Today I am going to talk about something that plagues companies and consultants everywhere--half baked analysis. It's something we've all done at some point, and something a lot of us still do on a regular basis. It's unfortunate because as online marketers we all understand the power of good data mining, but time and time again we revert to generic inquiry, at best, and default report templates.
Disclaimer: Origionally I attempted to write about the five steps I follow for solid data analysis in one post, but as I approached my 6th page of content, I realized it may be best to break up into a series.
Alas, this will be the first of three posts, tackling a five-step process toward good data analysis. The three topics are:
- Asking the Right Questions
- Identifying What is Going Wrong
- Turning Data Into Action
Yup that's right...cancel that afternoon meeting because you my friend are going to be stoked about data analysis in 3...2..1...
Rethinking the Questions
A few weeks ago at our SEOmoz PRO Seminar I spoke on "Analyzing What Matters & Ignoring the Rest" and I challenged the attendees to rethink the questions that guide their data research. Too often we get caught up in asking questions that simply put-- don't really matter. Let me explain. It will always be important to know things like "How much has traffic increased" and "What referrers are performing better this month," but this sort of inquiry does not qualify as marketing analysis.
Sure it's valuable to report that to your clients or boss, but as an analyst you are tasked with much more. You are tasked with finding things others can't. You are expected to dive into the data head first and find issues before they become huge problems. You are also responsible for finding opportunities a.k.a. the "game changer" for your company...that is your job. If you don't like the way that sounds, please stop calling yourself an analyst. You are stressing me out.
So what questions should you be asking? Bigger ones to start.
I know they sound uber-top level, but don't roll your eyes just yet. I challenge each of you to write these out and really think about the answers. I think you'll be surprised with what you come (or can't come) up with. I'm going to apply this to SEOmoz as an example.
An outsider would look at our site and say we are -
- Trying to sell PRO memberships
- An increase or decrease in completed goals would show us if we are being successful
- Losing traffic to our sign-up page, and a lower traffic count would be detrimental to our success
Well that is great, but honestly SEOmoz can't succeed solely on increasing PRO memberships. The truth is, there is a lot more to it than that. We have a recognized brand with expectations on it, and a community of over 200,000 people that come to us for the latest SEO information on the web. We can't afford to lose ground on either of those two. These are defining qualities of SEOmoz, and strong advantages over our competitors. So my three questions would leave me more complex answers, something like this:
- Increase organic traffic on "Learn SEO" type queries, increase branded term searches, increase YOUmoz member engagement, and increase signups
- More referrals from links to our resources, more traffic from people researching SEO, more YOUmoz submissions, more comments, improved engagement metrics on site, higher sign up attempts, higher signup completions, etc.
- Decline in branded term searches, decline in organic traffic to resource pages, decline in time on site for YOUmoz members, etc.
So now what? You are left with a handful of metrics to investigate. Those metrics should be the base of your analysis efforts. I urge all of you to revisit the reasons why you analyze what you analyze, you'll be surprised to learn that you don't really have a good reason most of the time. After you have your new questions nailed down and you know what metrics you want to analyze, it's time to jump in the data.
Start Macro and Go Micro
This is when I highly suggest you fill your coffee cup, or grab another Red Bull. I also support locking your office door, or putting up a "Do Not Disturb, I am Data Mining You Silly Non-Analyst" sign up on your cubicle. Okay anyway...so the main roadmap to solid analysis includes five steps and they are:
*Please note that Analyze, Value, and Action will be covered in upcoming posts in this series.
What Do We Mean by Macro Analysis?
