conversions

Conversions are down. Data you need to analyze to avoid it.

November 25, 2016

Are you panicking because your website is driving fewer sales or conversions? The first thing you’ll need to do is open up your analytics tool and start digging into the issue. This article will talk about some of the key things to look for when your website stops performing.

What to consider when you look at your web data is the fundamental of the web performance equation. The equation is:

[Traffic x Conversion Rate] x [AOV] = Revenue
Traffic x Conversion Rate = Orders
Orders x AOV = Revenue

This is a pretty universal equation for digital marketing and e-commerce.

If your problem is that the revenue is declining, then you’ll need to take into account of the AOV (average order value) impact.

Let’s start looking at the impact of the key metrics, and see how we can diagnose the issue breaking it down by ‘traffic’ and ‘conversion rate’.

Conversion drops because of lower web traffic

One main reason your orders are down is due to the fact that the site’s traffic is down. Traffic of your website could be impacted by many things, but if you’re in Google Analytics or similar tool, the first thing to look for is what traffic source you’re seeing the decline is coming from.

Look into channel report and see which bucket of traffic is declining. Then Look into which source and medium are causing the traffic to decline. If you’re paying for advertising, look into if there is any issues with your ads or campaign set up.

ga-sourcemedium-112016 — Google Analytics traffic source report.

There will be times where traffic sources aren’t an issue as overall traffic is not down at all. In that case, you’ll need to look at the traffic from the perspective of user behavior. If you have a marketing funnel, then look at the funnel and see if there are any major changes in traffic within the funnel.

In Google Analytics you can use the reports within Behaviors and Conversions section. Start looking at the traffic pattern and see if you have any traffic drop off that could be impacting the traffic going into your cart. That would definitely lower your conversion rate and a number of orders.

Conversion drops because of lower conversion rate

In your web analytics tools like Google Analytics, you would usually set up goals that you want to track. When you set that up, usually the tools is able to start reporting on conversion rate (# of goals occurred divided by the traffic). Using this conversion rate metrics, you can use that to see if particular sources of traffic are causing a lower conversion rate. Usually, you’ll compare the data from different date ranges, like a month over month, or current week vs. last week and such.

Some the key reports to dig into where the conversion rates are dropping is.

Funnel report
Goal flow
Channel and source/medium report

These are the basic reports, but sometimes you make changes to websites (i.e. adding a link that may take away users to another page away from shopping cart or flow). In such case, you need to dig into if people are going from certain page to another page. In such case, you can use the Behavior > Site Content > All Pages, and chose a page and look into Navigation Summary. If you see that more people are going away to another page that doesn’t matter than you may have an impact and explanation to why your conversion rate is dropping.

ga-funnel-112016

Average order value (AOV) is declining

When you’re looking at the revenue decline, and realize traffic is not declining, and conversion rate hasn’t changed, then you may have a decreasing AOV. When you’re AOV is declining, the number of orders is decreasing, and that could mean few things.

People are ordering items at a lower price point
People are using promo/discount codes more so than prior weeks
People are buying fewer number of items within a transaction

More people are visiting a product page with a product at a price point fewer than the average price sold
In many cases, this issue is less about your website unless the traffic is lead to a page with the product at a lower price than average.

So hopefully, this gives you a basic understanding of how you could approach analyzing data once you start seeing the conversions go down. Don’t panic, just go into your web analytics tool like Google Analytics and follow the steps I mentioned above. More advanced users will look into more strategic and tactical things, but this is probably a start.

How to Analyze Mobile Metrics

June 29, 2012

You hear a lot about mobile metrics in digital marketing. When I was at the Think Shopper event at Google, they emphasized on investing in mobile. According to their insights, in the US, only 33% of advertisers have a mobile optimized website. There is clearly a huge gap between in actual consumer behavior and what companies are delivering online. It seems to me marketers aren’t seriously looking into mobile and executing on the insights.

So here is my few metrics scanning technique to quickly understand the signal from what is consumers are telling you about consumer journey or their experience on your site via mobile (in this case includes tablets). When companies don’t have a marketing plan, objective, goal… they usually ask analyst on what’s happening with traffic. What’s the current state?, blah blah.

I hate analyzing data without objectives and goals, but in reality, this is part of the job of analysts. Please remember that data analysis is as good as the business questions. When there are no good business questions to answer, then think of business questions you think fits the business then formulate the answers to answer those questions.

In such data analysis exercise, we still need some kind of tactical approach to understanding mobile. These are ideas, but I’m also attaching my rationale behind it. Additional ideas are welcome.

