Viewsy aims to revolutionise in-store analytics the way that Google Analytics has transformed web analytics.

Viewsy, despite its small size has already been recognised by IBM as a business to watch, by picking up one of IBM’s Smart Camp awards.

With many of our clients operating both online and in-stores, we were keen to find out from Odera what his technology can do for store retailers.

AWA: How does the technology work and how reliable is it?

Odera: Our sensor technology works by listening to ambient phone signals to determine customer behaviour and movement around commercial spaces — for example at retail locations or at events. Our analytics engine builds statistics on the back of the raw location data.

Like all analytics technologies, Viewsy sensors capture a sample of the total customer population: this capture rate can vary from 15% to 90% (depending on the environment), but is often around 50-60%.

AWA: How did you get the idea and what made you want to go into the analytics business?

Odera: It came about from my time at Groupon. I saw the demand from customers for accurate information on customer behaviour after a deal and saw the need through this for our solution.

Retailers would ask ‘how do I know I haven’t just given an 80% discount to already loyal customers’. Or they would ask ‘how do I know a person will come back after a deal is offered?’.

Clients had no data on the effect of discounts on their long-term business — did incentivizing customers drive loyal behaviour, did it change the make-up of the customers, how effective were discounts on bringing new customers in the door?

Analytics is a science of knowledge and insight. We have seen the impact of analytics most clearly in the online world, whether at Amazon’s e-commerce platform or Google’s product suite. The incredible growth of the tech economy – both in terms of what company’s build and how they run their businesses – is built on analytics. Now we want to bring the analytics revolution offline.

AWA: How likely is that the technology becomes mainstream?

Odera: There is no question that the structures and methods that currently exist online will be bridged into the offline world. This is already happening – whether you look at location services like FourSquare, in media content platforms, or the many offline markets being brought into ecommerce.

The question is what precisely this infrastructure will look like. Our current play is in WiFi technology — we believe that WiFi technology offers high-levels of precision and identification (versus GPRS or GSM), but is also passive and frictionless (versus NFC).

AWA: What are the main benefits to retailers?

Odera: We enable retailers to finally understand the patterns of customer behaviour offline. Viewsy provides the missing link in omnichannel marketing.

Retailers can follow foot-traffic through the store, understand how long visitors spend shopping and where in their store, understand dynamics between different stores in their business, and manage information on customer satisfaction in-store.

They can tie this information to events, campaigns, or promotions they are running. Retailers can expect real-time information on queuing lines, browsing time, and abandonment rate. They can set benchmarks to improve performance and measure impact of business changes – in operations, marketing, or store management.

Retailers can now manage their real loyalty rate. They may already have a loyalty scheme, but with Viewsy they can passively measure loyalty regardless of whether the customer has opted-in to a loyalty scheme and regardless of whether they make any purchases.

Conversion metrics become more advanced with Viewsy. Determine the conversion of passing foot traffic to in-store visits, the proportion of customers who are engaged, or even calculate traditional conversion statistics by department.

The Viewsy platform is extremely versatile, with a wide-range of applications in different verticals and departments. We work closely with all of our clients to identify their business value drivers and support them in building metrics and performance targets on the back of Viewsy location data.

AWA: What are you currently working on and do you have any success stories that you can share?

Odera: Viewsy was recently installed across a large retail estate, where the technology was used to identify a 57% relationship between dwell time and loyalty behaviour. This enabled the retailer to increase revenue by over 10% through optimisation of dwell times in store.

We are currently working with a large events operator who has already used our platform to increase advertising revenue by over 15%. We have recently agreed a deal to help a global fashion brand understand the ROI from their offline marketing.

AWA: Thanks for your time, Odera

Odera: You’re welcome.

Please leave a comment and let us know how you think the Viewsy platform could help your business.

So here to help you we have pulled together our own top 10 list of useful CRO lists that we have found on the web over the last 12 months or so.

So.. in my best DJ voice .. here’s the top 10 countdown in reverse order:

In at 10: Tag Management Tools

Tag management has been one of the most discussed topics of the last 12 months particularly with the launch of Google Tag Manager in October 2012. Our friends at Econsultancy have pulled together a useful report which reviews the leading Tag Management tools and provides a guide to what to look out for when purchasing a paid-for solution. E-consultancy charge for this report, but they are always good value.

http://econsultancy.com/uk/reports/tag-management-buyers-guide

9. Data Visualisation

Data is the lifeblood of what we do, but sometimes the CRO and analytics industry becomes overly excited with the tools capturing that data and not about the insights and stories we find in the data. We believe the industry needs to become much better at telling compelling stories that brings contextual meaning to the data we are analysing.