Macro analysis means you have a solid understanding of the different sections of your site, the different user types that navigate it, and the top-level metrics. You should know these like the back of your hand. In addition to knowing these actual numbers you should know their rate of change (how often does that data point change), the depth of change (how extreme are those changes--big jumps? small steps?), and the way they interact (is there a consistent relationship between two metrics--one goes up/down, the other will too). If this sounds like a lot to continuously track, you are right. Good analysis is a lot of work. Thankfully SEOmoz pays me in cupcakes, and Champagne Wednesdays, I highly suggest negotiating for these perks ;)
At SEOmoz we track our top sections by week, so we can easily identify shifts in the data, and it looks something like this:
(A portion of our weekly analysis for full site stats)
You can see we aren't just looking at our homepage, we are looking at our subdomains, our highest trafficked sections. We also are going beyond visitors, we are pulling top-level stats like pages/visit, time on site, bounce rates, etc. This graph goes around to the entire company once a week. This macro level view helps all of us understand the momentum of our site's growth. It helps us easily isolate problem areas so we can address them before they grow into huge "Oh sh*t" moments. Trust me when I say, if you aren't tracking your data at this macro level, you should start today.
What Do We Mean by Micro Analysis?
This part of the puzzle is the one that most people skip over. Micro analysis means you don't just have a sense how your blog's traffic is doing you know how many comments you get on it, how long they spend on it, how deep they go into your site after reading a post, and how many of your blog visitors end up converting for you. In short, micro analysis means you look at all those secondary data points that you can actually manipulate.
While it's great to go into work on a Monday and say I want to increase traffic to my blog by 20%, it is a big feat to accomplish. Not only will it take a lot of time conceptualizing, writing and sharing that content, it will also, most likely, be less lucrative than if you took the existing traffic and increased its conversion rate by 5%. That sort of move is done by honing in on data at a micro analysis level.
Specifically this is where things like event tracking in Google Analytics and deeper dives into your preferred analytics package come in handy. Everyone has their own approach for micro analysis, but I think a good place to start is see where successful events (downloads, subscriptions, sign-ups, conversions, etc.) are taking place and see if you can come up with common demoninators. If you see that successful pages all have one or more thing in common, you can start testing these on other sections to increase conversions across your whole site. Here is an example of what we pull for SEOmoz:
(A portion of our micro tool usage analysis report)
We can see which tools are performing the best, and analyze those pages to see if we can isolate out page tweaks to roll out across all tool pages. It seems simple, but way too often analysts look into analytics to see how they are doing, and fail to put in the time required to uncover what they could be doing for increased success. You should know, for every single section and user type on your site, what makes it "successful." You need to be tracking these "successes" as closely as you would your visitor count.
Well this post got a little long, but I really wanted to give you guys some real examples on how I approach data analysis both at the macro and micro level. Hopefully, you can take some of this and apply it right away. I know we all have our own unique approach to analysis, and I'd love to hear yours in the comments below!
Next post I will be talking about the "analyze" step of a solid analysis strategy. That post will hone in on quick ways to figure out what is going wrong. I will talk about some GA features that you can use to make your analysis more effective and less time consuming. So stay tuned!
Nail - > Head
Very clever Carter ;-)
If you ask me about the metrics that could identify whether i am succedding or failing then it is going to be conversions. I have setup macro conversions (like orders, sales etc) and micro conversions (like signups, tweets, pageviews, pages/visit etc) for my sites. I monitor these conversions through my custom report which is often armed with one or two advanced segments. I love visualizing data, so use lot of motion charts and graphs. For e.g. just by plotting the history of data points like source/medium on motion charts, i can see which source/medium is showing decline in traffic and revenue. My focus is generally on trends rather than the actual numbers. So graphs and charts work well for me.
sounds like you have the right things going. I love motion graphs. Basically anything that can rewire my brain to see the data uniquely is a worthy endeavor in my mind :)
That was a great explanation of how you dig into your analytics. That is essentially what I am doing right now, although I can see it might be valuable to have a few more columns of data to input. We have our daily view of Total visits, Google organic, PPC visits. how many leads we generated, and how many sales. Then that data gets moved to our monthly chart to see year over year.
