Occam's Razor 
by Avinash Kuashik

Magnificent Mobile Website And App Analytics: Reports, Metrics, How-to!

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Nothing I can tell you about the importance of having an incredible mobile strategy will surprise you. Mobile devices (phones, tablets, wearables) are transforming how we behave, how we buy, how we consume content, and dare I say how we become happy or we become sad.
You after all have all of the aforementioned devices, and it is likely that at some level you are looking at traffic to your company's digital existence.
Still, let me try to surprise you.
Here's a graph that shows how US adults consume media, it shows time in hours. In blue is how much time we spent in 2010 and in red the time spent in 2014.

Surely you are not surprised that digital finally beats TV. (Yea!!!) I was not surprised, we could see that coming quite clearly.
What was surprising, even to me (!), was the dramatic shift between 2010 to 2014 to mobile content consumption. The light gray line is desktops plus laptops, the dark gray line is mobile devices.
The only reason good old digital is beating TV is mobile.
Amazing, right? And we see this trend all around the world.
Yet, if you look at the mobile experiences of the Fortune 1000, you will feel sad. If you look at the mobile marketing strategies, you will see they don't reflect this shift to mobile. A majority of YouTube consumption is on mobile, yet if there is an advertising or content strategy inside a company for YouTube it rarely accommodates for this reality.
Why?
Many reasons. CEOs still don't get it. CMOs don't grasp the implication of this shift in consumer behavior. Company UX leaders are happy to stink less by taking the sub-optimal path of responsive design, rather than create a mobile-unique experience (your customers tend to do different things on your desktop site than your mobile site!).
But why blame others, in this post let's focus on one important reason whose responsibility can be squarely put on your shoulders and mine: Measurement. Let's get the information we need to get our CEOs, CMOs and CUXOs to unleash a tsunami of creativity and awesomeness when it comes to mobile.
Framing the Opportunity.
There are two types of experiences we need to worry about.
Our mobile websites. Our mobile applications.
They are two completely different beasts.
Consider their purpose. Mobile websites have to do many jobs, because people with many different purposes will come there. You have to solve for all of them. Mobile apps are much more focused (or they stink), and people use them for specific purposes. They use different technologies of course, and different distribution mechanisms.
To use my See-Think-Do-Care framework , mobile websites have to solve for See, Think and Do while mobile apps usually have to solve for Care.

Create a distinct mobile website and mobile app measurement strategies. They will need two different implementations, it is quite likely that you will end up with two sets of metrics (more people focused for mobile apps, more visit focused for sites).
Remember, when someone says mobile analytics, first ask the clarifying question: Do you mean mobile application or mobile website? Then approach each separately (even though there are tools like Google Analytics that will do both). It will save you hours and hours of time, effort and focus.
In this post we will look mobile sites first, both data collection and analysis, and then mobile applications.
The post is written in these six steps:

Step 1: Tag every shared link with campaign tracking parameters.
Step 2. Tag your mobile website. GTM FTW!
Step 3. Dive into Mobile Reporting and Analysis.
Step 4. Dive into Mobile Reporting and Analysis.
Step 5. Implement Cross-Device Tracking.
Step 32. Media-Mix Modeling/Experimentation.

Taking inspiration from my favorite quote, it's not the ink, it's the think, in each section I'll share the think and then the ink, which includes screenshots and specific guidance on what you should do.
Ready?
Step 1: Tag every shared link with campaign tracking parameters.
This might seem slightly bizarre, but before you do anything email every person you know in your company, take your agency out for an expensive lunch, massage the right egos in your IT team, do whatever it takes to get every link shared by your company digitally to use campaign tracking parameters.
The reason for my recommendation is that mobile browsers are almost there in terms of their behavior when compared to desktop browsers, but they do sometimes exhibit weirdness when it comes to passing referrers. For mobile apps, there are no referrers (everything's Direct, hurray!). When you tag your email, paid search, display, organic and paid socially shared urls, you are going to ensure that your analytics solution will capture the source accurately (even in all those cases where there is no referrer).
So, be a dear. Always, always, tag every link (owned, earned or paid). It will have a material impact on the quality of your mobile analysis.

In Google Analytics there are five parameters: Source, Medium, Campaign, Term and Content. You should always use the first three, the last two are bonus. Check with the web analytics tool you use, every single tool allows you to do this, though each has a nuance you have to absorb.
Campaign tracking links have some differences depending on if they are going to your mobile website or your mobile app. Please see the detailed campaign tracking page for more info for websites, Android and iOS. Check out the helpful GA site URL builder and the Google Play URL builder.
When you analyze the data in Google Analytics (or Adobe or WebTrends or Webtrekk), this data will be in your Campaigns folder waiting for you to some pretty magnificent analysis.
Remember. Tag. Everything.
Step 2. Tag your mobile website. GTM FTW!
If anyone tells you that mobile analytics is hard, browsers are terrible, cookies are crumbling, phones use WAP (remember that?) etc., look at that person, give them a hug, then mark them in your book as enemy using red ink.
I kid a little of course. Use blue ink. : )
You can track mobile websites just fine with your standard web analytics tool.
According to Pew, while cell phones are nearly ubiquitous around the world (95% China, 91% Chile, 82% Kenya), penetration of smartphones are still getting there (37% China, 39% Chile, 19% Kenya). In the US, depending on who you ask, smartphones form around 65% of the cell phones.
It is important to realize that almost all monetizable behavior on mobile devices is on smartphones (everywhere in the world). So if with a few minutes of work you can track that, you have captured what's most important to your business. If you are in a feature phone majority market, and that market has most of the monetizable behavior, please invest in unique tracking there. If you are not… KISS.
Let me modify my earlier sentence: You can track smartphone usage of your mobile websites just fine with your standard analytics tool.
If you are starting new, or going to touch the code on your website for any reason, please, in the name of Thor, Superman and Dilbert, use a tag management solution. Enterprise tag management solutions are extremely feature rich now (they can even make you coffee), and hold the incredible promise of just having to touch your mobile site/app once and then being able to add more data capture sexiness remotely via the cloud.
Google Tag Manager is one such solution. It is free. And you don't even have to use Google Analytics to use it. It supports GA of course, along with AdWords, DoubleClick, GDN and many other Google tags. What is cool is that it is also pre-integrated with comScore, Turn, Media6 and other measurement and tracking solutions.