One of the skills that an analyst should be developing in their armoury to improve their story telling is data visualisation. Net magazine has written a very useful review of the major data visualization tools currently available.

http://www.netmagazine.com/features/top-20-data-visualisation-tools

8. Top CRO blogs

The best tool available to a CRO specialist is not their analytics or testing tools. It’s their brain. Sometimes it’s useful to tap into other brains to get a different perspective. The list below details some of the best CRO practitioners who regularly blog about their work.

http://blog.rejoiner.com/2012/03/12-killer-blogs-for-conversion-rate-optimization/

7. Speed testing tools

There is overwhelming evidence that the speed of a page download can have a fundamental impact on the financial success of an online business. The link below details a plethora of tools available to test the speed of a website. Without doubt one of these tools needs to become a core part of your analytics/CRO toolset if it isn’t already.

http://sixrevisions.com/tools/free-website-speed-testing/

6.  Ten ‘must own’ CRO Books

Although we love the internet and digital tools we are not afraid to go “old skool” with our next list. We’ve pulled together our own list of 10 books we believe every CRO professional should read. I’m not exaggerating when I say I consult one of these books at least every week to check something or look for some fresh thinking.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/lm/R3F7WU39S3RHEF

5. Google Analytics tips list

Whether you are a friend of Google or not, one thing you will have to accept is that Google Analytics is the standard web analytics tool .

With its ever-expanding list of features, Google Analytics is steadily becoming an enterprise clickstream analytics tool. If you are not familiar with GA it’s time you should be. Kissmetrics have pulled together a bumper collection of GA resources.

http://blog.kissmetrics.com/50-resources-for-getting-the-most-out-of-google-analytics/

4. Econsultancy CRO report

Back to our friends at Econsultancy they have produced a fantastic report all to do with Conversion Rate Optimisation. The focus in this list is less about tools and more about the techniques used and the types of tests currently being considered by UK businesses.

http://econsultancy.com/uk/reports/conversion-rate-optimization-report

3. The online marketer’s toolbox

Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg are pioneers in CRO and online marketing. In late 2011 they created a site specifically reviewing a cross section of online marketing tools (including CRO Tools). Although the reviews date back to February 2012 it’s still a very useful site:

http://www.websitetestingtools.com

2. MVT tools and guides

If you are new to testing this list is for you. This has a great set of introduction guides to CRO and A/B testing, case studies, links to all the major tool providers and guides and tutorials.

http://www.seoptimise.com/blog/2010/07/30-multivariate-ab-split-testing-tools-tutorials-resources.html

And at No.1 … Craig Sullivan’s CRO slidedeck

If you could only have access to one of the lists in this top 10 it has to be this one. Craig Sullivan is one of the leading lights in CRO in the UK today. We had the privilege of watching Craig present his CRO slidedeck at the latest MeasureCamp in London earlier this year. This slidedeck really is a treasure trove of information about all the CRO tools you would possibly want to use. Craig regularly updates this slidedeck when new tools enter the marketplace so there are no worries about it being up to date.

http://www.slideshare.net/sullivac/measure-camp-tools-of-the-cro-rabble

• Hunter / warrior competitiveness
• A need to be liked and / or be successful
• A desire to be on the right / winning team

These emotions are the very ones that marketeers want to tap into because they will often override rational buying behaviour.

These are the emotional buttons you need to press to speed up your decision-making process on your website. Creating a sense of urgency in the mind of the consumer is a proven approach to boosting conversion rates. The specific techniques include:

• Limited sales period
• Only X left in stock
• If you order in the next X minutes / hours you can have it tomorrow

What these approaches have in common is that they play on the fear that consumers have of missing out on opportunities  - particularly those they perceive to be of financial or rarity value. Our innate competitiveness means we are compelled to consider such an offer simply because we know that someone else will.

Equally,  consumers love the feeling of having successfully bought a product or service under a limited promotion or offer. Most people like being a “winner”. We’ve found 10 great examples of how sites create a sense of urgency to speed up consumers’ decision making:

Example 1: Amazon

Amazon has delivered a double whammy on this page. I’m particularly interested in learning R (an open source statistics package) at the moment and having found this book on Amazon they gave me a number of reasons to purchase. However there are two in particular that challenge me to buy now (or very soon). Firstly Amazon advises in bold green there are only 5 left in stock. Secondly (and this is one that gets me every time) if you order in the next 22 hours you will get this book by Saturday.

