faulker046

The Web is all about choices and Analytics is all about understanding the choices by analyzing the behavior patterns: Who are my right customers? Why do they make the choices that they do? What opportunities are worth chasing? What features will provide the most value? What is the best time-to-market, and most important which customers are most important. While it’s difficult to make ALL the right choices, one has to make most of them right for the campaign, site, or product to succeed. Enter Personas This is a must have tool for marketers for helping them make the right choices. Personas is essentially a technique for capturing the important learning(s) from analyzing users and customers and identifying and understanding the different types of people who use the site. It is a description of an imaginary but very plausible user that “personifies” these traits. The three key traits which personas help identify are: Behavior, Attitudes, Goals. How can Personas Help Rallying – Personas c...

There are several misconceptions in web analytics (created by some author/bloggers/experts) though many others have tried to clarify them from time to time but they keep reappearing. I recently had a conversation with someone who was so much in love with one of the misunderstood metrics, listed below, that it prompted me to write this blog post. So without much delay, here are the most common five misconceptions that I come across all the time: More Page Views are good – Unless you are an ad supported site that sell advertising via CPM (cost per thousand impressions) more page views might mean that the visitors are lost on your site and can’t find what they are looking for. More pages views/visit could indicate issue with your site navigation. For effective analysis, set your baseline and then watch for significant deviations (up or down) from the baseline. All that bounces is bad – I have written 2 detailed posts showing why all that bounces is not really bad . Bounce rate is o...

Should you use a compound metrics in your web analytics reporting? This was a topic of discussion in one of my classes at UBC Web Analytics course. What is a Compound Metrics? Before we get into answering the question, let’s look at what a compound metrics is. Simply stated a compound metrics is when you take two or more simple measures and combine them together to form one metrics. So should you use it? Short answer is - why not? Sometimes simple metrics such, such as visits, page views, clicks etc., are not enough to explain a complex concept and that's when you need a compound metrics, e.g. engagement metrics, visit quality measure etc. But isn't compound metrics hard to explain? It depends on how you define it but then a lot of people still struggle with visits, visitors, hits and pageviews. With that in mind, I agree that initially it might be a little hard to grasp the compound metrics. Over long term, compound metrics actually helps simplify the measurement of a compl...