The Biggest Mistake Web Analysts Make… And How To Avoid It!

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The single biggest mistake web analysts make is working without purpose.
We work very hard. We torture SiteCatalyst. We send out a lot of data. Then we resend it again and again. And yet our work results in very little impact on the business in terms of action taken by company leaders.
Why this sad state? Almost always we dive into the ocean of data first. Sadder still, we don't ask questions later. We never ask questions.
No questions. No tie to what's important. No impact from the data.
Result? Our work lacks purpose. It is that simple.
My normal recommendation to address this supremely corrosive issue is to encourage each company to go through the process of creating a Digital Marketing and Measurement Model . It is a fantastic five step process that forces the engagement of key stake holders to produce a blueprint of why digital exists in a company, and what it is trying to accomplish.

No touching Google Analytics. No going to web analytics conferences. No tweeting for help.
Just doing the four things, in five steps above, will deliver what we lack… purpose.

1. Why should you come to work?

2. What should the focus of your work be?

3. What level of performance indicates success or failure?

4. What dimensions, if analyzed, will deliver juicy business insights?

Unfortunately a very tiny fraction of companies, or Analysts, want to put in this lifesaving effort up front.
If you fall in the "Analyst unwilling to do the hard work" category, I'm afraid I can't help you.
If you fall into the "Analyst really wanting to do the hard work but does not have the connection to Superiors, or other teams, and looking for any way out to identify business purpose" category. I have a very very simple approach for you to follow. You are going to love it.
But there are two prerequisites: 1. You are going to have to throw away the shackles, and think like a business owner. Even if you work in a multi-headed hydra called "global corporation." 2. Have the courage to move beyond the office politics/bickering, move from waiting for a savior to tell you what the purpose should be to investing some time in figuring it out yourself.
If you meet the prerequisites, and have a pinch of business savvy, we are together going to change the world!
My recommendation calls for you to take a structured approach and answer five questions. The insightful answers will help you create your own understanding of the purpose of the digital existence. You'll end up creating something very close to the DMMM above.
The result will be an astonishingly high level of focus for your digital analytics work (even on day one) and hyper-relevant insights to the business. That, in turn will simply blow people's mind (relevant insights always do), creating love for you. And love like that is hard to come by. (Conveniently that type of love also translates into a sweet raise. :)
Perhaps I've over-promised. But I'm just so excited about this process and its power to make our professional lives better.
Ready?
In my experience the best teaching happens with real world examples, rather than spouting theory. Hence, I'm going to use Credit Karma as an example to illustrate the process. I don't know anyone at Credit Karma. I'm not an expert in the credit score reporting business. So I'll be just as blind as you might be walking into any business and going through this exercise.
Here are the five questions (plus one special bonus in the end) I/you have to answer to get a very good sense of the business to bring astonishing relevancy to our data analysis:
#1. Why does the site exist?
This is the holy grail. But here's the trick: We are not looking for just the obvious answers. We want to identify as close to 100% of the purpose for which the site exists, how it makes money/gets leads/raises donations (as the case may be).
In the case of Credit Karma my first job is to identify what the Macro Conversion is. The single biggest reason for the site's existence.
Luckily except in the case of the most incompetent websites, this is easy to find. In our case it is right there staring us in the face on the home page: Free Daily Credit Card Monitoring!

Just to be sure, since I don't know them at all, I might poke around a few pages to make sure. But usually it is pretty clear.
And in this case the cool thing is that they give you one score, the TransUnion one, for free. No credit cards required to sign up! My favorite report is the Credit Report Card. Great visualizations and really great data. Sign up today! [Disclosure: I'm not affiliated with nor do I know anyone at Credit Karma.]
OK, back to being the business owner.
The next thing to answer this question, and ensure that I'm not a newbie Analyst who will only focus on 2% of the business success, I have to figure out the Micro Conversions.
To do this you'll go to the main sections of the website. You'll look for other calls to action. "Sign up for the mailing list." "Order our catalog." "Download the trial version." Et al.
After 10 minutes of browsing, I found all these valuable Micro Conversions:

Some are pretty straight-forward. Affiliate links (Take Offer, Compare Rates) that link to other sites from which Credit Karma makes commissions. Advertising on the site is a Micro Conversion (the SavvyMoney ad above with the link Manage Your Debt). The Write A Review call to action (the more reviews there are on credit cards, the more valuable the site is for comparison shoppers the more people will come and do business with them). In the same vein, completed Compare Credit Card offers is an important Micro Conversion (and a sign of deeper engagement with the site). Finally, the links to connection on social platforms are Micro Conversions as well.
Now you have a fantastic understanding of the business objective (make money via credit reporting) and the Goals (a combination of Macro + Micro Conversions).
And, I can't stress this enough, you are not just looking at 2% of business success, you are looking at 100%.
Bonus: Identifying Macro and Micro Conversions also gives you a list of Ecommerce Tracking to set up on the site, and Goals to set up in the Admin interface. You'll also note small things like outbound link tracking (using Events) to set up for social actions and ensuring all affiliate links are tagged with our company's tracking parameters.
Don't open Google Analytics or Yahoo Web Analytics yet! We have more work to do…
#2. What parts of the website should you focus on first?
One of the biggest problems we have with digital analytics is that we have waaaaaay too much data. And because the reports only show the top ten rows, we might not easily be able to see what matters.
Hence it is very important to figure out where to focus your analysis first. My method for doing that is to browse around the site and answer this question:

~ What content on the website is directly tied to driving Macro and Micro Conversions?
~ What sections of the website might be most valuable to the visitors?
~ What content areas seem very expensive to create (hence more important to measure if they are adding any value!)?
~ What cross-sells and up-sells do you see being pimped across the site?
~ What does the top nav and left/right nav groupings tell you about priorities?

