Making Goals, Funnels & Filters Actionable

Google Analytics (GA) makes advancing your business easier by giving you the tools to quickly see where improvements can be made in your web site that will make a difference to your bottom line. Whether your bottom line is dollars or traffic, GA has solutions. Three of these tools are called goals, funnels and filters. I will briefly outline the uses for each of these and how they can provide actionable insights that will sharpen your business’ performance.

Goals

In setting up any analytics program your first priority should be to determine your goals. Beware, it is easier said than done because they cannot just be any goals. Goals have to tie the data you are collecting to your desired business outcomes. Without goals, the metrics you collect will not yield actionable insights. It is lovely to know that you got 1,000 visitors on your site today, but how do those visits impact your business, really? That is where setting up clearly defined goals comes in.

For example, let us say that you have a business goal of getting a publishing deal to write a book on how to de-clutter your home. One strategy you determine for yourself is to become a recognized expert in home organization. The tactic you employ to achieve your strategy is to write a blog where you share tips on home organization. You do some research and discover that publishers sit up and take notice of a blogger when in addition to getting an average of 50,000 visitors per day, the average time on the site is 12 minutes. You set a goal of achieving an average site visit time of 12 minutes. (See how we must first have clear business goals in order to know what our analysis goals should be?)

Analytics guru Avinash Kaushik (2008) says it well:

At the end of the day every analysis needs to solve for the business outcomes. So you have to have some understanding of the goals going in (this is much harder than you imagine).

 Many people just jump into the data, find interesting trends and patterns, convert those into "insights" and off it goes. The problem? You are sending things out you think matter, rather than what the business actually cares about (paras. 25 & 26).

Perhaps you decide that a goal of a 12 minute average visit is too overwhelming to start with. So you set up four smaller goals in GA. The first goal is a visit duration of greater than 3 minutes. It looks like this:

The second goal is for visits greater than 5 minutes. It looks like this on the GA site:

Set the visit duration goals at any intervals you think make sense for your overall targets.

There are other goals that can be set, such as URL Destination, Pages per visit, and Events. The same logic applies. By clearly defining your desired business outcomes you can drill down to the specific metric you need to measure in order to track your progress towards your overall business goals.

Funnels

Now, let us suppose that another benchmark that gets publishers’ attention is a large mailing list. You decide to add a monthly newsletter opt-in page to your blog, so you can begin to capture names and email addresses. Again, with some research you determine that 100,000 is the magic number of regular subscribers that you need to get publishers interested in your book. It is easy enough to keep count of how many new addresses you collect, but that is not actionable data in terms of site improvement. What is actionable information is the pathway that people use to complete the sign up process. By watching their actions in this funnel, you can figure out where people abandon the course. You can then optimize your site to insure more people make it all the way through to complete the sign up procedure.

In order to set up a funnel, we go back to our goals tab and select the second goal set, and choose the goal type, URL destination. We plug in the address of the page that subscribers will see once they have successfully completed signing up for the newsletter. In this case, it is a thank you page.

By checking the “Use Funnel” box at the bottom, you can then add the steps in the funnel that bring visitors to the ultimate destination of the “thank you” page. Once you have added each of the steps the visitor must complete in order to successfully sign up for the newsletter, you then have the ability to see where people abandon the process. You can then look at the pages where they bail out fix any issues. Anyone can count new sign ups, but only someone deeply invested in their goals will think to add a funnel to their clearly defined goal in order to determine site obstructions to their goals.

Filters

Filters are another tool designed to help you get down to actionable data.

Google Profile Filters allow you to define rules that permanently modify your data as it flows into your account profile. If you want to screen, suppress, or shape the data that enters your profile so it doesn’t clutter the picture of your ecommerce business, then Profile Filters are an important feature to implement (Stearns, 2010, para.6).

There are advanced filters you can set up for doing things like segmenting out organic search traffic from paid search traffic, but for our purposes here, I will relate just the basic filtering options.

One important note about filters is that once you apply a filter, you cannot retroactively “un-apply” it. Once the data is filtered, you cannot get the entire data set back again, so keep one profile that is completely unfiltered that includes all the data compiled from your site. If any issues arise, you can always refer to the data in the unfiltered profile.

An easy and useful filter to turn on is one that separates out traffic coming from your own ISP domain or IP address. So, going back to our goal of an average of 50,000 visitors per day, if you are visiting your site 100 times per day, your visitor count is going to be inaccurate every day because of your own visits. With filters, you can tell Google Analytics not to count traffic coming from your own domain or IP address. You can designate it to exclude traffic from certain sources or include traffic to particular subdirectories or hostnames. Filtering lets you see the only data you want to see.  

Below is an example of how to set up a filter for your own IP address.

Using goals, funnels and filters, you can make your web site’s analytic data more actionable—as long as you have tied each back to your business goals. Because, in the end, actionable data is the only data worth having. 

References

Kaushik, A. (2008, July 21) Consultants, analysts: Present impactful analysis, insightful reports. Kauskik.net. Retrieved from http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/consultants-analysts-present-impactful-analysis-insightful-reports/

Stearns, M. (2010, February 4) Google Analytics: Use profile filters, advanced segmentation to understand your visitors. Practicalecommerce.com. Retrieved from http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/1623-Google-Analytics-Use-Profile-Filters-Advanced-Segmentation-to-Understand-Your-Visitors

How a Web Retailer Can Use Analytic Applications to Improve Their Sales 

AutopartsWarehouse.com Case Study

AutopartsWarehouse.com (USAP) is an online retailer that utilizes web analytics to boost their sales and website’s performance. I will explain a few tools they have already implemented with great results and then make some suggestions of other tools they might use for further success.

