My last post raised a debate about Omniture, its complex installation, and the fact that most companies that use it are being left behind.
But this blog is not about hating Omniture and praising any other tool. This blog is about Adapting. The real world of Web Marketing does not accept excuses. Either you get your skills working in your company or you Die. Its that simple. Here is Part 2 of “The Good The Bad and The Useless.”
GA rocks, but there is a particular report that really bugs me…
The Visits to Purchase Report:
This report shows how many visitors purchased on their first visit.
So out of all the purchases made, approximately 70% made their purchase on their first visit. That means that there were 30% that needed some reassurance before coming back and making the purchase. Maybe they needed to consult with a spouse or friend for reassurance, ask their parents for a credit card when they got home from work, etc.
But this information is not that useful if we don’t segment it. So let’s segment for referral traffic only. You can see details of this in Avinash’s Web presentation.
Great, now we can see that referral traffic converts only at approximately 56% on the first visit? That’s a big difference from the site average! What’s going on here? At this point my logic would be to see this information and compare sources against each other. Let’s see what happens when we try to compare Direct traffic, Organic Search referrals and referring domains:
Do you see the problem with this report? When we saw only one segment, the referral report contained 100% of referral traffic of which 56% converted on the first visit and approximately 16% on the second visit. But all of a sudden when I add the other segments to compare against each other in the same report, the segments are showing the percentage of the overall site traffic.
This report is telling us that out of ALL transactions, 1.46% of them converted on a second referral traffic visit. So what?!! This brings everything out of context. With this report, I can no longer compare referral traffic as performing worse on the first visit than “non-paid” traffic.
I now have to go into excel and do my number crunching because of the way existing data is being shown. I get something like this:
Now that we have some context I can clearly see that referral purchases are converting less on the first visit than the site average, or any other traffic source in this report. Obviously there is standard deviation, because we have more data on some of the sources than others, but a larger data set should give you more accurate results.
If we are going to segment properly, we need to keep the important metrics in context, otherwise we can make important errors and costly marketing mistakes.
Why is this report useful?
Think of all the 1st time visitors that could have converted and thought “I’ll come back tomorrow” but forget, and never do so at all. If you notice a particular segment’s traffic sucks, you can create incentives for these particular visitors. Through landing pages or using IP Delivery wisely.
An idea: Offer a catfish ad or Ajax bar on the top with a call to action such as: “10% off Coupon Code: jhtus987 only valid for next 3 hours.” Would it work? Maybe, Maybe not. But shouldn’t you test it out?
What reports would you improve in Google analytics? How would you improve them?
{ 0 comments… add one now }