You can quickly see how those simple questions help you understand what data might be the object of your analytical horsepower.
Another 10 or 15 minutes of exploring various links and pages yields the answers I'm looking for.

For me, as a lay person and not a credit score industry veteran, the most important section would be /learning. The more the website visitors are aware of how important credit scores are, the more likely they are to sign up.
This was a bit hidden but the second most important piece of content would be the Credit Simulator (/preview/simulator). I can go play with the simulation and be informed (scared, actually) of the implications of taking credit and become a more qualified lead for Credit Karma.
The other sections I found valuable, using the framework outlined in the questions above, were: /help/howitworks (no one would sign up without looking at this page, we have to A/B and MVT test this to the max), /tools (this creates a great affinity for the brand, even if people don't sign up) and of course /creditcards (if they don't sign up, let's at least get an affiliate click :).
You can quickly see how you've got a short list of things to do in the Content section of Google Analytics. The filters to apply to those reports, to understand which KPIs would be most important as you value this content.
Rather than letting the data take you somewhere randomly, let this approach put you in the drivers seat and then you take data for a ride to a specific destination. That is what being successful is all about.
Awesome, right?
#3. How smart is their digital marketing strategy?
If you are a regular reader of this blog you know how deeply fond I am of the Acquisition, Behavior, Outcomes framework. We covered Outcomes with the first question and behavior with the second. Now it's time for acquisition.
What I try to probe, without talking to anyone at the company, is how savvy the company is in digital marketing. I'm also trying to figure out all the places they might be doing advertising. I want to know if they have even a simplistic understanding of how to rock social media.

Here's my process for doing that…

~ Visit www.google.com (or Baidu in China, Yandex in Russia etc). Run a bunch of search queries with the intent of looking for the company's products and services. I'll do at least five or so brand-related queries ("credit karma reviews"), and at least ten to fifteen non-brand/long tail queries ("free credit scores," "best credit score website," "credit score reporting scams," etc.).
I make a note of: 1. Organic search rankings (rank, page titles, snippets). 2. Paid search ads (title, creatives, urls shown). 3. Competition (who comes up first consistently, ppc and organic). 4. Search Plus Your World results.
~ Visit sites like (in this specific case) Yahoo! News/Finance to see if I get display ads when I read articles or stories about credit cards, credit scores etc. Do the same with some of the top sites I can think of related to the industry (brokerage sites, financially savvy consumer sites, etc). Finally, checkout at least a couple of blogs relevant to the topic.
I'm trying to see if I bump into my company's ads (display, text, any other type). It will be a great reflection of how well thought out their acquisition strategy is, or how sub-optimal it is.
~ No business, B2C or B2B or here2there, can exist without a robust YouTube strategy. So off to YouTube to do some relevant searches to see what videos show up.
Do I see any promoted videos in the results (to control the message)? Do I discover a brand channel by the company (to create a deeper connection with customers)? How lame or awesome are their videos (you want to teach and pimp both at the same time)?
~ Social is all the rage these days and I do believe that every business of every type should have a social presence that is the epitome of conversational marketing. So visiting their Twitter/Facebook/Google+ pages is critical.
Do they have a social presence? How many followers/likes do they have in comparison to their competitors? Do they reply to questions, or just shout? Do they pimp offers or try to make people's lives better? Is there any consistency in their contribution?
One special thing I'm also checking is if they have the +1 button on their website. Search Plus Your World and the social graph has become quite important. People search now, see their friends/social graph liking/endorsing brands and pages. Those often catch the eye of the searcher more easily, sometimes, than paid or organic results.

All this goes into creating starting points for what I'll do when I get into the web analytics tool. Will I analyze Search first or Campaigns? Will I focus more on referring sources or social traffic first? Will I measure the value of YouTube first or Display ads?
Additionally the above investigation also gives me a set of insights I can deliver to my CxOs. Channels where they should exist but don't. Things they might be doing badly in Social or YouTube or wherever. Missed opportunities in Organic search or SPYW (Search Plus Your World). Things like that. And these recommendations will come from my own digital marketing sophistication (earning respect from my Senior Leaders).
Bonus: In the digital marketing savvy section I've also started to pull out my Samsung Galaxy Tab and Nexus S to preview the mobile and tablet experience of the company. If it stinks that tells me a lot (remember the year of mobile was 2010!). I'll also run a couple of quick searches on Google or Yandex or Baidu to see how the landing pages look on my mobile phone and tablet.
Super Bonus: Only for the most passionate amongst you… run a quick query in the iTunes App Store and the Android Market to see if the business exists there in the form of an application. If yes, download it. Play with it. Download some competitor offerings.
Most companies that are on the bleeding edge of digital marketing savvy are leveraging Google, Yahoo!, Email Marketing, Blog ads, Social channels AND mobile experiences AND mobile applications. The analysis above, will bring remarkable brilliance when you dive into the data. You'll take your company from bad to good in terms of acquisition-savvy, or from good to great.
#4. How well are they doing in context of their competition?
It is almost criminal to dive into doing any analysis of a company's website data without first getting a little bit of context about their competitive performance. Context after all is king .
Here one simple example of how it can be helpful. You log into CoreMetrics and you see a line traffic going up or down. Is that good or bad? You don't know. No one at the company will talk to you. Why not jump on to a free competitive intelligence tool and figure out the answer for yourself?
I'll usually start with looking at the company's data in www.compete.com (if they are US-based with primarily US-based traffic) or Google Trends for Websites . And in five seconds I'll end up with a graph that looks like this:

The above data is from Compete. I've included not just the data for Credit Karma, but also for two relevant competitors, freescore.com and myfico.com.
Initially I was wow-ed by the spike in the blue line (Credit Karma), that is quite spectacular. But then I see that it might be an industry thing, as the competitor spiked as well. Good context.
While at Compete I can also dig into a whole bunch of metrics like Visits, PageViews, udience segmentation, and so much more.
Now, I better understand visitor acquisition.
Time to understand a bit more about the visitors themselves. My BFF? Google/DoubleClick AdPlanner , perhaps the largest source of demographic and psychographic data out there.