Here is the outline of the key analysis points
– By how much is your mobile traffic growing? (questions the relevancy of mobile traffic to your business)
– What is driving the traffic (questions where to potentially invest more or less based on current traffic drivers)
– Are mobile users consuming the content differently (questions where and what to optimize or create content strategy)
– Difference in interaction or task completion, mobile vs. non-mobile segment (questions if your mobile site is working or not)
– Time factors, recency, and frequency (questions if your mobile is driving loyal or engaged audience)

By how much is your mobile traffic growing?
This is an obvious one. Given that many research papers are talking about the growth of mobile and it’s internet access, how is your website doing? My piece of advice doesn’t expect your mobile traffic is growing according to the industry or market trend. One of the things I’ve noticed is content catered to mobile has done a lot with how your website’s organic reach to mobile users (content in either a form of content written about mobile, or page that is mobile optimized). * note organic, because companies do pay for ads targeting to mobile…

Make sure to look for signs that could possibility drive higher growth rate. In most cases the mobile traffic growth is not just happening naturally, it could be those content you’ve written or syndicated somewhere.

Mobile Traffic Growth YoY

So as you can see, my blog’s mobile traffic growth is pretty significant looking at year on year. My blog traffic is very small, but imagine you see that growth in your company’s website. That growth is something. What percentage of traffic share does it represent? You might want to check that out by year over year. I’ve noticed 2010 to 2011 has shown significant growth particularly from tablets (iPad in particular). What about your website?

What is driving the traffic
Things you need to look for is traffic sources and the actual pages driving the mobile traffic growth. Would it be the inbound traffic to a website or would it be some content specifically in interests to mobile users’ journey online?

Again, an example from my data.
Sample Mobile Traffic Sources

Wow, so Google is really helping me drive mobile traffic to my blog and year on year, it is driving a pretty significant percentage increase as well as volume (blurred). MR. Avinash’s Occam Razor blog is also driving some good lift in mobile audience year on year for my blog.

So given that search is driving traffic, it is a good timing to look at the content that people are finding via Google SERP. So go to content and segment by organic search. You’ll see which page is really giving you that organic traffic from mobile.

Are mobile users consuming the content differently
Don’t expect the mobile user to stay on your website as long as PC browsers. Remember that most likely the mobile users are swiping their fingers and clicking rapidly through various content. Also in their consumer journey, mobile users could physically be in different places from traditional PC environment Hence, consumer mindset on what info they need and expectation from their activity online are very different from traditional PC environment.

Review mobile segment vs. non-mobile segment, and look at page views per visit, bounce rate, time on site, and recency & frequency. This will set the tone on setting up a different digital marketing strategy for mobile, in both traffic acquisition, and usability of the website.

Difference in interaction or task completion, mobile vs. non-mobile segment
Do the same with the previous point on content by looking at mobile vs. non-mobile segment. The difference is to make sure you obsess about understanding the difference in task completion rate behavior pattern on mobile vs. non-mobile users. Task completion could be anything on conversions such as file downloads, newsletter sign up, sales conversion, add to cart, watched a video, etc.

This part of the analysis is very important. Your website exists for a certain reason, hopefully not just to drive traffic, but to drive some outcome that adds value to both your customer/consumer or business. Obsess in analyzing mobile users against conversions.

Random ideas to look for in this exercise…
– Recency & frequency for mobile converters, to look for differences in customer journey pattern
– Landing page difference for converters and page value
– Multi-channel attribution on mobile segment vs. non-mobile segment
– Conversion rate analysis by traffic sources
– Customer profiling on mobile converters vs. non-mobile segment (age, gender, etc.) Yes, you can do this if you have your analytics integrated with social graph

Time factors, recency, and frequency
I’ve kind of touch this in the previous point but keep in mind that smartphones are with consumers 24-7. It is personal, and they may have apps they frequently use to access blogs or get notifications on a phone while in their pocket to read things.

As you can see from my recency or ‘day since past last visit’ shows 2 days apart traffic shows a higher traffic distribution on this bucket than a non-mobile segment. My blog traffic is obviously going to be different from your site, so check out to see if you are getting some interesting results. It is probably more likely that users on mobile ar revisiting your website more frequently given that you’re adding content occasionally.

Mobile Traffic Recency

Analytics solutions like Mixpanel can also perform cohorts analysis, so you might find your traffic has a better recency conversion from one event to another event (i.e. free signup to premium account signup). Eyeball the time factor in conversion really closely, mobile customer journey is very different from traditional PC behavior so you might find different insights leading to a whole new digital marketing strategy.

Hopefully, you can find something interesting about your consumers or customers on smartphones. Have fun analyzing!!

