Derived metrics – what is this sorcery you speak of?
At Summit, you might remember Bret Gundersen introduced Derived Metrics and showed a few examples. What are they? What are some use cases? Check out Derived Metric Sorcery here.
Understanding engagement – now even easier with Discover
Do you want to know more about your audience and how engaged they are when they visit your site?
Find out how to create a calculate metric in Adobe Ad-Hoc Analysis (formerly Discover) that will provide you with some great insights, and it’s dead easy to use.
Discover v3 – it’s the new black.
Discover v3 is out and I can guarantee it will make you wonder how you ever lived with out it.
Visitor Scoring – the engaged visitor segment
So I promised that I would finally put fingertip to keyboard and talk a little bit more about using Visitor Scoring…to finish up the series that I started a while ago.
If you’ve read my previous posts, you’ll know that we implemented a series of metrics for engagement measurement, culminating in a per-visitor score.
I wanted to share with you some of the insights and benefits of doing all of this, particularly in Discover.
1 million rows and SAINT still wants more
While this might be a quickie, it’s a biggy. A big one in terms of the amount of data just uploaded through SAINT. In fact, we’ve just uploaded around 1 million rows of data, with 6 columns per row.
And it didn’t even blink! Gotta love that!
So why do we have a million rows of data?
Customer segmentation of course.
The icing on the Visitor scoring cake
This is the third (but not final) post in the series on Visitor Engagement. One of the problems with the Visitor Scoring method that I previously described, is that, at the end of the day, you’re still somewhat limited to viewing scores at the “average” level, by segment.
That presents a number of challenges because the average is precisely that…and the underlying scores vary dramatically within each segment.
But there is a way to see what each and every visitor score is, or even within the different segments…and it’s called the Unique Visitor ID. You can see at the visitor level, how many times they’ve returned, how many “things” they’ve done, such as searches, product views, revenue etc.
This is really the icing on the proverbial cake.
Elusive engagement – Part II – Visitor scoring
This is a follow on post to my previous one about measuring that elusive engagement. This post focuses on the aspect of applying a score to visitor interactions, as they interact with your content and applications.
Visitor scoring is fairly simple – especially in SiteCatalyst, and by leveraging the data in Discover through segmentation, (and ultimately in SiteCatalyst 15), it’ll give you even more insight into visitor engagement.
Visitor scoring measures and assigns a relative value to individual customers and prospects based on their actions and behaviors over time. You can determine intent and engagement – even before visitors convert.
Once you’ve identified your most valuable visitors, you can dissect their actions to determine the campaigns, keywords, referring sites and offline touch points that engage them – and invest more on these efforts.
Elusive engagement
Now, there’s a hot topic. Measuring engagement. One of the most widely debated topics in web analytics.
What is engagement and how do we measure it?
Engagement, unfortunately, is not derived from a single measure. It’s not time on site. It’s not how many pages they viewed. It’s not bounce rates and it’s not about conversions.
Engagement is about a lot of things. What is an engaged visitor and how do you measure engagement?
Moving beyond business-based segmentation
One of the most powerful ways to enable an audience connection is through behavioural segmentation.
Many companies today segment from a business standpoint. Don’t get me wrong, this is a good strategy and aligns your measurement and optimisation strategy with your business segmentation model.
Customer / non-customer segments. Product A owners / product B owners. Mosaic-based segments. Geographic segments. Lead / Non-lead segments. These are all typically business-based segments, and you should definitely be segmenting using this methodology if your overall business does.
But I think there’s a higher level of segmentation – behavioural segmentation. Read on to see how we easily achieved this.
Understanding user behaviour on forms a.k.a. form abandonment
We’ve all got forms on our websites. And chances are, you have multi-page forms. But, do you know how they’re performing? Do you know where people are abandoning your forms? If you knew that, what could you do? There’s lots of ways to track forms but they vary depending upon what you need to accomplish. Multi-page forms, which are very common these days, are slightly more complex from a measurement standpoint, but you definitely want to get some insights into these types of forms. In this post, I look at various ways to review form abandonment, from SiteCatalyst Fallout Reports, to using Discover Fallout Reports, to the Form Analysis plugin.
Back to basics – props, eVars and events
One of the fundamental things you need to understand about Omniture SiteCatalyst is the difference between an s.prop and an eVar, and just what events are and when to set them. They are at the heart of the product and provide the ability to customise it to suit your business needs.
If you don’t understand the difference, you’re going to be in a world of pain, and left dazed and confused.
This is, understandably, the most confusing thing to new SiteCatalyst users, and they take a bit of getting used to, especially when you start to combine them all together, but once you understand them, you’ll be on your way to generating custom ones that can really provide insight. Hopefully this post will help out in some small way.
Campaign Stacking, Lead Stacking, Product Stacking
Here’s another really simple customisation that you can and should do as part of your basic implementation, which helps you to further understand attribution.
Attribution is probably one of the hardest and most contested measurements available…which “thing” led your customer to do something. Read on to find out more about stacking in SiteCatalyst.
How to create a good measurement strategy
Many companies struggle with an effective digital measurement strategy, often due to the lack of resources or the lack of understanding how it can provide an effective return on the investment.
And it is an investment. Generally you’ll incur people and training costs and you’ll incur licensing costs for the various platforms. These are all ongoing costs.
But you can demonstrate an ROI that will far outweigh the costs incurred, if you spend the time and effort in putting a solid strategy together. Read on to see the 6 key elements to a successful measurement strategy.
Segmentation is the key to success.
It often strikes me as strange that people still look at numbers in the aggregate. Knowing that you get a certain amount of page views, or a certain amount of visitors and so forth, doesn’t really tell you anything.
In order to get some insights of value, things that you can really act on, you need to segment your traffic and conversions.
But so few people really do it, and even fewer do it really well. Read on to find out why segmentation should form the basis of your analytics strategy…
Is your content converting?
One of the little-used nuggets in SiteCatalyst is “participation”.
It’s a given that you want to know how many sales you’ve made, or how much revenue you’ve generated, but what about which pages have helped to contribute to that conversion. Not every visitor follows the same path through the content, and it’s therefore beneficial to be able to see which pages are more likely to drive a conversion than others, thereby exposing your most valuable pages.