The above data is for freescore.com. I can also quickly run queries for Credit Karma (and others) and compare and contrast the demographic profiles of people who visit the website. Are our competitors particularly stronger in some Educational categories or Incomes compared to us? What are our areas of strength?
While in AdPlanner I also highly recommend looking at "Sites also visited," a fantastic way to understand who a site's real competitors are. What are the clusters of options when people consider a credit report? This is also a great place to get ideas for websites you can show ads on, exchange links, etc.
The last stop of my journey is Google Insights for Search , your direct source for all Google organic search data from across the world. Here I particularly like to look at a metric I call "share of search." How often are people looking for the generic query for the industry, for me (/my company) and for my direct competitors?
Think of it as unaided brand recall …

Just look at that massive spike in queries for Credit Karma at the end of Dec! What the heck happened there? Great question. What where the related keywords people searched for? Check the Google Analytics reports. Was this traffic any good? Check the Google Analytics metrics. Are we going to dominate the world and crush our competitors? Time will tell!
The purpose of competitive intelligence analysis is to understand your place in the world, to highlight from an industry/ecosystem perspective what your strengths and areas of opportunity are, and to collect a list of questions like the ones immediately above for analysis in your web analytics tools.
Is that not simply orgasmic?
#5. What is the fastest possible way I can have a impact on the business?
One final thing.
I look for a low hanging fruit to fix/analyze. Something I can quickly analyze, find insights for and get fixed to show the value of data (and my employment at the company).
Here are some examples of things I consciously look for:

~ Any obviously important links that might be broken (404) or misdirected.
~ Horribly constructed landing pages for the top organic/paid keywords.
~ Something absolutely important missing from the site's information architecture.
~ A missed opportunity for promoting a micro conversion more prominently. (Why is the Credit Score Emulator so hidden, and not on the home page of Credit Karma?)
~ Overpimping of social icons when there has never been a social post (or all posts are sub-optimal).
~ No "related items" after a product is added to cart. (Aw, come on! Has Amazon taught us nothing?)
~ 17 display ads on every single page on the website. (Why, oh why must we inflict torture?)

And other such things. Depending on the website you are analyzing, and your web-savvy/UX expertise, you might find other things. But the criteria to apply is that you are looking for big, obvious broken things that can mostly likely be fixed quickly and for which the impact can be quickly measured.
You are trying to find something with a clear purpose to show the power of actions taken through data.
One of my most beloved low hanging fruit for lead gen/ecommerce websites is to identify and improve the checkout abandonment rate .
That would be measuring the efficiency of this process for Credit Karma:

For a lead gen/ecommerce website there is no faster way to improve the bottom line. The potential customer has already discovered us. They've survived our website. They've gone from consideration to purchase. Now, all that remains for us to make money is to get them through these three simple pages. Let's make sure we do that! 100% of the time! (I love being aggressive in this case.)
This is directly tied to business purpose. It is absolutely focused on something important (getting the macro conversion). It is small (3 pages), and it is very well defined. And it is easily measureable (hello my dear funnel analysis, I've missed you!).
That is how an Analyst achieves glory. Through data. Powered by a clear purpose.
So five simple questions that help you focus on the end-to-end view of the business (Acquisition, Behavior, Outcome) without ever touching the data (except CI) and help you create your own Digital Marketing Measurement Model.
What I love more than anything else is that it forces you to become the Marketer for the couple hours you'll spend on it. It forces you to think like a business owner for that time. It forces you to pull out any UI/UX chops you have.
It is rare that Analysts get to flex those muscles. It is important, though because I don't know of a single Digital Analyst who has become great without flexing those muscles.
And now, my dear, you are ready to log into your web analytics tool!
But before you do that, I have one last parting gift for you…
Special Bonus: #6. Any technical notes I can make for the future (analytics or coding)?
As I'm clicking around I also like to make note of these things:

~ Randomly view source to see if the javascript tag for the web analytics tool is there. You just want to spot check if the tool is there (for GA just do View Page Source and Ctrl F and ga.js).
I do not encourage you to do to this until much, much later, but you can use a web analytics site audit tool for more thorough checking. But don't do it now. Don't get sucked into technical implementation hell just yet.
~ Things that might hinder SEO.
For example: Link text – is it descriptive? URL structures – are they clean (as on Credit Karma) or a jumble of technical gibberish (as on www.aeropostale.com )? Exit links – are they wrapped in javascript (can't be read by search bots) or clean? How clean is the link structure? These and other such small things are both a task list and a sign of how savvy the company is when it comes to SEO.
~ When I click on various external ads (search, display, YouTube), I also take a quick peek at the URL window to check for campaign tracking parameters. So important to have them.
~ Make note of windows that pop up. If they are links to the company's blog or their ecommerce/travel reservation/lead gen platform, is it on the same domain or a different domain?
Latter means tracking challenges, technical nightmares.
~ If they have an internal site search engine, and in this day and age it is criminal not to, then I do a quick search and see if my query shows up in the url stem. For example, on this blog it would look like this: http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/?s=segmentation
This would be awesome. The "s." It means we can configure it in Analytics in two seconds (no IT begging involved) and start doing amazing internal site search analysis .
If the parameter does not exist… well, then IT begging will be mandatory. :)

