Digital Analytics MiniDegree from CXL — every marketer must try — Part 9 Review
CXL Institute’s Digital Analytical Mini degree has been eye-opening, knowing from very little to knowing much more.
As always I start by saying analytics is the sexiest word, for at least the professionals who understand it, most of the students and professionals are following this as a career, rather for the pay than its actual understanding and passion. Let’s not argue over this, since it has lots of points balancing on either side of the equation.
Before I go any further I will just give a brief on myself, I am Nischith a sales & marketing professional working in the health sector. I live in Bangalore India and I am from Mysore, City of Heritage.
The information shared below is based on the learnings from CXL Institute, you need to have a bare understanding of what Digital Marketing or Google analytics is, as CXL themselves say their courses are not for beginners. Let’s dive in, I hope I give you a good insight into their teaching.
Today's topic of the review is using analytics to find the conversion opportunities Using Google Analytics and A/B Testing
- Using goals to quantify outcomes
Once you are set with what to achieve through goals, your next option is to measure them and find opportunities.
When you go to behavioral reports in Google Analytics you find different pages viewed by the users and unique page views and average time views.
There are defined goals that you measure and identify if there is an opportunity to improve the goals. You also create an opportunity to improve the content to engage customers.
Few notable Goals you can use in your Google Analytics
*Purchase Goals
*Engaged Users
*Registrations
*Entered Checkout
Avoid setting too many goals, set micro goals and macro goals not more than 10 to 15. Too many goals can skew the conversion rate with regard to actual purchases.
You need to also understand that the engagement goal might be the most misleading.
Evaluating traffic quality
We see how to understand and identify the grouping and quality of your traffic. You will also learn to use this information to optimize your marketing strategies.
Go to the acquisition area and Source/Medium report, now you can see common channels people are using to get into the website and who sent them there.
If you have set up eCommerce you will see the eCommerce conversion rate, looking at the conversions through the Transactions, Revenue and conversion rate helps to identify what channels are bringing in more traffic, should you explore that traffic and identify more such traffic, all these can be answered here.
You should always target the highest source of traffic to try to improve those numbers. it’s better to cut your losses and focus on traffic which converts more and spends more time on your page.
Secondary dimensions and advanced segments
Secondary dimensions help to dig down the information required from the available data, for example, Primary dimension Page and secondary dimension source/medium drills where the customers are coming from and landing on what page, what is the conversion value of that age, are people engaging or not engaging from the page landed or are they confused what action has to be taken will have to be analysed you can take help of the bounce rate too here.
“Remember High Volumes areas are great opportunities for conversions”
You can further drill down using the segments available and identify more opportunities.
Advanced Segments is a more thorough way to look at your data.
A single segment should aim to cover 5% to 50%percentage of your website’s viewers.
Spotting conversion opportunities
Conversion Opportunities can be found :
*How users arrive at your site
*where users land
*Structures of Landing Page
*Each step Along the sales funnel
*Identifying shopping cart problems
There might be a single opportunity or you can convert it to compounding opportunities.
You need to act like a customer and follow the customer's journey identify any shortfalls improve the lacuna and repeat the same. For example, if you have an e-commerce site and you will observe here usually the dropouts will be at the cart level, which should be motivated to purchase the item from the cart.
Advanced segments for identifying Opportunities
Segments completely depend on the requirement you have on your plate, there might be a requirement to optimize your customer engagement, you can go with mobile and desktop users, this is just an example.
Refer to this link to understand more on advanced segments:https://www.bounteous.com/insights/2017/10/24/getting-started-google-analytics-segments/
A/B Testing Basics
what A/B testing is and what it’s not?
A/B testing is for validation and learning. We can do conversion optimization without any testing at all but there will be a lot of eyeballing and just like guessing what’s working or what’s not. With A/B tests, we can validate business impact through measurements. So if we ship something,we make a change on our website, and it’s working, we will know exactly how well it’s working. It added 10% to our revenue or increased cart adds by 5% or whatever it is that we’re trying to do. So it’s for validation and measurement.
So we should think about testing as a measurement methodology. It does not prescribe at all what you can or cannot test.
Well, the companies that run the most A/B tests are Google and Facebook, and so on. So A/B testing is just a methodology. You might say, “Oh, well, A/B testing is risky. What if B is not better? And so we tested to lose money.”So you think that a safe alternative is to just go with A because B might be risky. But we live in a world that is always changing, so change is inevitable. It’s going to happen whether you like it or not. The environment changes, your competitors change, all that stuff.
A/B testing is done through Statistical Validation.
Want to learn more about A/B testing, you definitely need to join the CXL institutes courses to help you out to understand the crux of A/B testing.
Thanks, CXL Institute for their programs making learn stepwise and creating a structure on how to track things you wish to, this is my 9th-week review.
We will come back with more such topic reviews as done today.