Sign up for your free account, set up a container tag, add that to a global element on your site and as soon as you add your GA Web Property ID, you are in business.
This will just give you the standard tagging. You would get the cool and sexy events, timers, rules and triggers, cross-domain tracking and all that. But for day one, standard will do.
One last request for you. Once you start collecting the data, please take half a day to identify all the micro-outcomes on your mobile website (remember this step for apps too), and ensure you configure them as Goals in your Google Analytics account's admin interface.
Mobile experiences are unique, to understand that one key strategy for us will be understanding the micro-outcomes.
So, use GTM, implement one container tag, turn on the standard GA tag, configure goals in GA admin, you are ready for a lot of mobile data analysis!
Step 3. Dive into Mobile Reporting and Analysis.
Analytics > Mobile > Overview > Devices.
That is all it takes for you to get a real solid feel for mobile's impact on your business. The very first thing you'll see will be the distribution between desktop, mobile (smartphones) and tablets. The team at Google has done a great job of having the end-to-end view there across Acquisition, Behavior and Outcomes.

What do you learn from this report? Mobile content consumption, behavior along key metrics (time, bounces etc.) and a sense for how much value you are getting from your mobile traffic. It will likely answer all the top level questions your boss has relating to mobile.
If you have ecommerce you will see key metrics related to money making. Transactions, Revenue and Ecommerce Conversion Rate.

What do you learn from this report? Mobile has much lower conversions and conversion rate than tablets or desktop. It does not matter if you are a B2B or B2C or A2K, you will always see this. This should give you two thoughts to frame to your boss. 1. Don't frame the value of Mobile in context of last-click on-device conversion. 2. Leverage Mobile (smartphone and tablets) to inform, assist and form deepen relationships with your visitors. (Remember my stress earlier on measuring micro-outcomes?)
Now that you have done God's work by making those two points clear, time to dive deeper. After all 50% of the traffic to the above site is on mobile devices, to get 10 times fewer conversions means there is something else of value that can be done.
Your boss will likely ask you which phones and tablets are used to visit your website, or other such value-deficient questions. For the first couple of interactions, give her/him that data. It is easy to find.

What do you learn from this report? Almost nothing. You will look at it only to please your boss for a couple of days. They will soon see that the values in the dimension (column one) rarely change, they will get bored and move on. Thank your lucky stars and stop reporting this.
(I've cropped off some of the not useful metrics in the standard GA report, at the minimum you see above what I think will be most useful in a not really useful report.)
One of the powerful reason for not using a dedicated mobile website analysis tool is that you can use the full suite of reports and analytical features inside your comprehensive digital analytics tool. You don't need anything special for this.
The best way to take advantage of this opportunity is to leverage the Analytics advanced segmentation feature.
You can choose the built in Mobile and Tablet Traffic segment, and apply it to any standard or custom report you want to analyze inside Google Analytics.

For example, I've invested an enormous amount of my budget in creating See and Think content, which I've properly tagged using the lovely event tracking feature in Analytics.
Apply the mobile segment to the event tracking report, and boom!

What do you learn from this report? In my case the interactive elements which are useful are clearly displayed above. In your case these might include videos people watch (See), car configurators people use (Think), handy guides they download (Think/Care), social amplification (Do) or follows (Care), and so on and so forth. This report is most useful in understanding if people are interacting with, usually, your most expensive investment in content and delivering some micro-outcomes.
Speaking of micro-outcomes (or micro-conversion if you insist), apply the same segment to your Goals Overview report in Analytics for some truly deep insights that you boss will love you for.

What do you learn from this report? How mobile traffic is adding value to your business. You've looked at ecommerce already and noticed some ecommerce is there, but not enough. So what else is going on? The stuff you see above. This report will help you identify where your company should invest in when it comes to mobile content and what kind of people to hire for the mobile awesomization team.
And how hard was it to get to the above? Standard GA tag > Goals in admin interface > Advanced segment. That, really, is all it takes.
You can, and likely should, do a lot more analysis of your mobile performance. Rather than having you jump around the many Analytics reports, I've created a destination where you can find pretty much all you need for your mobile report.
Let me walk you through the custom report, and I'll also share a link below to allow you to download the report directly into your GA account so that you can get jiggy with it right away!
The mobile custom report collects three key areas of analysis. Mobile device performance, search performance, and page performance serve as the three tabs on top of the report. In each case I've chosen the best fit metrics for that dimension (Users, Sessions, Bounce Rate, Time and Goal CR for devices) and added a custom set of drilldowns for each tab. This allows you to, for example start exploring performance at an operating system level, drill down to the devices for that operating system and then which landing pages perform best for that mobile device.

Here's the report for operating system. It shows clearly how you should at least be rooting for Windows Phone even as 40 awful pundits declare the platform a failure. For you, it delivers two percentage point higher conversion rate!

What do you learn from this tab? This is a better view than the standard report, but this tab is mostly for your boss (with mildly interesting data around engagement) and for your IT/Dev team as they decide which platforms to optimize the experience for or prioritize first.
The next tab is more fun/important, the search performance report. The drilldowns are Keyword, Source (engine) and Mobile Device Branding. You could do Source and then Keyword if you want, but I felt in this case the other way works much better. And again, a custom set of metrics.