Remember. You are not a technical implementer or a javascript tagger – two valuable roles. You are an Analyst. Your primary objective should be data analysis and finding insights. So the first five questions and the answers you'll find are your focus area. The sixth is a gift you can give the javascript tagger/technical implementer in your company.
That's it. My humble attempt at sharing with you everything I know about avoiding the single biggest mistake Digital Analysts/Marketers make: Execute their jobs without a clear business purpose.
If any of the above makes you feel that I hold data secondary and understanding what data is in service of first then I've succeed in my mission with this post.
As always, it's your turn now.
What are the approaches you use to identify business purpose? Do you dive into the data first, and still find insights without doing the above mentioned five investigations? Is there a strategy outlined above that you feel works better than others? What are your favorite low hanging fruits to fix for a digital business?
Please share your recommendations, war stories from the front lines, and feedback via comments.
Thank you.

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Digital Marketing and Measurement Model

There is one difference between winners and losers when it comes to web analytics. Winners, well before they think data or tool, have a well structured Digital Marketing & Measurement Model. Losers don't.
This article guides you in understanding the value of the Digital Marketing & Measurement Model (notice the repeated emphasis on Marketing, not just Measurement), and how to create one for yourself. At the end you'll also find some additional examples to inspire you.
Let's go…
The root cause of failure in most digital marketing campaigns is not the lack of creativity in the banner ad or TV spot or the sexiness of the website. It is not even (often) the people involved. It is quite simply the lack of structured thinking about what the real purpose of the campaign is and a lack of an objective set of measures with which to identify success or failure.
I've developed the Digital Marketing & Measurement Model as a simple, structured, five step process to infuse this much needed thinking. Here is what each step in the process helps accomplish:

Step one is to force us to identify the business objectives upfront and set the broadest parameters for the work we are doing. Sr. Executives play a key role in this step.  Step two is to identify crisp goals for each business objective. Executives lead the discussion, you’ll play a contributing role.
Step three is to write down the key performance indicators. You’ll lead the work in this step, in partnership with a “data person” if you have one.
Step four is to set the parameters for success upfront by identifying targets for each KPI. Organization leaders play a key role here, with input from Marketing and Finance.
Step five, finally, is to identify the segments of people / behavior / outcomes that we’ll analyze to understand why we succeed or failed.

Simple, right? It is harder than you might think, “soft” work always is. Before we go into each step in detail I want to share something extremely critical. The scope/breadth the model has to cover.
A complete, and competent, Digital Marketing & Measurement Model will focus on three key areas of your marketing, and in each answer the cluster of questions provided:

1. Acquisition.
How are you anticipating acquiring traffic for your website / YT video / whatever else you are creating? Did you cover all three components of successful acquisition: Earned, Owned, Paid media? How would you prioritize each? Where are you spending most of your efforts?
2. Behavior.

What is the behavior you are expecting when people arrive? What pages should they see? What videos should they watch? Should they visit repeatedly? Are there certain actions they should take? What is unique about your effort that ties to an optimal experience for a customer?
3. Outcomes.

What outcomes signify value delivered to the business bottom-line? A download? A phone call to your call center? A qualified online lead? Signing up for email promotions? People buying your product / services ? A 95% task completion rate? A 10 point lift in brand perception? Simply put: Why are we undertaking this digital initiative?
My sincerest hope is that these questions will seed your discussions as you go through the five steps below. If your Digital Marketing & Measurement Model does not cover all three areas of your digital effort, then it is not complete. Please consider revisiting it. Don’t accept a mediocre model.
With that macro thought out of the way, let’s get going and look at a real example of the five step process to solidify this concept.
The business we are doing this for is a real estate company. I’ve picked a tough one because the main outcome is offline success. If they can create a good model then your job is much much easier!
Step 1: Identify the Business Objectives.
Ask this question: Why does your website/campaign exist? (Think of acquisition, behavior and outcomes.)
This is a difficult question to answer because it requires more thinking that you might anticipate. If you do it right at the end of step one you’ll have something that looks like this:

Identifying the business objectives mandates a discussion, multiple discussions, with the senior-most leaders in your company and working with them / sweet-talking their egos and hearts with gentle encouragement, to identify why the site / campaign / digital marketing invitiative exists.
Based on those discussions, in our case, we’ve identified three objectives: Create awareness, generate leads for the builders and highlight community events.
Here’s a great test. Your objectives should be DUMB:

Doable.
Understandable.
Manageable.
Beneficial.
If they are too out there, you'll never get anywhere. If they are too vague, nothing will get done. If they are too lame, they'll inspire no one. Go for real world, clear, executable and those that deliver value to the company (short term and long).
Are your objectives dumb?
Pro Tip: One way to ensure success is to forget that you are creating a set of videos or that you are building a site to host downloads of pdfs or that you are trying to mimic a campaign from Europe. Really, really, really think hard about why you are doing what you are doing. Get the answer from your executive/client.
Step 2: Identify Goals for each Objective.
Drilling down to identify website/campaign Goals requires critical thinking from both the Management, Marketers, and the Analysts – with Management in the leadership role.
My definition: Goals are specific strategies you'll leverage to accomplish the business objectives.
After going through some of the acquisition, behavior questions with stakeholders, here’s our model:

Clean. Has a clear direct line between Goal and each objective. Provides immense clarity.
To deliver on "Create Awareness," in this case, the site needs to support all the offline efforts along with having a relevant online traffic acquisition strategy.
"Generating Leads" comprises the twin goals of providing all kinds of information that will help potential home buyers to make their decision and to collect e-newsletter registrations as well as e-requests for an onsite tour of the model home by the builder.
Finally, "Highlight Events" is for prospective home buyers (visitors to our site). By making them happy with delightful events, at the construction site hopefully in model homes for sale, they can be converted into Net Promoters (to others) and Buyers (themselves).
These goals provide clarity, but they also contain large chunks of specific marching orders for what the Marketers and Analysts need to get done.
Pro Tip: This is super key: Macro + Micro Conversions! If the goals identified don’t cover all the jobs the site/campaign is doing then you might need to revisit your work.
Step 3: Identify the Key Performance Indicators.
Finally we get to deal with data!! I know you’ve been dying to get here. You’ll be the ideas leader here.
My definition: A key performance indicator (KPI) is a metric that helps you understand how you are doing against your objectives.
For each goal, sweat, and find the most hyper relevant KPI. This is what it will look like:

So amazing right?
I am sure your head is buzzing with all the possibilities for custom reports and things to report on, and how much clearer it is what you are supposed to do! Awesome, but hold your horses. We have two more steps to complete. Stay with me.
Pro Tip: Try to look for smart KPIs? Here’s specific guidance to help you…

Pick super awesome key performance indicators that truly reveal success or failure.
Step 4: Identify the Targets.
It is heartbreaking how few people complete this step. It is absolutely critical, in so many ways.
My definition: Targets are numerical values you’ve pre-determined as indicators of success or failure.
Why do you need targets? Consider this: You had an amazing campaign on YouTube. You got 1.2 million views. Is that great or awful? How do you decide? That is why you need targets!
Ok, so you also need them to plan your site / campaign / marketing initiative better. If you were responsible for getting 5 million visits in a month would you execute your campaign differently than if that number was 500k? Or if you were supposed to reach 1,000 CMO’s would you remember not to use Social Media as your primary acquisition strategy? That’s also why you need targets.
Targets can come from historical performance (how you did last time you / someone did something similar). They can come from other efforts (if my one hour long boring video can get 30k views in a week, should your two min peppy video get 1.2 million views?).
Seek people who are accountable (client, management, Finance), they will help you identify targets for each KPI.
Your Digital Marketing & Measurement Model will now look like this…

Now everyone knows what the company is shooting for. When you crack open Google Analytics, or other tools you’re using, you'll immediately jump with joy or weep when you see the KPI. You'll instantly know what is good and what is bad.
Pro Tip: If you have no targets then make something up. Use a number that if reached won’t embarrass you / your management / me. :) That is a good start; you can revise the number next month after you get the first blush of data. What’s important is that you never measure without having some sense of what good or bad performance looks like. The more experience you have, the better you’ll get at setting targets. Good targets.
Step 5: Identify valuable Segments for analysis.
This last part is one that is particularly meaningful to me because of its incredible value.
My definition: A group of people, their sources, onsite behavior, and outcomes.
When you log into Google Analytics or any other data source you are deluged by data and you could go in a million different directions.
Remember: We not only wanted focus, we wanted hyper-focus.
Take 10 more minutes from the key executives. Have a discussion with them about what the most important segments to focus on are for each goal.
Identify the sources of traffic, types of people desirable, their attributes, their behavior, business outcomes that they care about the most. And what customers to the site might want to accomplish. Balance for the company and the customers.
You’ll provide leadership here and if you did a great job then your DMMM will look something like this:

What groups of visitors were important? What visitor behavior is desirable? What a traffic source was Marketing focused on? Who are we trying to attract? What on our site is important – at least according to us? And more such questions are important to answer to get to the optimal segments.
Pro Tip: How to Identify Analytics Segments. Read. Act. Enough said.
Hallelujah, praise the lord you are done!
This was a lot of work, but I assure you that at this point you will thank God and your Cat that you worked this hard. You now have a structure that will guide your measurement efforts. The insights you derive will be of value because they are grounded in what’s important to the business and the leadership. And when you make recommendations based on data… guess what… action will be taken. Worth it, right?
Here's the sexiness: You now know what's important and where to start and what to focus on. Your boss/client knows what success or failure looks like and how to connect her/his business objectives to your data. Prioritized business focus for relevant data analysis!
You have the basis of a solid contract. Get the DMMM signed (preferably in blood!) so that all parties are clear on what everyone is supposed to be solving for.
Punch-line: Always, always, always work with the above "Marketing & Measurement contract" in hand.
Two Bonus Items.
Some of you might have noticed that I’d eliminated the Tour Conversions KPI in step five. That was simply to make the image in step five looks prettier. But worry not, with that KPI included our Digital Marketing & Measurement Model will have this beautiful final form…

Can we run the most fantastically actionable web analytics program in any company now? Yes we can!
One last gift for you.
When you create your own Digital Marketing & Measurement Model you don't have to use the format I've used above, you can add to it as you see fit.
I wanted to share with you a different format, and example. Below is the model for a retail e-commerce website with an online and offline presence:

 FY= Fiscal Year.

ABC= Authenticity, Benefits, Communication.

I hope that the two examples in this blog post will help inspire you to use the Digital Marketing & Measurement Model as the foundation of your web analytics efforts.
I believe, with every fiber of my being, that this is will empower magnificent success.
Good luck.

