Geary LSF University Presents: Analytics Basics

Editor's Notes

1. Thanks for joining the analytics session.We are going to cover a range of topics during theses sessions from the specific Google Analytics, or GA, capabilities, talk about some case studies that are a little out of the norm and also talk about the context for using analytics.While we are going to focus a lot on GA, the principals that we cover apply to all analytics tools. They do essentially the same thing, but in different ways.much of the content, we will present as if you are the end user. This is to put you in the mind set of the client.
2. Before we get into analytics, we're going to spend a bit of time on KPIs. Almost everyone knows that Key Performance Indicators are talked about a lot. But, sometimes we have to take a step back and understand the nuance of KPIs. We are going to look at them from a couple of perspectives:1) Traffic version conversion2) Performance (what your measured by) vs management KPIs (used to direct your efforts).3) Cascading KPIs. Ensuring that your relavent to your boss's efforts. This we'll touch on here, but in a later session, there will be a section covering this specifically.
3. as we look at the site KPIs, we can divide them into two categories: Traffic and Conversion. You see some examples of each here. As you loo at your programs, there may be others that you view as important. One of the things we need to keep in mind is that, while we create these categories, the two are very tightly connected. The quality of the traffic driven can greatly affect the conversion KPIs, and the buy flow or funnel quality can have an impact on the efficiency of your traffic drivers.Key here is to focus on those KPIs that you can affect with your day-to-day actions.
4. We all deal with different levels of KPIs. The Performance KPIs, and the management KPIs.Performanc KPIs are the ones that we review annually, quarterly or sometimes monthly. These are directly related to the company goals / KPIs.For most of us, we look at management KPIs much more often. These are the numbers that our actions directly affect and that we use to decide what our next actions should be.For instance, if a PPC manager is responsible for specific revenue targets, Revenu is the performance KPI.But, the manager will use other KPIs like conversion rates, CTR, cost per click, etc to manage their activities in an effort to hit the performance targets.
5. By setting up your KPIs, you can keep yourself focus, not get distracted. Your performance KPIs are the ones that are used to determine if your are doing a good job.The managing KPIs are the ones you use to assess you actions – is your daily activity having the impact to achieve your performance goals (KPIs).
6. The early marketing for porsche was focused on the young single guy. But they grew up, had families and started looking at other cars. So, porsche created PorscheEveryDay.com.
7. [Video embedded]It was a place for owners with families to load videos and photos and share stories about how they use the car every day. Porsche used offline media to target metro areas to encourage up loads for owners, and then target prospects to be driven to the site as well. They used Spot TV, direct mail, and local print.
8. [Video embedded]They were then able to go into Google analytics and see where users were coming from.
9. Quiz Question: What are the five primary UTM parameters for Google Analytics[Walk viewers through the video]In GA you can see the utm dimensions at the different levels You can also see different metrics for each dimension as well.We can then build reports out of these dimensions.
10. When we talk about reporting, we will discuss Custom Segment. But, I wanted to give you a preview into how you can practically apply the UTM parameters to create an analysis. By creating a convention for naming content (Ads / Content in this case), we can identify two segments and compare their impact and performance matrix to each other, or against a control group. Elaborate on some applications…Display >> track creative variationsEmail >> track creative versions (text vs. html) or identify different links (header link, button link, body link, footer link)Social Media >> track time of posts or the phrasesThen you can use the All Traffic Sources report to view the Ad Content values.
11. Upon selecting the custom segment, all our reporting will break out the performance of these two segment for comparison. This can be used in many different ways to compare different groups of traffic.
12. You can collect/insert almost any kind of custom data into Google Analytics; As long as the data is available to you in the source code of a web page you can pass it to Google Analytics via a custom variable.
13. Custom variables can be set to identify which user experience a visitor had and how this relates to the conversions. Puma used this to tag one of four versions and then tracked the users, monitoring and benchmarking their performance against each other to optimize their efforts.
14. There are 4 parts to a custom variable:1. The name of the variable2. The values for each variable3. The index or slot of the variable4. The scope of the variable
15. Quiz Question: Name 4 uses for custom variables (adobe eVars).
16. La Tienda used custom events, triggered by the ZIP field to see how people responded to the shipping rate differences. Within a radius of the primary shipping location, they have a flat rate. But, beyond that, they were variable. What they found is that people were dropping out of the buy flow, but more often at the variable shipping zone. So, they switched to two flat rates. They found that it was not expensive shipping, but the fact that people did not know what the shipping costs were going to be until too far in the buy flow.
17. Quiz questions: What are 3 things you would set up for tracking as events on a web site.
18. And, so that wraps up this first session of Analytics Basics. I hope you now have a better sense of how to start thinking about analytics. Start crafting your mind from your client’s perspective when broaching the topics of KPIs, inputs and outputs to get the most of GA, some levels of customizations to enhance out-of-the-box features to think about.