First, a quick techie lesson. You are seeing (not set) above simply to indicate that 84,894 Users did not come via Search. Good contextual bit of data to have. You are seeing (not provided) above because Google, Yahoo! and others do not provide keyword data for users who do secure searches. [For more: Search: Not Provided: What Remains, Keyword Data Options]
What do you learn from this tab? How your search strategy is working for your company and what keywords and search engines you need to focus on in terms of improving your future mobile outcomes.
Finally, our third tab contains deeper insights around content. There are only four key metrics on this tab, and the drilldowns take us from the landing page to which source the traffic came from to aforementioned page and lastly did the type of user (new vs. returning) have an impact on performance.

What do you learn from this tab? Since mobile sites will have higher than average bounce rate, the landing page view is incredibly helpful in identifying both pages you need to improve (Bounce Rate, Time) and the pages you need to love a lot more (Page Value column). Once you find the most precious (or loser) pages, say #3 above, you can drill down to see which sources are delivering this valuable traffic – and you know what to do then. : )
Three simple tabs, your go to mobile analytics data without having to run around the tool. You can also download this report directly into you GA account: Mobile Performance Analysis Report.
I hope you can see that we don't have to go very far and wide to do very deep analysis of the smartphone and tablet users of our mobile website (or, eeek (!), desktop website on mobile platforms). Grab the report above, or apply the segment highlighted above and you will be more than on your way to creating a more data driven company.
Step 4. Dive into Mobile Reporting and Analysis.
Even if your business is mostly mobile app related and you barely have a five page mobile website, I recommend doing steps one through three first. There is enough complexity and enough simplicity above in implementation, reporting and segmentation that you will be a lot more familiar with what to do when it comes to ensure glorious glory for your mobile app analytics.
The cool part of app analytics with Google Analytics is that the tracking, reporting and analysis were re-thought from the ground up just for a mobile application environment. The downside is that this awesomeness comes at the cost of having to learn new things on top of my recommendation above. You do get really good stuff back, just look at it…

Real-time! OMG! (Remember, right-time is way more important than real-time.) Deep analysis of actual users, their location, their engagement with your app (how many open your app only once and never again, the answer awaits!), of course devices and crash reports, but more fun events and conversions and in-app purchases, and the pièce de résistance what traffic sources and campaigns actually drive people to your app page in the Play store! (Sorry, no iOS. Purely because of iTunes data sharing policies.)
Could you possibly want anything else?
Let's pull this a bit. How do you actually implement Google Analytics mobile app tracking?
Here's the world's greatest Mobile App Implementation Guide. Just follow the instructions. There are helpful links to the Android SDK or the iOS SDK along with the specific getting started guides.
When you are ready to grow beyond the default tracking (do that first!), you can implement event tracking in Android or event tracking iOS. Your next stop along the analytics ladder of awesomeness will be enhanced ecommerce tracking in Android or iOS . There is more. But should be enough to kill with smart insights.
If you have a mobile app, I also highly recommend using the Google Tag Manager because of the additional complexity of having to submit all changes to apps to the various stores, getting them to review and the added lag that comes with that love fest.
Once you leverage GTM… life becomes a little more simpler…

…and you have added flexibility in terms of making changes to measurement possibilities and having them propagate faster and bring your insights faster.
How can you get to this glorious stage?
Happy birthday: GTM Setup and Workflow: Mobile Apps

As with any analytics tool, your data capture journey can be never ending. Remember to stop at various stages (1. default 2. events 3. ecommerce 4. more 5. more more), and shift to data reporting, enjoy the data, realize you don't get what to do, shift to the data analysis phase (advanced segmentation, custom reporting).
Most people get stuck in DC, some make it through to DR, the bests spend time in DA because it is the only effort that yields the answer to: So what should we do?

There is a lot you can do (proof: details on all mobile app analytics reports). Here's my cheat sheet for you for initial focus of your mobile app analysis efforts.

1. Understand how many Active Users are interacting with your app. What does the 30-day active number look like?
2. Zero in on how Users discover your app, what sources and campaigns contribute to downloads and installs. Google Play Sources report, Play Referral Flow report.
3. Engagement, or death! Zero into Loyalty and Recency reports. You will see interesting patterns in the Goal Conversion column. Segment these reports as relevant to you.
4. Money, money, money. Dive into the outcomes reports to measure in-app revenue by day or a time period that makes sense. How many people are buying shiny swords and blunt gems?

That should get you going, and keep you with your first six months worth of analysis. Yes, there is a lot more, just scroll up three screenshots. Don't get lost… DC, DR, DA, money, DC, DR, DA, happiness, DC, DR, DA, glory.
If for any reason you don't want to use the custom mobile app analytics feature in Google Analytics, you also have other options.
Upsight (nee Kontagent) provides mobile app analytics, with a pinch of advanced segmentation (including sweet cohort analysis) and big data mining thrown in for good measure.
You can also look into Mobile App Tracking – it has a special emphasis on tracking marketing with a little less on detailed app behavior, segmentation and analysis.
Countly's claim to fame is that it is open source (a free version is available along with paid ones). You can also play with their mobile app tracking and data using their live dashboard/solution set. (Repeat, click on that link to play with actual data!)

Like other tools such as Analytics, they track events in great detail.
Here's an example of their tracking in-app purchases…

Their User Retention report is well worth taking a look at.
There are mobile app analytics solutions that also provide built in A/B testing and/or surveying capabilities and/or push notifications to individual users and/or capturing and analysis of personally identifiable information (PII) etc. Analyze your needs carefully, buy for now and the near future rather than for 2017, lest you spend all the time until 2017 on implementation, customization, reporting and re-implementation.
A new entrant worth checking out is Introspex, my friend Ali Hedayati is the Chairman.