Occam's Razor
by Avinash Kaushik

3 Advanced Web Analytics Visitor Segments: Non-Flirts, Social, Long Tail

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The last blog post shared custom analytics reports that you can use to find amazing insights faster, enabling you to create a focused, truly data driven organization.
In this blog post I want to continue the let's help make your day-to-day life better path. I'll share three advanced segments that I personally find to be of value in the process of moving from data to actionable insights. I hope you'll download and use these segments, but more than that I hope you'll learn how to create delightful analytics segments with the options you have at your disposal.
I am an unabashed segmentation fan: Web Analytics Segmentation: Do Or Die!
Without segmentation our analysis is focused on unrecognizable blobs of traffic. Total Visits. Average Page Views Per Visitor. Overall Conversion Rate. Yada, yada, yada. Boring. Useless. Life wasting.
With segmentation we focus on groups of people and we focus behavior that has logical connections (everyone who used a particular keyword, group that came via Twitter, people who viewed a TV ad, visitors who saw more than 4 pages on our site etc., etc). That helps us understand data & performance better. It helps us get data-gasms, improve ROI for our web efforts and get our bosses promoted.
How can you not love that?
Below are examples of segments that help us make a lot more sense of all the data we have and the insights that await us. You'll be able to download these segments and import them into your Google Analytics accounts and start using them right away!
Additionally, as I often do, you'll learn lots about the types of delicious analyses you can do with these segments. For good measure there is also a tutorial on regular expressions at the end (no good analyst can live without regex!).
If you use Adobe's Site Catalyst or CoreMetrics or Yahoo! Web Analytics or WebTrends or. . . you'll have enough detail below to create a segment in 5 minutes in those tools as well. Trust me, it takes just 5 minutes and, like with Google Analytics, you won't need to update your JavaScript tags or have to do extra work with IT or buy other expensive versions of their products just to do segmentation.
Let's go. . . three awesome analytics data segments. . .
#1: Non-Flirts, Potential Lovers
Did I get your attention? :)
We all obsess with our bounced traffic because it seems nutty that the person you spent so much time and love attracting to your website bounced! They did not click to see another page. They did not hit play on the video on the landing page. They did not click on a link on your landing page to your corporate site. They just left.
Here's how that segment looks:

It is tempting to analyze these people. Where did they come from? What campaigns? What landing pages? Etc., etc.
You can find value, but to grow the business it is not prudent to focus on analyzing just the people who flirt with us.
Why not first analyze people who do engage with us?
At this point people switch to analyzing all the non-bounce traffic. This is how that segment looks (bottom right):

[The above is a standard segment in GA, just look under Default Segments.]
Better. Ignore the flirts. Focus on everyone else.
Unfortunately that is still a "blob." It includes anyone who just had two "hits" in their visit (hits is a technical term for a page view, event, custom variable, etc., etc., more than one hit = non bounce visit).
I want us to be a lot more deliberate.
Look at the Depth of Visit report (standard report in GA in the Visitors section). It shows the distribution of the pages people see on your site (not the "silly" metric, average page views per session).
The distribution will show you the "tipping point," the point at which a core group of people decide to stick with your site after overcoming their initial "fears" (and your perhaps sub optimal pages!).
Segment that.
To use a metaphor. . . look for people who made it with you to a third date. For many sites, but not all, that's people who have seen three pages. It might take 14 pages to buy, but if they stay to three they are giving you a chance. They might read 8 stories on your non-ecommerce content site, but you note that people who see three engage for a longer time.
Here's that segment:

So simple right?
These 7,610 Visits were ripe with promise. Some people ultimately ended up buying, others just gave you a chance and decided not to consummate.
Rather than focusing on the bounce traffic ("flirts") it is much much more interesting and valuable to initially focus on people who give you a chance.
Where did they come from? 
12.11% from Organic Search via Google. Enough? Not enough?
More questions for you to answer. . . .
What pages did they enter on? What campaigns have a higher percentage of these people? What countries? What keywords? What is the delta between content they consume on your site compared to everyone else?
Look at the row with % of Total. . .

Helps you find what they are interested in, right?
More questions to answer. . .
Do they all happen to use the comparison chart first? Do they all absolutely read the Sports section? What's so unique about them?
This an astoundingly simple segment to create. Yet analyzing visitor behavior for this segment helps you identify, and perhaps do more of the things you already know are working.
Do this first.
Here's how you can get this sweet and simple segment:

1. Log into Google Analytics.
2. Come back here.
3. Now click on this link: Non-flirt Potential Lovers Segment. It will open in GA.
4. Click on the Create Segment button to save it in your account.

If you want to share this report with others (say via Twitter / email) you can use this url: http://goo.gl/SuwKp
Have fun.
#2: Social Media, Baby!
Social media is all the rage. Suddenly Marketers have discovered that convincing people to buy their products/services or read their content or apply to university takes just two things:

A. 140 character missives sent frequently during the day extolling the glories of the company / newspaper / university
B. Creating a Facebook page, and then proceeding with the glory extolling

So easy. </ever so slight sarcasm>  : )
Our job is to hold the feet of these adventurous people to the warm accountability fire, right?
[Remember everything below is only if you use Twitter, Facebook et al for pimping. If you are participating in those media in the manner in which you are supposed to, conversation and adding value rather than pimping, then I encourage you to read my Social Media Analytics post to learn what the best metrics and tools are.]
The challenge in measuring social media impact on your business is two-fold.

1. Most content gets consumed in applications (think tweetdeck, my beloved twicca, mobile etc). They don't send referrers allowing us to tie to the source with our analytics tool (any tool, GA or Omniture or CoreMetrics).
2. Splitting out activity that we caused vs. activity that was caused by others.

My recommendation is, again, two-fold.
First, if you tweet / update / tumble links back to yourself then please for the sake of all that is holy in the world add campaign tracking parameters.
Here's the link I tweet:
http://goo.gl/myisj
It points here:
http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2010/12/best-downloadable-custom-web-analytics-reports.html?utm_source=social-media&utm_medium=twitterfb&utm_campaign=aktw
See the campaign (utm_) tracking parameters? Trackability, sweet, trackability!! Mobile, apps, html5 pages, bring it on. All visits tracked!
[If you use Site Catalyst or WebTrends or Yahoo! Web Analytics your campaign tracking parameters won't look like the above. Check with your vendor and tag appropriately.]
Second, split your social media value analysis into two different segments. Activity caused by you and activity on your site by all social media visits.