I haven't started event tracking in Analytics though, I really need to go off and figure out how to do that. With this new company, I just got their Goals set up on all of their lead forms, tracking, and imported into AdWords so that was pretty huge for them. :)
Hey Kristi! I'll make sure to do a post on event tracking soon enough. We are actually revamping a lot of that stuff internally. We are making the switch from VPV tracking to event tracking, so I bet we will have some case studies to share soon enough! :)
Hi Joanna,
Great post! A current project of mine has been tracking backlink data via Open Site Explorer and GWT for quite awhile, however we're looking to add an Excel tab focused on macro traffic and Analytics style data. I'd love to see a future post regarding the macro spreadsheet you screenshotted. Not the data, of course, I'd be mostly interested in the headers of each column (and possibly why you include them for the less obvious columns).
Thanks!
Oh I like that idea, Ill put it on the list of things to tackle in an upcoming post :)
Great post!
Sometimes, new analysts have a whole lot of difficulty avoiding analysis paralysis. There is so much information available that it can be very difficult to decide upon a course of action. Consequently, I am a huge fan of following the TOWS methodology when I am starting a new project. (To those of you unfamiliar with TOWS, it is ultimately a SWOT analysis on steroids)
Nothing focuses me more than taking solid information, plotting out strengths/weakness/opportunities/threats and then figuring out strategies based upon those.
Hello,
Thanks for this first shot of a long serie.
I only have one question, but you will probably answer it in the next post :
In the macro analysis, you introduce bounce rate.
How can you turn this data into actions ?
Cheers,
Alex
Great post and a few questions.
Do you manually calculate your rates of change? Also, is this data on your spreadsheet somewhere for everyone in the company to be able to see at a quick glance?
I find reporting is very important yet often very time consuming to produce something good.
Thanks for the post; look forward to the next.
Hey Joanna,
Excellent overview! I totally agree, its definitely a lot of work data mining through analytics. I would say that in the real world, a macro view of the site is almost completely irrelevant. It’s nice to see overall statistics, but isn't the micro analysis what makes all the difference?
One of my favorite things to track is the users' path through the site. What page did they come in on, and what pages did they go to, and did they interact with any of the CTA's along the way? That's really the cool part of the job, being able to create and test to fix issues and re-analyze the results.
[sigh] Just once I would like to be able to read an SEOmoz post, smiling to myself at how similar the author and I are and how nice it is that I've been doing what they advocate all along.
But alas Joanne, once again as I'm reading one of your posts I find myself muttering "Snap! I haven't been doing this right at all!" And I add yet another "to do" to my workload. It's a kinda sorta love/hate relationship I find myself in with SEOmoz that keeps me continually coming back for more I guess. [/sigh]
But enough of my pathetic whining. Your post had some great insights, but my favorite was "You are also responsible for finding opportunities a.k.a. the "game changer" for your company...that is your job. If you don't like the way that sounds, please stop calling yourself an analyst."
As to the champagne Wednesday and cupcakes, you should totally have added those as perks to your latest candidate search for the marketing position. There's no telling what talent you would have attracted.
If they would offer a free supply of Skittles, I would have no other choice than to apply and move out there!
The UBC Web Analytics certificate definitely changed my perspective about things even coming from a strong business background. If you're considering being an analyst check out the Web Analytics Asssociation at https://www.webanalyticsassociation.org/
Oh what a great post! I don't know how many times I hear people say, "I don't rank well. I need to try tactic x" without even so much as looking at one metric. To many, SEO is a giant game of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey. It's one thing to tell people what to look for, it's another thing entirely to provide a mental framework for improvement. Good stuff!
You are spot on! We talk about this a lot in house as we build out the tools. Hopefully as we roll out GA integration we will have some unique features that make the combining of good SEO data and action a lot more obvious and less time consuming. We will be rolling out some stuff for this in the next month or so...eeeeek! I cant wait :)
Thanks for a much needed kick in the butt on analytics. I believe you are right that everyone gets lazy on analytics from time to time. You've inspired me to do some analytics work today.
To your points on choosing metrics, I often push back on people asking for tons of silly data by asking, "If you knew the answer to that question, what would you change and what would you do differently." You'd be surprised how often the answer is, "I wouldn't change anything, I just want to know." I love the 5-step chain, I think it's spot on. The only change I would make is to put the "action" button in 300px font. The only thing worse than being lazy on analytics is actually doing the work and then not applying the results which seems to happen a lot.