It focuses on complete mobile customer experience management, with elements of the platform supporting developers, marketers and your tech/operations folks. The thing you might like the most is the no code instrumentation.
You have many choices. Free or paid. The one thing you don't have is an excuse to ever release an app into the world without the ability to collect the data you need to understand mobile marketing and consumer behavior.
Bonus: If you fall in the developer category and you would like to learn how to implement Google Analytics in an iOS app, please checkout Scott Sherwood's wonderful tutorial. Not only does he walk you through all the steps in detail, he also provides a clock app that you and download to practice!
Step 5. Implement Cross-Device Tracking.
Close to the holy grail, the ability to track and understand the behavior of the same person across devices, browsers, mobile and desktop applications and sites.
Holy grail is step five because it requires a great deal of thought – business and technology -, it requires business process re-engineering quite often, and time. If you are using Google Analytics, I encourage you to work with one of the Google Analytics Certified Partners who can help you do this quickly and efficiently in exchange for reasonable sums of money. If you are using a different analytics solution (this is where having the same analytics solution across your mobile, desktop, site, app, is incredibly valuable), please seek out their excellent consultants.
The Google Analytics team has made it easier for you to understand multi-device user behavior in a single view. With Universal Analytics, you can use the fantastic User ID feature to assign web behavior and outcomes to a single user across existences. [Since you are an over achiever, you are using Google Tag Manager for all this, Tracking User ID in GTM!]
The benefits of implementing real cross-device tracking is truly immense. I encourage you to use a consultant to help. If you want to go it alone, get a Red Bull and download this handy-dandy 62 slide Cross Devices Optimization presentation.
Step 32. Media-Mix Modeling/Experimentation.
This is going to be a drive-by (with a promise of a more detailed post in the future).
I've covered the value of media-mix modeling (nee. controlled experiments) in the reality check section of my detailed post on multi-channel attribution modeling.
Briefly, we don't quite understand how to allocate our media dollars optimally because often (if you don't do step 5 above), we don't know which people (as in People and not Users) were exposed to which media activity (AdWords, DoubleClick, Email, Facebook, yada, yada, yada). One way to overcome this issue is to use media-mix modeling to run tests and measure incrementality in results and attribute it to the optimal channel.

I love media-mix modeling. For advertisers with huge budgets it absolutely yields incredibly valuable insights.
It also involves insane complexity, huge costs to execute the experiments and a big commitment in time and people. Unless you are a massive site spending massive amounts on marketing and getting massive conversions, is rarely worth the revenue attribution you get.
But it is great for consultants, your internal people, and me.
So. If someone comes to delivering nirvana on the back of media-mix modeling (for mobile only or mobile and desktop and tv), take it with a grain of salt. At the very minimum, check that you have completed steps one through five above. If you have, and you are a big advertiser, embrace the consultant/internal person/me, cut a check and wait for glorious results.
I'm sorry for being a bit of a downer on something I love. It is important to be real though.
Ok, back to the happy zone.
Mobile devices – smartphones, tablets, wearables – present an amazing opportunity to engage our consumers at more times during the day, in more interesting contexts, and solve not just for a transient connection (BUY NOW!) but also a persistent connection. You can inform, entertain, and provide utility that delivers relevance, joy and delight. Guess what happens when it is time to monetize. You win first.
In this quest mobile data is your bff, and if you follow the five steps above you'll be ready to set your company apart from the wannabes.
I wish you all all the very best!
As always, it is your turn now.
At what step is your company's current mobile analytics effort? Is there one challenge that is most holding your efforts back? Which mobile site analytics tool do you use? How about mobile application analytics tool? Do you have a favorite mobile report – app or site? Have you had success implementing cross-device unique user tracking for your company? Got any tips to share with the rest of us on how we can do it faster?
Please take a moment to share to your delightful comments, insightful suggestions, and valuable examples via the comment form below.
Thank you.
P.S: Two additional posts you might find to be of value:

~ Mobile Analytics: Tracking Click-to-Call Mobile Ad Campaigns
~ Mobile Marketing 2015: Rethink Customer Acquisition, Intent Targeting

Diving into Data (Web Analytics) looking for key Insights / Advice of Avinash.

Diving into Data (Web Analytics) looking for insights.
Advice of Avinash:
Segmentation:

New Nirvana Rule: Never report a metric (even God’s favorite KPI) without segmenting it to give deep insights into what that metric is really hiding behind it.
The power of segmenting a metric is that you peek behind the curtain and find out more about the metric. These are the benefits that you will gain:
1.    It is impossible to segment any metric without putting in the effort to understand what we are reporting and the business value that the metric represents. This is hard work but what does not kill you makes you stronger. :~)
2.    Segmenting allows you to quickly hone in on areas of deeper dive from which will emerge key insights that will drive real and meaningful action.
3.    Our senior executives and decision makers don’t understand all the complexity and magic that is a web experience, showing them segmented trends is a extremely effective communication tool (and the best part is you barely have to talk, the picture will tell the story).
4.    You will earn a big fat bonus and promotion.

KPI Attributes:
1) What is good for Jane it might not be good for John. Every web business is unique !!
2) Do not go for perfection: Good is enough !!
3) Critical few baby, critical few !! Few KPIs:Most common: 3. Maximum: 4 KPI for each website analysis.
4) KPI Lifecycle (Half of KPI will die in one year), because your competitor become stronger. So apply Lean Six Sigma Process (Define, Measure, Analyse, Action, Improve or Eliminate). If your KPI do not give you insight, kill it, be brutal and kill it, and then define a new better KPI .

Each KPI must be:
1) Uncomplex
2) Relevant
3) Timely
4) Instantly useful

Do Not forget of Conversion Trinity
1) Relevant
2) Value
3) Call to action

Alex Rojas Riva

Ninja Analytics, HiPPO's, Master in Digital Marketing Plan & Direction, Web & Social Analytics, Free Consultation, Mobile: +44 (0)755 2839713, Skype:janibalrojas.

I can't improve your Website by 1000% but I can improve 1000 things by 1%, if you execute my recommendation immediately or action to take care.

There are Data known known, there are Data we know we know. We also know there are Data known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some Data we do not know. But there are also Data unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the web history, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones.