You drag over Source and input the Value you are using to tag your SM links, in my case the utm_source is imaginatively titled social-media.
This tracking mechanism (campaign tag) is used both on Twitter and Facebook links. I can, and often do, split out Twitter and Facebook separately by using a different value in the utm_medium value. I can further segment them separately if I want. For now I want to analyze them at a higher level together.
I did pimping. I got 2,486 Visits. So what?
Easy question to answer, go to your outcomes report and apply your newly minted segment:

Pretty darn pathetic, right?
Only one of the above goals is connected to a "hard" conversion (leads generated, Goal 2). The rest are "engagement" and videos played and other such goals.
Still pathetic, right?
Do you know how awesome, or not, social media efforts directly initiated by you are? It's not that hard. Go figure it out.
Oh and yes, you don't have to stop here. You can apply this segment to your amazing Page Efficiency Report, to your Visitor Loyalty and Recency reports, to your. . . well any report you have. That allows you to measure a broader view of the success of your social media efforts, rather than my effort to instantly put your feet in the fire! :)
Here's how you can get this social media segment:

1. Log into Google Analytics.
2. Come back here.
3. Now click on this link: My Social Media Traffic Segment. It will open in GA.
4. Click on the Create Segment button to save it in your account.

If you want to share this report with others (say via Twitter / email) you can use this url: http://goo.gl/fvuXP
Time to create our second, more expansive, social media segment.
As I had mentioned above, this time around we'll look at the social media to our website(s) from our efforts as well as that of all our friends / BFFs / haters.
Before you create this segment you should go checkout your All Traffic Sources report and see how your web analytics tool is capturing various channels people show up from. Based on that review of my site, here's the segment:

A quick explanation.
Values for twitter, facebook, sphinn, stumbleupon are there for people who use web based versions of these social media websites. I can add delicious, digg etc., etc., if I want to. They are simply not that important a source of traffic for me. See why the review of the All Traffic Sources report recommended above was important?
[Some people will obsess and create a ginormous catch-all segment. But remember, you don't need to understand data from the last 10 visitors to make smart decisions.]
The value for "social-media" is there to capture the social media campaigns tagged by me. See our first social media segment above. You'll use your own tracking values.
Value for awe.sm is because for a while I was using awe.sm to auto-tag all my links. There are some latent visits which should get flushed out of the system in the near future (as I have standardized on www.goo.gl and www.bit.ly).
That's *my* All Social Media Segment.
If you are thinking: "Good lord that is messy!"
Welcome to the world of social media tracking. It is messy-ever changing-and you should know that you are going to babysit this constantly. Sorry.  [Also see comment above about needing the last 10 visitors: you don't!]
But after you create the segment, awesomeness follows. . .  analysis!
Step one: Answer: "So What?"

Better, but honestly still pretty pathetic. Remember the goals are a mix of hard and soft conversions (see above)!
By now I am never surprised when I see the above result for Social Media efforts of most outcomes-driven pimping efforts via those channels.
Perhaps you are an exception. Now you know how to measure it!
As mentioned above Analysis Ninjas won't stop at just Outcomes analysis and will dig deeper to see if there is any value that this traffic is adding to our company. My personal favorite place to start is Visitor Loyalty analysis.
Ok so these people are not delivering any hard or soft conversions. Does their loyalty profile look any different?
Here, check it out (standard report in Google Analytics and other tools):

Hmm. . . a very different profile from other visitors to the site.
Other traffic to the site has much less loyalty than social media traffic. See the delta between 60.98% and 44.35% in the first two rows? Also see the much better, sweeter, distribution for Visitors who visit from 9-14 times through 26-50 times.
For this content website there is value in the social media efforts in that they are delivering an audience that tends to then be much more loyal than all other traffic that ends on their website.
Provable value! From social media!! I know!!! :)
A couple more ideas for our Ninjas to dig deeper, and types of analysis they could do to determine other types of value.
It is trivial to measure the base metrics for your website for your Social Media segment. Visits, Pages/Visit, Average Time on Site, % New Visits, Bounce Rates, Conversion Rates. . . . and so on and so forth. . .

You can quickly see at an aggregate level, or a detailed level, if your social media are delivering on the promise outlined by your $150,000 Social Media Consultant.
Here's another bit of analysis that can be useful for certain types of websites.
Say you have a real estate website, or you are responsible for craigslist.com. Both sites are primarily internal site search driven. People come to the site, search, find what they want, do business.
Take your newly beloved Social Media segment and apply it to your delightfully sweet pre-configured Internal Site Search reports. [Left nav -> Content -> Site Search]
Here's what you'll see. . .

You'll be able to analyze if people who come to your site from your Social Media campaigns engage with your site more or less (Total Unique Searches per Visitor). Do they exit from the internal site search results faster or slower (% Search Exits)? Do they have a harder time or an easier time finding the right result (Results Pageviews/Search and % Search Refinements)? And other such analysis.
You don't have to just report clicks and visits from social media. In our real estate website we got to the root of what's a deeper engagement (searching) and we got down to measuring real value (or lack thereof).
Ready to do some real social media ROI analysis?
Here's how you can get the all social media traffic segment:

1. Log into Google Analytics.
2. Come back here.
3. Now click on this link: All Social Media Visits Segment. It will open in GA.
4. Click on the Create Segment button to save it in your account.