I'm looking forward to part 2.
Great post!! Just at the right time for me...rolled out a major redesign our main site and need to keep an on the analysis to ensure we have made the design decisions.
Great post! Looking forward to Part 2! :)
Great post, Joanna. I expect even greater series. :)
I like those case studies, espetially when they are related to SEO sites.
It's good to know why more traffic doesn't mean more conversion and as you say, it's better to upgrade the conversion rate with the same traffic than just building traffic.
Great post! Thanks for giving us more insight in your analysis process.
Great post Joanna. Your mention of Macro/Micro conversions made me think of Avinash's post Win With Web Metrics: Ensure A Clear Line Of Sight To Net Income! where the case is made (as you do) that we need to be reporting on goals/actions that make an impact to the bottom line.
Thanks for bringing some additional clarity to an often murky subject.
Really enjoyed this piece. Thank you. Feel that a self-reflective tone goes a long way in any industry and the only way to differentiate oneself in an increasingly saturated market for one's services is by constant improvement which necessitates constant self reflection and questioning.
Hey Joanna,
I love the overview, this is very helpful for me! However, the images appear broken now and unfortunately the content in them was referred to a lot. Is there anyway you could replace them?
Great post, quite similar to Avinash's chapter 5 in Web 2.0 - The Key to Glory: Measuring Success. These are often overlooked essentials.
Great stuff, though why didn't you link to part 2?
I'am going straight to part ii
Nice post Joanna, looking forward to Part 2 :)
Good analysis... Thanx.
Thanks for this series already. Anything that fuels a "real" data mining process is exactly what we need over here. I really appreciate these kinds of posts.
Also there was mention of "cupcakes & champagne" on Wednesday. Is there a good way to approach getting in on that?
Glad you are finding it useful!
As for champagne and cupcakes, I believe Danny started that tradition by bringing in champagne one Wednesday and then "suggesting" it become a weekly event. #smartcat
Yeah, super handy.
Maybe one Wednesday I'll just throw caution to the wind and try it out, see if it catches on.
Great post. I am trying to improve my site analysis skills at the moment so it's quite timely. In an industry so results driven it's important to remember that it's worth the time and effort to sit down and think!
Great series! By the way: Some display errors with ie9: Text missing
Excellent post Joanna! As a new analyst, I've been a little overwhelmed with all of the data available. This post has really helped me to re-think and focus my efforts.
Really looking forward to part II. Thanks for sharing!
Quick question: how do you automate your data mining?
Does anyone have best practices to quickly include new data in your spreadsheet?
Hey there! I actually pull this manually. It does take like 20 minutes every Monday morning, but I love having a personal touch on the data. Other community members might have found a way to balance that with automation though, so hopefully they offer suggestions here as well!
I rather enjoy your Macro analysis chart. Mind if i borrow it?
Great post, I am looking forward to the next one.
Hi Joanna you just have let me realize I have the same approach, just that I have been doing kind of a mixed approach and did not differentiate between Macro and Micro. Now I have a better way of doing it.
My initial approach is always: What needs to be done to have a higher impact initially...
Also it was very nice to meet you at seomoz pro seminar. Have you forgotten about me? if you know what I mean... Please check your emails...
This is the type of posts I expect at this point in my career, kind of like SEO Analyst type... Thanks Joanna.
Can´t wait to read the next 2.
Gustavo.
Great post, I rarely print out an article, sit down and have a read through it all but did with this one. Will be sharing it around.
I also take the Macro --> Micro approach with my websites/clients.
That said, this post (the "Big questions") actually helped me realize I was missing a very important part of the Macro analysis for a project I just started, so thanks Joanna! :)
Well this comment just made my day :) I am gonna head home and call today a success! ;) Best of luck on the new client!
Thank you so much for sharing these great information on analyzing data. I enjoy reading your post, and looking forward to the next one, especially when you mentioned that there will be some GA tips.