Occam's Razor
by Avinash Kaushik

Kill Useless Web Metrics: Apply The "Three Layers Of So What" Test

50 Comments | Print | PDF

Data, data everywhere yet nary an insight in sight.
Is that your web analytics existence?
Don't feel too bad, you share that plight with most citizens of the Web Analytics universe.
The problem? The absolutely astonishing ease with which you can get access to data!
Not to mention the near limitless potential of that data to be added, subtracted, multiplied, and divided to satiate every weird need in the world.
You see just because you can do something does not mean you should do it.
And yet we do.
Like good little Reporting Squirrels we collect and stack metrics as if preparing for an imminent ice age. Rather than being a blessing that stack becomes a burden because we live in times of bright lovely spring and nothing succeeds like being agile and nimble about what we collect, what we give up, and what we deliberately choose to ignore.
The key to true glory is making the right choices.
In this case its making right choices about the web metrics we knight and sent to the battle to come back with insights for our beloved corporation to monetize.
A very simple test can allow you to figure out if the metric you are dutifully reporting (or absolutely in love with) is gold or mud.
It is called the Three Layers of So What test. It was a part of my first book, Web Analytics: An Hour A Day.
What's this lovely test?
Simple really (occam's razor!):
Ask every web metric you report the question "so what" three times.
Each question provides an answer that in turn raises another question (a "so what" again). If at the third "so what" you don't get a recommendation for an action you should take, you have the wrong metric. Kill it.

This brutal recommendation is to force you to confront this reality: If you can't take action, some action (any action!), based on your analysis, why are you reporting data?
The purpose of the "so what" test is to undo the clutter in your life and allow you to focus on only the metrics that will help you take action. All other metrics, those that fall into the nice to know or the highly recommended or the I don't know why I am reporting this but it sounds important camp need to be sent to the farm to live our the rest of their lives!
Ready to rock it?
Let's check out how you would conduct the "so what" test with a couple of examples.
Key Performance Indicator: Percent of Repeat Visitors.
You run a report and notice a trend for this metric.
Here is how the "so what" test will work:

"The trend of repeat visitors for our website is up month to month."
So what?
"This is fantastic because it shows that we are a more sticky website now."
(At this point a true Analysis Ninjas would inquire how that conclusion was arrived at and ask for a definition of sticky, but I digress.)
So what?
"We should do more of xyz to leverage this trend." (Or yxz or zxy – a specific action based on analysis of what caused the trend to go up.)
So what?
If your answer to that last "so what" is: "I don't know… isn't that a good thing… the trend is going up… hmm… I am not sure there is anything we can do… but it is going up right?"

At this point you should cue the sound of money walking out the door.
Bottom-line: This might not be the best KPI for you.
Let me hasten to point out that there are no universal truths in the world (though some religions continue to insist!).
Perhaps when you put your % of Repeat Visitors KPI to the "so what" test you have a glorious action you can take that improves profitability. Rock on! More power to you!

Key Performance Indicator: Top Exit Pages on the Website.
[Before we go on please know that top exit pages is a different measurement than top pages that bounce.]
You have been reporting the top exit pages of your website each month, and to glean more insights you show trends for the last six months.

"These are the top exit pages on our website for the last month."
So what? They don't seem to have changed in six months.
"We should focus on these pages because they are major leakage points in our website."
So what? We have looked at this report for six months and tried to make fixes, and even after that the pages listed here have not dropped off the report.
"If we can stop visitors from leaving the website, we can keep them on our web site."
So what? Doesn't everyone have to exit on some page?

The "so what" test in this case highlights that although this metric seems to be a really good one on paper, in reality it provides no insight that you can use to drive action.
Because of the macro dynamics of this website, the content consumption pattern of visitors does not seem to change over time (this happens when a website does not have a high content turnover – like say a rapidly updating news site), and we should move on to other actionable metrics.
Here the "so what" test not only helps you focus your precious energy on the right metric, it also helps you logically walk through measurement to action.

Key Performance Indicator: Conversion Rate for Top Search Keywords.
In working closely with your search agency, or in-house team, you have produced a spreadsheet that shows the conversion rate for the top search keywords for your website.

"The conversion rate for our top 20 keywords has increased in the last three months by a statistically significant amount."
So what?
"Our pay-per-click (PPC) campaign is having a positive outcome, and we should reallocate funds to these nine keywords that show the most promise."

Okay.
That's it.
No more "so what?"
With just one question, we have a recommendation for action. This indicates that this is a great KPI and we should continue to use it for tracking.
Notice the characteristics of this good KPI:
#1: Although it uses one of the most standard metrics in the universe, conversion rate, it is applied in a very focused way – just the top search keywords. (You can do the top 10 or top 20 or as many "head keywords" as it makes sense in your case, just be aware this does not scale to the "mid" or "tail".)
#2: It is pretty clear from the first answer to "so what?" that for this KPI the analyst has segmented the data between organic and PPC. This is the other little secret: no KPI works at an aggregated level to by itself give us insights. Segmentation does that.

Key Performance Indicator: Task Completion Rate.
You are using a on-exit website survey tool like 4Q to measure my most beloved metric in whole wide world and the universe: task completion rate. (You'll see in a moment why. :)
Here's the conversation…

"Our task completion rate is down five points this month to 58%."
So what?
"Having indexed our performance against that of last quarter, each one percent drop causes a loss of $80,000 in revenue."
So what? I mean in the name of thor, what do we do!
"I have drilled down to the Primary Purpose report and most of the fall is from Visitors who were there to purchase on our website, the most likely cause is the call to action on our landing pages and a reported slowness in response when people add to cart."
Good man. Here's a bonus and let's go fix this problem.