If you want to share this report with others (say via Twitter / email) you can use this url: http://goo.gl/YnJON
Good luck!
#3: Search Queries With Multiple Keywords [3, 4, 5, 10, 20]
On this blog and in my keynotes I have bemoaned the obsession Marketers have with brand keywords and their sub optimal strategy of optimizing for keywords, rather than key phrases.
I am a search long tail lover. It is the way to happiness (and finding relevant users!). Hence our first segment focuses on helping you understand the balance between keywords and key phrases in the queries used by Visitors from search engines.
It is not actually a "segment," it is more like using advanced segmentation as a reporting engine in a way you can only do in Google Analytics!
My strategy is simple. Use a regular expression to get GA to segment search queries into various "words this query contains" buckets. Here's what it looks like:

"Magical" part: ^\s*[^\s]+(\s+[^\s]+){2}\s*$
Not that magical actually, just a humble regular expression. It is looking for the number of words in a query (in this case queries visitors typed into Google or Bing or Baidu that contained three words). The second regex counts visits with four word search queries.
[A quick note of thanks to Nick Mihailovski for helping me come up with the perfect regular expression. I was using ^\w*\s\w*\s\w*$. It was good but would not have caught some variations and it would not work for queries in non-English character languages.]
Ok back to using advanced segmentation as a long tail search report.
The final segment I have created, using the method above, has more "or" conditions that contain buckets for counting search queries with 3, 4, 5, 10, 20 and 20+ words. You can of course create any buckets you like; these were ones I find initially interesting.
When you click the Test Segment button (top right) you get this gratifying view (cropped to a small size):

Delightful right? It really is.
You get such an immediate sense of the long tail in a way that is hard otherwise in the mass of queries from search engines.
521 Visits from people who typed more than 10 words into Google/Bing! There were 36 visits by people using 20 words in their search query! And 237 people typed in more than 20+ words as their search query!
OMG!
Is your search engine optimization and paid search strategy accommodating for this type of behavior? You still bidding on a word or two?
While the above is not even your complete search universe view, it is a very simple and straightforward way to appreciate how long your search tail is.
And notice you did not even look at a report. You could do all of the above in the advanced segmentation view!
You likely want other buckets than 3, 4, 5, 10 , 20. No problem. Just download the segment below and make the appropriate changes and bam!
Here's how you can get this search long tail segmentation reporting:

1. Log into Google Analytics.
2. Come back here.
3. Now click on this link: Search Query Length Segment. It will open in GA.
4. Click on the Create Segment button to save it in your account.

If you want to share this report with others (say via Twitter / email) you can use this url: http://goo.gl/v3KbM
Being the Ninja that you are I am sure your thirst of knowledge is not satiated.
Now you are probably wondering how the bounce rate looks for one segment of the long tail traffic (lower usually) or how the conversion rate looks (higher usually) or how many pages do they see (more engagement usually) etc., etc.
The above segment won't help you with that. But all you have to do is create the segment you want.
For example here's the segment for people who see four words exactly:

Save the segment, here it is: Visits via Search Queries containing 4 words.
Now apply it to your favorite search report and hello sweet, sweet delicious data!

You know the search queries, you know how many people came and you know their performance ("engagement" or conversions or downloads or leads etc., etc).
Furthermore, you can also segment this data by Paid Search and Organic Search, or Google vs. Bing and start to do very focused analysis that should fundamentally improve your search marketing program.
You can also take another slice at segmenting your search head, mid, and tail. For example you can easily create a segment for Visitors who came to your site via search queries that had more than four words in the query.
Here's that segment: Visits via Search Queries with more than 4 words.
Now go apply it to your search engine or organic search or paid search or goals reports and do really valuable analysis that will earn you the eternal love and adoration of your peers and superiors!
[SIDEBAR]
In case you wanted to do something more sophisticated beyond what's outlined above here are a quick set of instructions, and a tutorial on using regex.
If you want to create a segment for search queries that contain just one word use this regular expression in your advanced segment:
^\s*[^\s]+\s*$
If you want Visits with two words in Google search queries use this:
^\s*[^\s]+\s+[^\s]+\s*$
or
^\s*[^\s]+(\s+[^\s]+){1}\s*$
If you want to identify Visits by people who use three words in their search queries:
^\s*[^\s]+(\s+[^\s]+){2}\s*$
Now you can keep adding to the number in parenthesis and do a happy dance.
Some more cute things.
If you want to query for more than x words, say more than three words use this:
^\s*[^\s]+(\s+[^\s]+){2,}\s*$
Did you see the comma after the number two above? Good.
If you want to identify all search queries where visitors to your site typed 2 or 3 words into the search engine, use this regular expression:
^\s*[^\s]+(\s+[^\s]+){1,2}\s*$
Fun eh?
So what the heck are all those characters in these regular expressions doing? Glad you asked.  Let's consider the regular expression we used to identify 2 word search queries.
The expression is (identified above): ^\s*[^\s]+\s+[^\s]+\s*$
Here's an explanation (as best as I can express in lay terms). . .
^          start at the beginning of the line
\s*        match zero or more white space characters
[^\s]+   match at least one or more non-white space character
\s+       match at least one or more white space character
[^\s]+   match at least one or more non-white space character
\s*        match zero or more white space characters
$          end of string
I hope all this "magic" makes a lot more sense.
[/SIDEBAR]
Isn't advanced segmentation cool? And to think you did all this with your standard javascript tag, all on the fly (including historical data analysis) and without having to buy extensive expensive add-ons!
Ok it's your turn now.
What are your absolutely dearest advanced segments? What's the coolest thing you have done with the advanced segmentation capability in your web analytics tool? Care to share some of your favorites? Perhaps a downloadable link?
It would be incredible to have your wisdom help all of us. Please participate.
Thanks.

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