because Techmeme linked to it. So why don’t I have more comments (especially since I have been begging my friends to submit.)
Well, Cynthia Closkey pointed out that I had accidentally required people to register in my efforts to figure out how to avoid pingback spam (not that one has anything to do with the other – this reminds me of a customer who set every cookie possible just to try to make GA work.) And then I never got rid of it, making it incredibly onerous to comment.
All right all right, I fixed it, and there are just a few more days to add your criticism of the GA documentation. Win real prizes. So that’s both fame AND fortune. Google sees every comment. Check it out. And don’t require your customers to register before buying or your readers to register before commenting. Assuming you want the comments and the money, of course.
Robbin
ps notice that I got my t-shirt
View Comments (2 Responses) | Categories: Conversion Science, Google Analytics
Posted on June 17, 2007 by Robbin Steif
I just got my copy of Web Analytics – an Hour a Day. I am taking it on vacation to Hawaii. (I’m not taking a laptop or a Blackberry or anything, so I figure, I can spend some time reading.)
The first 300 people who send in their pictures with the book in their hands get an autographed bookmark from the author, Avinash Kaushik. So I gave my daughter a choice – did she want her picture on my blog, or did she want it on Avinash’s blog, where more people would see it, but no one would know who she was? Well, you can see which one she chose. BTW, I think letting people send in their kids’ pictures with the book is a brilliant idea.
Avinash, since you asked for all feedback, good and bad – I was so disappointed that the included disk said “CD-ROM” on it, but doesn’t work in my car (and what was I expecting? you wrote that it includes video, so it must be a DVD.) If it were a CD, though, I really could do it in an hour a day, half an hour each way to work and back.
Endnotes: Thank you, June Li, for telling everyone about the Google Analytics Documentation contest. Thank you, Bob Mutch, for teaching me how to do a better job with my WordPress pictures (although I thought someone had set up the CSS and in the end, I just added padding to my picture, which achieved a similar goal.)
Robbin
View Comments (No Responses) | Categories: Industry News
Posted on June 16, 2007 by Robbin Steif
Every day, or maybe every other day, we get a note in our email that usually take this format:
Hi LunaMetrics. Our conversion rate sucks is just terrible. What can you do to help us?
I don’t mind getting emails like this; after all, the potential customer is just starting a dialog that might lead to a big project. But I feel that it’s important for the potential customer to understand how much effort might have to go in to increasing a conversion rate.
Any more, I’ve starting to answer those emails with one of my own, and it goes something like this:
Let me not steal your money. Sure, we’d be happy to set up your analytics, and then collect enough data to read them and make recommendations, if you need that. We can do some user testing to find out what customers think (always incredibly valuable) and we can even do a conversion best practices analysis to tell you what we think. And we’ll have a great idea of why you aren’t converting well. But I don’t want you to think that we’ll do that analysis, you’ll make a few changes, and your conversion rate will magically increase. It requires testing, testing and more testing.
At the first Emetrics Summit I attended, in Santa Barbara, I heard Avinash Kaushik say, “80% of the time, we are wrong about what customers want.” Only by asking them – user testing, multivariate testing – can we see what they really want.
And then, let’s look at this problem a different way: when the problem is not the site, but rather, the position. I’ve seen too many sites that sell commodity items without a unique selling proposition. So after we do that user testing, we’re going to find out, for example, that users don’t know who you are, and they can buy your product for the same rate elsewhere, so why should they give you their credit card numbers?
This doesn’t mean that all commodity businesses have lousy conversion rates. On the contrary, one of our customers has a website to sell their commodity; their conversion rate would make your skin turn so green that you could get the part of Elphaba on Broadway. But instead of starting with, “What color should our buttons be?” or “What should the headline say?” they have consciously thought through the offer and the barriers to purchase, and have done everything they can to make this the best offer and easiest purchase you could ever want to make.
So before you write that email asking to increase your conversion rate, think about whether you have a unique selling proposition. And then, before you waste a dime, decide whether you are ready to put in the work to test and test and test in an effort to increase those rates. Because otherwise, I really do feel like I am stealing your money.
