Imagine you have a great product and have launched its website with a lot of fanfare. The publicity surrounding the launch might help drive the product’s initial performance, However, as time passes, you’ll need to keep on innovating to ensure that the product does not become obsolete.
However, there is also the aspect of considering the data outlook of your product -
What is the general profile of your customers?
Where are they coming from?
What is the customer journey for your site?
Are they using desktops or mobiles?
Is your website getting popular?
Do you need a mobile app to increase your customer base?
How likely are your users to come back to your product site?
Which content is popular on your website?
Which are your areas of improvement?
Tracking of your Key Performance Indicators(KPI) and Metrics
For all these types of questions and more, having a Data Analytics Solution in place right from the time you start working on your product is crucial for sustained performance, longevity and benefiting your customers. This blog will focus on the importance of Data Analytics in the current context.
Here, we shall go into the various facets that Data Analytics encompasses thereby adding value to your product and your customers( both existing and prospective).
To start with, your potential customers in today’s world have a lot of choice in terms of looking for products online. They interact online in multiple ways.
The Customer Journey can be across devices as well. For example, on her/his way to the office, this prospective customer can visit your site on the mobile and decide to explore it further later. In the evening, once she/he is back home, she/he can then check it on her/his home desktop. Analytics solutions can capture these sorts of scenarios and help trace out the customer journeys across various devices to give you valuable insights. These insights can help you to make your strategy more versatile to consider users using both mobiles and desktops.
The next step would be to analyze the User Acquisition Flows and channels. This will give you information about the sources of the traffic to your site.
There are many ways users can reach your site. The most common way is usually through search engines like Google, Bing etc,. This is called Organic Search. Organic Search is one of the best ways to get traffic to your site and the best part is that it is free!
In order to be visible on the internet, your site needs to have its SEO(Search Engine Optimization) done right. SEO aspects have to be managed for the various search engines.
Anyway, as you all know, Google is the runaway leader(92.21%) in this realm. So, if you have your SEO aspects done for Google Search, you will be good.
Here, you have to ensure that when people search for your product or site, it has to be listed at the top of the search results. SEO is a massive topic in itself and it will require a separate blog to cover its intricacies. So here, the main point is that your site needs to be satisfactorily compliant with SEO best practices in order to be prominently displayed in the search results.
Organic Search is the highest source of traffic for most cases. Your acquisition analytics will show your organic traffic patterns. If there is a drop in the organic traffic to your site. It would mean that you have to take corrective action on the SEO aspects.
Other traffic sources are Paid Search, Organic Social, Referrals, Ads(Display, Search, YouTube and so on.) etc. Data from these channels will help you identify where you need to focus so that traffic to your site can be increased.
A sample traffic distribution graphical is shown here for your reference:-
This can be further analyzed based on user parameters like countries, cities etc. If you are targeting a country, then states, cities can be your focus areas to attract customers. Analytics will show which cities, towns have your maximum user base and minimum user base. Using this data, you can strengthen your hold in these areas and device strategies to improve your presence in the low customer base areas.
Other user attributes like device, platform, gender and interests are captured by Data Analytics. You can take this data to create the user experience and thus improve conversion rates and engagement as well. You can introduce campaigns targeting users depending on their interests for example.
Moreover, Data Analytics will give you information on the user device - are users mainly coming through desktops or users are from mobiles - based on that, you can determine your acquisition and user retention strategy. For example, if you notice a trend that your mobile user base is increasing over a period of time, then you need to have your mobile site more tuned to such users - For questions like - Will making a mobile app provide more user value? - Analytics will give you insights to come up with answers to such questions.
Browser use is also a major factor - you need to ensure that your site works fine across all the browsers that are most used by your prospective customers. For example, users in Apple devices will mostly have Safari as the browser while Chrome will be the prominent browser for users of desktops or mobile devices with Android. So, at a bare minimum, your site should work perfectly in Chrome and Safari since this will cover a majority of your user traffic.
Once you have the Customer Acquisition Channels and Customer Journeys mapped out, the next step in this will be to see where you can make the maximum impact benefiting your customers.
Analytics will give you details like which pages your customers mostly view when they visit your site. With this information, you can list out the pages with the highest hits. For these pages, make sure that you provide a personalized user experience for the folks landing on these pages thereby increasing engagement and the chances of these users coming back again.
Similarly, for those pages with lower user hits, you can design a better UX and add personalized elements to make it engaging for the users.
User Engagement Analytics provides you data on where the users spent the most time and where they spent the least time. Taking these insights, you can change these pages to improve the customer experience thereby positively impacting the engagement metrics.
Analytics gives you the events that your users are triggering. Typically, the events of interest are the conversion events. You can take the necessary action based on the increase or decrease of the conversion and other crucial events.
Analytics shows the various touchpoints of customers who ultimately are converted - i.e. they invoke the conversion events in your site. This will let you know the high value conversion points and the low ones and help you take the necessary action to improve user conversion.
A very vital set of Engagement Metrics are the DAU(Daily Active Users), WAU(Weekly Active Users), MAU(Monthly Active Users) - these give you a good idea about how your user engagement initiatives are faring.
You can also see user engagements based on user funnels and user cohorts and plan accordingly. On the other hand, analysis of user paths can potentially help unearth user looping - which would indicate that the users are getting stuck somewhere when accessing the contents in your site. This can help you make the user journey far more smoother.
You can further define user segments and provide each segment a far more user friendly and contextual experience using segment based Data Analytics.
Suppose you ran a promotion campaign, you need to be able to see how effective it was. Using analytics, you can check how your campaign fared. Monetization Pointers like which items gave the most revenue, which drove the most orders, how many new users were part of the order conversion vs how many existing customers etc will give you a wealth of information that you can use to improve revenues.
Similarly, performances of ads can also be tracked using analytics giving you the insights on whether your ad spend is giving you the desired outcome. The performance of any video ads, search ads or display ads that you have for your site can be analyzed for performance with respect to attracting conversions and traffic. Revenue related information like revenue per user, LTV etc are available through analytics.
To summarize, a Data Analytics solution will require 3 high level areas to be covered -
Generate the events for Data Analytics
Capture these events and process them to provide valuable insights and
Provide a Data Visualization system in place that will allow you to easily understand the data generated as well as create custom reports, graphs, charts etc on the fly.
In the current market, Data Analytics plays a very crucial part. As you have read in this blog, analytics gives vital insights into every aspect of the customer journey, customer demographics, customer acquisition, customer retention as well as monetization. For any business, by harnessing the possibilities and power of Data Analytics, businesses can unlock valuable insights that can get them going smoothly on the path of sustainable growth and success
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