In 2012, USAP hired Experian CheetahMail and Omniture to combine their technologies in order to implement a “ReMarketing program.” This entailed taking the behavioral data collected from user visits and creating targeted e-mail messaging that reflected users’ browsing habits (Experian.com, 2012, para. 1). 

So, for example, if during a session a user scrolled through fenders,  

 then moved over to garage tools and clicked on a couple of products, but ultimately did not purchase, an email would automatically be generated and sent to the visitor. The email would contain photos and links to the fenders they looked at and the garage tools they clicked on. To further entice a sale, the email might offer a discount or free shipping.  (It should be noted that if the user did not register or log in, then an email could not be sent. However, behaviorally targeted ads featuring the specific items they clicked on could be generated on other websites the user visits, as seen below.) 

Similarly, if the user put items into a shopping cart, but then abandoned the cart, the data would trigger a message like this one to be sent to the customer:

The ReMarketing campaign brought “significant lifts to the transaction rates, clickthroughs, and most importantly, revenue per email” (Experian.com, 2012, para. 1). 

Further Analytic Solutions

While the targeted emails and cart abandonment initiatives are powerful solutions, there are three more applications I would include in the Autopartswarehouse.com analytics mix. Each one adds further illumination into the user experience that will boost the ROI on marketing initiatives.

Phone Call Tracking

First, I would add phone call tracking. Because this is a retailer which sells technical and specialized items, a fair amount of customers are going to need to talk to an actual person to have specific questions answered. If the customer picks up the phone, a call tracking application can provide the trail of breadcrumbs between the digital marketing efforts of the company and how the customer finds the company. Closing this loop is essential for this retailer because without thorough knowledge of which efforts are working, and how well, the marketing department cannot accurately allocate resources.

How Call Tracking Works

Call tracking is rather ingenious. The telephone number displayed on the website is actually dynamic and changes depending on the referring site or particular keyword used that brings the visitor to the site. These dynamic phone numbers act as tracking tags and when the user dials the number it is collected as part of the site’s analytic data. This data on the keywords and referring websites is valuable because it will provide a more complete and reliable picture of the robustness of the marketing efforts.

Infinity Call Tracking and Easy Call Tracker are just two of many phone call tracking providers that work seamlessly with Google Analytics.

Video Recording & Tracking

Another solution I would employ into Auto Parts Warehouse analytics program is a video recording application, like Session Cam or Mouse Flow.  This would provide the ability to record and replay individual users’ website sessions which would allow analysts to gain deeper, more actionable insights by correlating actual visits with the data collected. I will explain by example.

When a new visitor goes to the Auto Parts Warehouse site, they have to fill in the type of vehicle they are looking for parts for. They can then click on any number of departments from the drop down menu beneath it.

Until I registered with the site, I had to keep re-entering the vehicle type every time I went to a new page. It was frustrating and time consuming. If I was a busy Auto Parts Store Manager looking to buy from a new retailer, I may not keep entering the data. I may just find another site to shop. An application like Session Cam would be invaluable in this kind of situation where the data is showing new visitors staying a few minutes on the site, viewing a couple of pages, but then consistently, inexplicably exiting. The video playback would clearly demonstrate the poor functionality and the reason for all the new visitor exits. The functionality could be fixed and results could be clearly measured. 

Social Media Management

The last tool I would add to Auto Parts Warehouse analytics mix is a social media analytics tool like Sprout Social, Argyle Social or Campalyst. Auto Parts Warehouse maintains pages on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Google+. Updating content, managing conversations, tracking mentions across the web are time consuming initiatives. In order to streamline efforts and put time and money into the content and channels that garner the greatest results, the company needs to closely analyze the impact of their social media strategies. With a social media management application, they can integrate their social media efforts and gain insights into how their social media efforts are affecting their ROI.

Most social media applications allow a company to manage all of their social accounts from one dashboard as well as see their website traffic in comparison to their social media activity.  Campalyst goes so far as to boast that it can “track fans and followers from a like or a tweet on the social network up to a purchase on the company's website” (Campalyst Inc., 2012, para. 1).

Regardless of the social media analytics application you choose, it has to integrate seamlessly with your analytics provider, and more importantly, be easy for you to use and understand.  

Adding the Right Solutions

While this post focused on Auto Parts Warehouse, the implications for other online retailers should be clear. Getting the right tools to capture the right data to provide actionable insights is what analytics is all about. It is truly amazing what collecting and analyzing data can tell you about your customers and your website functionality. While there are hundreds of worthwhile applications out there to explore, choosing the right ones for your needs is essential. As remarkable as this new data intelligence is, it does not magically boost your bottom line. To get dividends from your data, you need to apply the right solutions.

References:

Campalyst Inc. (2012, March 22) Campalyst. Google.com. Retrieved from http://www.google.com/analytics/apps/about?app_id=1626001.

U.S. Auto Parts combines online analytics with email marketing to boost campaign performance. (n.d.) Experian.com. Retrieved from http://www.experian.com/cheetahmail/case-studies-us-auto-parts.html