Nice right?
Notice in this case you have a inkling to the top super absolutely unknown secret of the web analytics world: If you tie important metrics to revenue that tends get you action and a god like status.
Keep that in mind.
So that's the story of the "so what" test. A simple yet effective way of identifying the metrics that matter.
This strategy is effective with all that we do, but it is particularly effective when it comes to the normal data puke we call the "management dashboard". Apply the "so what" test and you'll make it into a Management Dashboard.
Closing Summary:
Remember, we don't want to have metrics because they are nice to have, and there are tons of those.
We want to have metrics that answer business questions and allow us to take action—do more of something or less of something or at least funnel ideas that we can test and then take action.
The "so what" test is one mechanism for identifying metrics that you should focus on or metrics that you should ditch because although they might work for others, for you they don't pass the "so what" test.
And killing metrics is not such a bad thing. After all this is the process that has been proven to work time and time again:

More here: Web Metrics Demystified.
Ok now it's your turn.
Do you have a test you apply to your web metrics? What are your strategies that have rescued you during times of duress? What do you like about the "so what" test? What don't you like about it? Do you have a metric that magnificently aced the "so what" test?
Please share your comments, feedback and life lessons via comments.
Thanks.
PS:
Couple other related posts you might find interesting:

• Six Web Metrics / KPI's To Die For
• 4 "Useless" KPI Measurement Techniques
• Five Rules for High Impact Web Analytics Dashboards

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Occam's Razor
by Avinash Kaushik

Best Web Metrics / KPIs for a Small, Medium or Large Sized Business

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We have access to more data than God wants anyone to have. Thus it is not surprising that we feel overwhelmed, and rather than being data driven we just get paralyzed. Life does not have to be that scary. In fact a data driven life is sexiest digital life you can imagine.
In this blog post we are going to bring the sexyback. I am going to attempt to significantly simply your life by recommending the critical few metrics you should use to analyze performance of your digital marketing campaigns and website. You'll be able to quickly go from "omg what can I do!" to "omg what am I going to do with all the money and fame I'm earning!"
The approach I'm going to use is to 1. Use my Acquisition, Behavior and Outcomes framework to ensure an end-to-end view of important activity and 2. Recommend metrics / KPIs you can use based on the size of your company.
Each recommendation comes with hints on what analysis to perform once you have the data, and what changes you could make to your campaigns, content and overall digital strategy. [A summary in pictorial format is at the end of this post.]
Excited? Let's do this!
Best Metrics / KPIs for Small Business Websites
Small business websites are a very fragile ecosystem. People working hard to do the best they can on the smallest possible budgets. But not to worry. They have to start with just four simple metrics to start rocking!
Acquisition:
Clicks? Visits? Backlinks? Impressions? No. We have something magnificent.
Cost Per Acquisition.
Obsess about this metric. You have very little money. You need to know, obsessively, what you get for it. This metric delivers that insight. Oh, and everything has a CPA (not just your paid search or display/banner ads). If you are doing SEO then you are likely paying for someone. That's the cost.

Kill things that don't have an optimum CPA. Invest more in ones that do. Simple enough, right?
Tip: Remember this is just cost, not profit. If your product costs you $15 to make then, in the above scenario, you are shipping a crisp $5 bill along with every Social Media order!
Where is it? Most likely in Excel. For Search it is in your Google Analytics or Omniture Site Catalyst reports. But for most other programs (Affiliate, Email, Social, Display) your Cost is likely sitting outside your web analytics tool. So extract the # of conversions, import into Excel, add a column for Cost, do the math, sing or weep (based on what the data says!:)).
If you are paying someone to do web analytics and this metric is not on top of the dashboard they've created for you, it might be time to say sayonara to them.
Behavior:
Page Views? Time on Site? No. You can do so much better!
Bounce Rate.
I continue to be a believer in trying to prompt love at first sight. Okay, okay, I'll settle for delivering relevance. :) Bounce Rate helps you identify campaigns where you might be targeting wrong people (who then come to your site and leave right away) or sending relevant traffic to irrelevant (and often flash-filled hideous) landing pages.
Bounce rate helps you find campaigns and landing pages that need to be killed / improved. Everyday.
Where is it? Standard metric in every web analytics tool worth anything. Look at your All Traffic Sources report and your Landing Pages report.
Checkout Abandonment Rate.
I find the fastest way to make money is to take it from the people who have already decided to give it to you. Obsess about checkout abandonment rate (the percentage of people who click Start Checkout to those who complete that process).

Focus on checkout steps with the highest abandonment. Tweak like crazy. A/B & Multivariate tests are a good option. But you are a small business… so just take away as many fields as you can, play with where to show shipping cost (I vote for way up front), reduce the number of checkout steps if you can, ask for account creation at the end of the process rather than at the start. Try, test, measure, be rich.
Where is it? In Excel. Or if you use Google Analytics: In Paditrack for free. (Google Analytics' native funnels are pretty sub optimal, ignore that entire feature.) For other tools: In KissMetrics. Create a funnel just for the checkout process (from clicking Start Checkout to Thanks for your Order) and both these tools will give you the metric automatically. They also allow you to segment the data! Make love to it.
[Bonus: What is abandonment rate?]
Outcomes:
My favorite Economic Value? No. As a small business I recommend…
Macro Conversion Rate.
You are a small business. Obsess about conversion rates, and everything connected to improving them. What products are people buying? Every single day (okay week) look at the All Traffic Sources report and seek out the Conversion Rate metric. Ruthlessly punish sources that are not working well and reward the pretty babies. Be they Earned, Owned and Paid media – oh and have a marketing strategy that has each of those elements or as a small business owner you are not going to win a lot.