Robbin
View Comments (No Responses) | Categories: Conversion Science
Posted on June 14, 2007 by Robbin Steif
This is part of a series I am writing on filters for Google Analytics (and when I am all done, I promise to thread them all.) This current entry is a particularly beautiful capability of GA, but you might want to first read about Custom Advanced Filters if you aren’t terribly familiar with them (my most recent post in this series.) I will do just the tiniest review, else this will get too long.
Just the Tiniest Review: In a Custom Advanced Filter, you get a field A and a way to extract it into a Regular Expression, and if you like, a Field B and a way to extract that one into a RegEx, too. Then you can play with them — put them together, for example. That’s what output to constructor (the third area) is all about.
New: But what if you wanted to put together more than two fields? That’s a job for Superman Cascading Custom Advanced Filters. BTW, I made up that name. I haven’t found that one in the Google Analytics documentation, but I don’t know what to search under. (Now, if I could enter the contest, I would submit this entry. But the rules are, I can’t win.)
Back to business: so, let’s say that every day your boss wants a report that tells her what keywords people were searching on, what was the source, which ad they clicked on, how many pages they looked at and did they convert? None of this is hard in Google Analytics – the hard part is getting the information easily and quickly. What do you do when you have 50,000 keywords and you need the information for your boss every day? What do you do when your boss wants that report to also include geographic location and browser size?
(Note: Caleb Whitmore from POP, who taught me how to do cascading custom advanced filters and gets a ton of credit here, calls these Insane Filters, because, “who has time to look at 50,000 keywords every day?” And in fact, I have made my example here pretty simple compared to the one that I did for a customer last week, which included seven filters.)
So remember our fairly simple example: we are looking to get keyword – source – Ad Title – pages/visitor – conversion rate.
We start by creating a filter that will associate keyword (Campaign Term) with source, and we’ll dump in into Custom Field 1. If you are now a little lost , please read this post on how to create Custom Advanced Filters. Here is a screen shot:
Now comes the “cascading” part. In this second custom advanced filter, we pick up Custom Field 1 as our A, we pick up the next thing we need, Ad Title, also known as Campaign Content, as our B, and we associate them in the constructor, but this time we put it into its ultimate resting place.
So what do I mean by that? With the final filter, you decide which report you are going to plop it all into — that’s what goes in the “output to” field. The decision on a report is important – the report you choose will give you specifics you might need. For example, if you want conversion rate, don’t drop it into your Top Content report (because you don’t get conversion rate there.) I have been using Visitor > Languages for this (but even if you have a seemingly obscure report like languages, you should create a custom profile for this work.) Notice that I didn’t do any work on pages/visitor or conversion rate, even thought I need it — that info will come automatically with the report, if I choose it correctly.
When you get the report, the first column will look like this:
shoes,google,Buy Red Shoes for $5
Right? First comes the keyword, then a comma, then the source, then a comma, and finally the name of the ad. This is how we associate more than two fields. The reason that I used seven filters for a customer last week was because they needed us to associate eight fields (i.e. you can keep doing this, and only in the last filter do you choose where to put the data.)
The other information (pages/visit and conversion rate) will be the same as always, in columns on the right. Plus there may be data you don’t care about, depending on the report you chose. Either way, all you need to do is export to Excel and voila! there is your report.
Tips and tricks: It is nice to use a comma in the constructor (i.e. like this: $A1,$B1) . That way, your file already has commas and separates nicely. However, depending on your data, you might have other commas get in the way. For example, just think of the mess you would make if your ad title was Shoes, Sandles, More — each of those would go into a separate cell in Excel. So a better way to go might be with a separator that isn’t used as often, maybe a slash or a star * or …. well , you get it. There is probably a way to get Excel to recognize those, but I generally have to export to a notepad and tell the notepad the name of the delimiter.
Also in the tips and tricks area, there is no reason that you can’t dump the whole thing back into your final field with each filter. So if you report is going to end up in Languages, you could always have every constructor go to Languages. But my advice is to resist that temptation and use the custom field until you get to the last filter. It’s a pain to get all your work done and start to get data, only to realize that the report you chose doesn’t work. If you use Custom all along the way, you only have the change the last filter.
Don’t forget that you can change the order of filters. This might be very important — you might need a different layout of your excel spreadsheet.
And finally — if you learned something here, please submit an entry to the Criticize Google Analytics Documentation contest. You have until June 26.