Tracking interactions on site and what to plan

April 28, 2012

I come across many requests on vanity metrics, this is probably not surprising for many digital analytics folks. Here let’s talk a little more about tracking interactions on site and what to plan for.
Traffic to site, a number of clicks to this links, video view, etc. Yes, all of those data are important if the goal is to widen the funnel, but at the end of the day, these traffic driving activities need to yield to an outcome. Analysts or people who are in charge to connect the dots between data and business objectives/goals will need to plan to assure your analysis don’t end up reporting just on traffic, link clicks, video views, etc.

Here are my three step data tracking principles I follow to better set up a good website analytics practice.

1. Just implement the tracker to track the basics. Yes… just do it.

Yes, you have to go to this step to collect something, to begin with. This is the first step to acquiring visits, page views, link clicks, video views, conversions, etc. Typically, you’ll work with engineers or implementation leads to make sure the site or the new site elements are tracked. Rather you report on those high-level figures or not are your call, but this is usually the first step most analytics practitioners will need to go through. Here is an example…

The marketing team is investing in generating video assets. All managements will want to see the number of views, so people in charge will stress hard to analyze what we have to get that data up and running when the data doesn’t exist.

You can see this step as answering that question, but another way to view this is really preparing the denominator of your conversion rates or articulate the size of the conversion opportunities in this segment. So the analytics team with engineers will implement video views by video title. Now, managements are happy right? Think twice…

2. Set up the tracker to tie to an outcome or a conversion events

Now, a good analyst will work with an engineer to make sure not only the video view is tracked. He/her will ask the engineer to track video view completion event as well. Some will extend to track different points (i.e. 50% of video viewed), too. With this completion event, an analyst can answer X% of people who viewed the video actually completed watching the entire video.

Video views are such a vanity metric as you can have 100% of people visiting the page with video start watching the video and end up not watching all the way to the end. You can have 1 million views, but I’m sure managements will not be happy to have videos where 99% of people did not watch it all the way instead of closing it at 10% mark…

Conversion event could be something else, too. It could be ordered completions, a number of video shares, or a number of likes on people who viewed the video segment. Conversions could be any desirable outcomes.

3. Make sure that outcomes can give you deeper segmentations and understand the value

At the end of the day, your management will need to digest that data and connect it to business objectives and goals. The common language many of these executives or managers speak is dollar value (or in some form of currency value). All of those traffic, clicks, video views, how much incremental business value (or dollars) it is bringing for the company is what the analyst needs to set up themselves to succeed in a world full of meaningless data.

Another form of adding linking video interactions to value is segmenting the crap out of it, and tie it to visitor loyalty. So beyond clicks, video start, completion rates, you could analyze to see of those who watched the video, what percentage of them are coming back completing a conversion event (i.e. downloads, newsletter sign up, hit product page, share, etc.).

I’ve used video as an example, but it could be any other events that happen on a website. Here is a snapshot (below) of a particular segment that completed the action events (or micro outcomes), and showing how that particular segment performs on conversions comparing against another segment who aren’t engaged with the site and did not complete the action events.

This is very powerful stuff because you can now confidently recommend being aggressive in growing that particular segment, or ask more marketing dollars to promote your digital marketing program. What are your analytics planning tactics? I’d love to hear. Feel free to comment here or write on my Facebook page.

First Step to Increase Conversions on Your Website

March 21, 2008

The ultimate goal for any websites is to convert. An entire book can be written to cover how to increase conversions on your website, but I would like to start off by reviewing where to start and take the first step.

1) Define what is the conversion
This is very important since every site is unique. Some sites are blogs and it may not generate money. However, conversion for such non-transactional site could be to have visitors to leave a comment, read as many contents, etc. Whatever your site is, make sure to define the goals and understand what the conversion is.

2) The path to conversion
I was about to say the point of traffic drop off, but you just have to step back and realize that every action of conversion needs to start somewhere. The path for a conversion could be a check out process for transactional sites. However, keep in mind the options that your site visitors have to convert. Rather it is a necessary path they need to take from page to page, or navigate within a single page, understand the experience of the visitors that they will take to convert.

3) Retention / Drop off / Bounce
Obviously, diving into these metrics and associating it to the path, you’ll come to realize the point of opportunity for an enhancement to increase conversions. It is important to understand your analytics tools and leverage the feature to find the improvement points. Typical metrics and analysis methods are conversion funnel analysis, bounce rate, single access page, path analysis, etc.

4) Optimize
Once you have the metrics and path or points to associate it, it is time to take an action to optimize. Like I’ve said earlier, every site is unique so there is no one solution to optimization. However, the typical method to test out which optimization worked is to use A/B test. i.e. Google has a solution called “Google Website Optimizer”. Do whatever it takes for better conversion process; modify the page, test different form entry process, colors, navigation, make a call to action bigger, etc. A lot of it would probably based on user experience. Make sure to test the results.