I love creating an advanced segment with just the people who buy twice the average order size. I call them the Whales. Look at sources, locations, product bundles purchased, keywords and campaigns and all that to learn where/how you can find more Whales.
Where is it? Standard metric in all analytics tools. Remember to look at both the rate and the raw number of conversions for context. People make silly decisions when they don't do that.
That's it!
You are a small sized business and these four simple key performance indicators will literally rock your world as soon as you start measuring them. Cost Per Acquisition. Bounce Rate. Checkout Abandonment Rate. Macro Conversion Rate. Don't look at any other metric until you feel you've mastered them.
Tip: If you've hired the right analytics talent/consultant to help you, they'll be measuring these fabulous four.
Best Metrics / KPIs for Medium Sized Business Websites
What if you are a medium sized business? What key performance indicators are optimal for you?
First, you are going to measure the KPIs mentioned above. But because you are running a bigger and more complex business you'll also measure…
Acquisition:
CPA
+ Click-through Rate
While CPA is a macro metric about your campaigns' bottom-line performance, Click-thru Rate (CTR) is a deeper dive into analyzing the creativity and relevance of your affiliate deals / search listing / blinky banner ads.
In the context of Search (Paid or Organic), the text in your ads, the number at which your listing is ranked, the match between the user query and your ad's intent all help you receive a higher CTR. And if someone comes to your site (and does not bounce!) then you get an opportunity to convince them of your product or service's glory.

Small tweaks to the subject line of your email campaigns can have dramatic improvement in CTR. Recency and Frequency capping of your display remarketing campaigns can have a huge impact. Changing demographic targeting options in your Facebook ads can work wonders. Etc., etc., etc.
Put another way… CTR helps you understand if you showed up at the right place for your first date. Are you dressed okay. And if you are smiling the right smile. Helpful to know, right?
Where is it?
Everywhere. Start at a campaign level. Drill down to individual creatives. Kill badness. Promote goodness. Rinse. Repeat.
Behavior:
Bounce Rate
Checkout Abandonment Rate
+ Page Depth
A very tiny percentage of visitors to your site will see more than a couple pages. That's the internet for you. As you improve the user experience, information architecture and relevancy of content on your site, it is important to keep an eye not on the rather useless metric of Average Page Views per Visit or Average Time on Site but rather on the distribution of page depth. Here's how that picture might look like (from a post I wrote in July 2006!)…

From the deep detail reported by your web analytics tool you can choose to aggregate into buckets you most care about (like mine above). Categorizing the visits into Abandoners, Flirts, Browsers, One-off-Wonders, Loyalists will dramatically change your view of content consumption. Over time, as you move to deeper consumption, you'll see direct business rewards.
The above image emphasizes a sale/conversion at the end, but even if you are a content-only website improving Page depth helps you because more pages equal (at the very minimum) more ad impressions!
Where is it? The final table will be in Excel. If you use Google Analytics the data you need is here: Audience > Behavior > Engagement > Page Depth tab. If you use WebTrends, Yahoo! Analytics, Coremetrics please click around to find the data. They all have it.
+ Loyalty (Count of Visits)
If Page Depth helps you optimize for a single session experience, Loyalty helps you optimize pan session behavior. Put another way… how good are you at getting the same person to visit your website multiple times? For ecommerce or non-ecommerce websites, loyalty can mean the difference between life of survival and raking in profits like crazy.
First set a goal for the % of site Visits you would like for people who've visited more than x times. [Set a goal for x too. :)] For ecommerce websites use your Days to Conversion report (more on this metric below) to set your goal. For content sites perhaps mirror your content update schedule. If you are the New York Times and you update the website 24 times a day then should the average person be visiting the site at least 90 times per month?
Your BFF, as always, is analysis and not just reporting the metric. Create this simple segment in five seconds…

Apply to your keywords and campaigns and referring sources reports and identify which sources drive loyal traffic. Apply it to your content reports and figure out which content drives Loyalty (Sports? Op Ed? International? Cat Stories?).
Where is it? In every web analytics tool on the planet. If you use Google Analytics the data you need is here: Audience > Behavior > Frequency & Recency.
Outcomes:
Macro Conversion Rate.
+ Micro Conversion Rate
Pick your favorite benchmark and you'll notice that less than 2% of visitors convert. Focusing on just the Macro Conversion Rate means you don't care if you received any business value from the 98% that did not convert. I refuse to accept that uber-lameness.
Identify your Micro Conversions (/Goals) and obsess about the long and short term business value they deliver. You'll quickly realize the Economic Value they create for you is often far greater than the Revenue your Macro Conversion reports! And optimizing for that will ensure you win HUGE.

Where is it? In Google Analytics it is here: Conversions > Goals. Even if you are a content site the data is there. Details in the Goal URLs report. Setting up goals takes two minutes, setting goal values might take you a week (see measurement strategies here). If you use other tools, please check with your vendor.
+ Per Visit Goal Value
This Key Performance Indicator 1. helps you move beyond the obsession of focusing on the 2% (because it forces you to focus on Every Visit!) and 2. encourages you to create a business that uses the web to deliver multiple outcomes to your visitors.

Every visitor will not convert, but every visitor will, hopefully, deliver some Economic Value. Looking at this metric helps you identify Goals that contribute higher value, and and understanding of simple things like where you should focus on. If Twitter delivers 87 cents of Per Visit Goal Value and Google delivers 97 cents then perhaps I want to keep focusing on my SEO strategies rather than following the advice of the Social Media Guru who's just informed me Search is dead.
Where is it? In pretty much every single report in every single web analytics tool. Click on the Goals tab.
That's it!
For a medium sized business we ended up with nine metrics. Seems about right if you are making more than five million dollars of economic value. They key difference from websites that are in the small business category is that we are going to shoot for multiple conversions, deeper site engagement and better analysis of acquisition efficiency.
Time now to deal with the big boys and girls… large websites!
Best Metrics / KPIs for Large Sized Business Websites
Acquisition:
CPA
Click-through Rate
+ % New Visits
My choice of this metric perhaps betrays my refusal to rest on my laurels. There are clearly a finite number of people in the world relevant for any business. But staying hungry and staying foolish is a popular mantra for me. I use this metric to constantly calibrate my acquisition strategy to understand which inbound marketing efforts are bringing new "impression virgins" to the business.
If you look at your Earned, Owned and Paid media then this metric is especially important for your Paid media efforts. Except for your re-targeting / behavior targeting campaigns, you want your paid search, display, affiliate, and social efforts to bring new visitors to your franchise.
Where is it? It's like air, everywhere! Don't forget to segment for optimal analysis.
Behavior:
Bounce Rate
Checkout Abandonment Rate
Page Depth
Loyalty (Count of Visits)
+ Events / Visit
Every awesome large website delivers complex experiences (videos, demos, dynamic slideshows, configurators + + +) via sophisticated technologies (Flash, AJAX, Gadgets + + +). Almost all of the time we leave measuring their effectiveness on faith (or the HiPPO). I love event tracking because it helps us measure these often astonishingly, expensive initiatives.