Endnotes: Thank you to Michael Harrison for telling everyone about the contest. Hearty congratulations to OX2 on your GAAC status. Jeff and Nick and Brian and Helen, thank you for helping me with all my GA endeavors.
Robbin
View Comments (13 Responses) | Categories: Filters, Google Analytics, Web Analytics
Posted on June 12, 2007 by Robbin Steif
… go on over to Dylan Lewis’s new web analytics wiki. The coolest part of the wiki (IMHO) is that the Google Analytics are public — and here is the username and password.
Now, he only gives read access, not administrative access. I went over to fix all the things I wanted him to have (and to figure out why his data is “accepting one goal” when there are no goals under the goal tab), and realized that I wasn’t an administrator. (*Sob* — I am so used to being an administrator.)
On the other hand, it is a great opportunity to see what they are like, if you’ve never seen them before. Plus, tonight, a reader was complaining about some v2 functionality; it was a complaint I had never heard before. “Show me,” I wrote him. “Go to Dylan’s wiki and use his public analytics.” What a fabulous opportunity — the reader can post the information to the world (well, at least to the 650 people who subscribe to this blog), and there are no NDAs required.
Now, if you have used GA, you really want to enter The Contest, right? (I never worked so hard to get a list of problems, but when I see the entries, I can see that it’s worth the effort.)
Robbin
View Comments (No Responses) | Categories: Google Analytics, Industry News, Web Analytics
Posted on June 10, 2007 by Robbin Steif
While I am waiting for everyone to submit entries to the “Criticize GA Documentation” contest, I have to tell you about this great conversion clinic I did on Thursday.
You know how the SEO events have clinics, where people submit their sites, and a few experts evaluate problems/opportunities in real time? Well, I did the same thing for conversion – an “expert” analysis. I cautioned the audience that the best experts would be users, but that this might be one place to start.
It must have been a success, because after the event, four or five people came up to me and typed in their sites and asked me to do those evaluations, too. (Not surprisingly, that’s when I got to see the really low-hanging fruit.)
Here are some of the things that I saw across many sites:
Incompatibility with Firefox. Not a few website owners were surprised at the way their sites rendered in Firefox, and commented that some text didn’t show up, or that links were broken there.
No scent. Scent comes in lots of different flavors (ooh, there’s a good one), but one of the ways I want to see scent is inline links that enable me to pursue my goal (links right in the copy.) I saw pages and pages of text with no links.
Hidden Forms. I saw lots of B-to-B Contact Us forms that were hidden behind links. If that’s your goal, why don’t you have a form on every page, or at least, start your form on every page?
Hidden Phone numbers.. If a phone call is one of your most important calls to action, why don’t you have it at the top of every page? This is the same issue as the last one — why do people hide their call to action?
Navigation. I saw those standard B-to-B non-descriptive navigation terms: Home, Services, Products, About Us, Contact Us and Resources. (Why can’t anybody say what they sell in their navigation? Well, one lady did that.)
On-site search. I found very few on-site search boxes. The only one that I remember was from a lady who had a Yahoo! store.
It’s All About Us. Companies that talked about themselves instead of their customers.
You sell what? I saw this a lot, companies that didn’t make it clear what they sold. More than once, I had to ask a website owner, “Now, what is it you guys do or sell?”
I didn’t see a lot of “my nephew created it” websites, and no one required a sign-in before they allowed you to spend money. (Although one guy made his “sign in here if you are already registered” so prominent that it obscured the other options.)
I love to speak in public, and this clinic was more fun than perhaps any other presentation I’ve done. I couldn’t have done the seminar if it weren’t for the help that LunaMetricians Taylor Pratt and Shareen Jordan gave me (during the two minutes that I studied each site, they got up and talked about best practices in conversion, or analytics.) Also helping in that space was Tim Sweet from Nauticom. (He absolutely lives up to his name.)
End notes: Many thanks to Scott Baldwin for debugging our blog and showing me why Safari was so intolerant of the unmatched tag. And to the two people who already made submissions to my “Criticize GA Documentation” contest. So come on, come on, let’s get some more entries.
Robbin
View Comments (1 Response) | Categories: Conversion Science, Firefox, Usability
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