Of 110,842 visits to the site, 9,054 interacted with your delightful experiences and each of those visits had 2.24 Events per Visit. Is that good? Bad? Could be better? Are these 2.24 interactions delivering higher economic value to your business?
In the above case the answer was a big NO. In your your case you'll decide based on your strategy and goals. At the end of the analysis you'll make significantly smarter decisions about your content (especially because the Analysis Ninja that you are, you'll triangulate performance of this metric with first, Page Depth and, second, Loyalty).
Where is it? Most web analytics tools do some type of event tracking. Please check with your vendor (it might not be called event tracking in their lingo, just describe my first paragraph above). In Google Analytics the data is here: Content > Events.
Outcomes:
Macro Conversion Rate.
Micro Conversion Rate
Per Visit Goal Value
+ Days to Conversion [or Time Lag for Content sites]
Another pan session metric I adore.
Life, no matter how hot you are, is not a series of one night stands. Yet because of how they analyze the data most companies end up optimizing their web marketing campaigns for one night stands. Come here and convert NOW! If yes: Oh, I love you. If no: Kill the campaign!
That approach is not just short-sighted; it is an insult to your visitors. Convert them at a pace they are most comfortable with. This metric helps you understand how quickly or slowly your visitors convert. You can, at the very minimum, change your campaign messaging and come hither calls to action and adjust your landing pages. If the Days to Conversion are much longer, then create a robust (slow dance) micro conversion strategy.

If you have a non-ecommerce website then there is something delightful for you in the Google Analytics Multi-Channel Funnel reports. Checkout the Time Lag report . It is showing you exactly the same data as the Days to Transaction for Ecommerce sites. The metric you see immediately above is called Conversions. It is essentially your Goals (/micro conversions).
Optimize your "hello, nice to meet you, what would you like, here is what I have to offer, why don't you check with your spouse, come back and check it out again, multiple times, I'm still here, you ready to convert / deliver economic value, here's how… " process.
Where is it? Days to Conversion is in the Ecommerce section of your web analytics reports. It is a standard report. (Don't forget to segment your sources. Deep insights await.) Time Lag may or may not be a standard report in your tool. Please check with your vendor. In Google Analytics it is a standard report here: Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels > Time Lag.
+ % Assisted Conversions
This is the newest metric I've made standard for all my clients / partners / BFFs. And it is a sweetie.
Assisted Conversions builds on the above mental model. It takes a while for a majority of your visitors to convert (macro and micro conversions), so why does almost all of web analytics focus on single channel analysis and optimizing that single channel in a silo? Just because the Affiliate click was the last one before conversion should it be optimized for that conversion? Especially if the Visitor originally came via Facebook (or Google or whatever)?
How many of your conversions had more than one ad / media / marketing touch prior to converting? Really smart Analysts at really successful companies understand that…

…and then use that data to optimize the portfolio of channels rather than individual channels for the company.
Even if you don't do portfolio optimization (and desperately hope you do) you can easily see how the above data will cause you to execute a different marketing optimization and expectation strategy for Email (1.18 Assist / Last Interaction rate) vs. Organic Search (0.61).
I am being modest when I say that this metric and subsequent analysis will have a fantastic impact on your company.
Where is it? % Assist Conversions may or may not be in your web analytics tool. Please check with your vendor. In Google Analytics you'll find it here: Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels > Assisted Conversions.
And we are done!
For large businesses we've identified 13 key metrics that would give a robust end-to-end view of business performance. The key difference vs. medium sized businesses is that we are really, really, really focused on pan-session (multiple visits) behavior. Put another way, we really care about people here and not just a single visit.
Here is a summary of the metrics I am recommending in this post…

I hope the picture above will quickly help diagnose where current gaps in your measurement strategy might be.
Additionally if you are a small business you'll know what else to measure when you start to become medium sized and if/when you cross that threshold you'll know the metrics that come with your large business status. :)
You'll notice that I'm not focusing on KPIs like AdSense Ads CTR or Page Load Time or Actions per Social Visit or Search Exits (I love this metric!) or Content Distribution vs. Content Consumption Rate or Conversation Rate (in case of a content site) etc. That's simply because these KPIs tend to be unique to the type of business you are running. My strategy above was to focus on just the KPIs that would be applicable across all types of businesses.
That brings me to a very important point.
While it is my hope that you'll find my recommendations above relevant and yummy… the most optimal way to identify that best key performance indicators for your company will come using the process and structure outlined in the Digital Marketing & Measurement Model.
I'll end with the thought I started this post with… we have more data than God wants anyone to have. But web analytics does not have to be scary or impenetrable. Use the roadmap above, focus on all three elements (acquisition, behavior, outcomes) and I promise you'll soon be on your way to being as happy as God wants everyone to be.
I wish you all the best!
Okay as always it's your turn now.
Does your business use the above recommended metrics / key performance indicators? Do you have an absolute favorite metric that's not mentioned above? Which metric above do you find most useful? Which one most useless? What is your strategy for identifying the most relevant metrics?
Please share your suggestions, critique, and helpful best practices via comments.
Thank you.
PS:
Couple other posts on metrics / KPIs you might find interesting:

• Web Metrics Demystified
• Your Web Metrics: Super Lame or Super Awesome?
• Kill Useless Web Metrics: Apply The "Three Layers Of So What" Test

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