Example 2: daFlores.com

daFlores.com is one of the largest florists in Latin America. To prod site visitors into action they added a clock to all the product list pages indicating how long was left to order to receive same day delivery. This had two benefits: 1) To promote its same day delivery service, 2) to increase conversion – which it did by 27%. Not bad for just adding a clock!

Example 3: Moo.com

The business card sector is ruthless at the best of times, with a large number of suppliers to choose from. Although the offer is not as good as the banner suggests, Moo.com are offering a 2-day turnaround on your business cards if you order before midnight. For the time-poor business person this is a very compelling message.

Example 4: Republic

Everyone likes getting a discount especially when it is 20%, so when you see the words “Last Chance!” (even if it might not be entirely true) you feel inclined to at least investigate further. The combination of a time-closed offer and money-off is the cornerstone of many successful promotions.

Example 5: Argos

Argos, like many companies, is keen to dispose of previous season’s stock as quickly as possible. It may not be the prettiest page but the copy and the constant indication of how many products are left in each category drives sales.

Example 6: Dell Auctions

Auction sites are exemplars for creating a sense of urgency. Not only are consumers presented with good offers which are time sensitive they are competing against other people which adds that extra level of tension and excitement – a great way to sell off a lot of old stock.

Example 7: ADT

We found this example in one of Avinash Kaushik’s latest blogs. Avinash liked this page for a whole host of reasons but the one element he highlighted was the top red banner. Firstly the site had detected where Avinash lived in the United States and then calculated how long he had left to put his order in for a security system relative to the opening hours of the ADT office. Simple but highly effective.

Example 8: Harvest

Harvest is an SAAS (Software as a service) product offering a web-based timesheets service to businesses.

Like many SAAS companies, Harvest’s primary marketing aim is to get potential customers to try the product ,because they believe that once the user has tried it they will want to use it permanently.

Therefore promotion of trial is often the focus with these types of sites. Notice the barrier to trial is minimal. The trial is free and no credit cards details are required. For someone who is investigating using such a timesheet product there are few barriers to trialling the product.

Example 9: CloudHQ

Cloud

HQ is another SAAS product offering a cloud based service which enables syncing between a number of different cloud based services such as Dropbox, Google Drive and Evernote. CloudHQ have used every “sense of urgency” technique possible:

• Free trial
• No credit card required
• The annual fee is the cost of only 10 monthly fees (very common promotional technique amongst SAAS companies)
• For the premium product there is a discounted monthly or annual plan fee that is discounted for life if you take out the product by February 15th.

Example 10: ASOS

Finally – and this is my favourite – because it focuses on a slightly different conversion compared to the other examples.

ASOS has focused on one of the key issues consumers have with ecommerce sites – which is delivery and delivery charges in particular. For only £9.95 a year (which in itself is a limited offer) an ASOS customer is entitled to unlimited next day deliveries with no minimum order value.

I think this is very clever because it works on two levels. Firstly it uses similar techniques to the ones demonstrated in previous examples – a time limited offer. Additionally once the user is signed up I believe it will make them much more likely to purchase from ASOS than from competitor sites because they want to take advantage of their free delivery service which they have paid for.

It’s not often you see a sense of urgency technique trying to generate long term loyalty.

As always we welcome any comments and opinions. If you have any good examples of creating a sense of urgency we would love to hear about them.

How did responsive web design evolve?

For those who care to remember (or more appropriately those who can) even up to the mid-naughties the web industry was designing for primarily one experience – the PC experience.

Laptops and desktop computers were treated as one entity. Mobile phones were for texting, picking up email particularly if you had a Blackberry or dare I say making a phone call. Tablets were for easing hangovers or the figment of sci-fi writer’s minds.

Move forward through the last 6 years and the plethora of different and usable (remember, we had many internet mobile devices before 2007 but they were often not practical) internet- enabled devices have grown without precedent. We now have PCs with screens ranging typically from 19 to 30 inches (with a multitude of screen resolutions), laptops ranging from 11 – 17 inches once again with many resolutions, smartphones with many resolutions, tablets (different sizes and resolutions), games consoles and internet TVs.

We are now in a much messier and complex world than pre-2007, and this is set to continue (see below)

Delivering effective web content to different devices has become far more challenging. For the web designer and front-end developer the considerations are no longer just browser compatibility but device compatibility as well.

What are my options?

With the mobile internet becoming mainstream, designers are now confronted with how to deliver a good experience (whether that is an e-commerce, a brochureware, a blog or a media content site) across large and small screens. Today you have 4 options:

1. Use your standard “PC” designed site for all devices
2. Develop a mobile app
3. Develop a bespoke and separate mobile site
4. Design and build a responsive website

On a practical level all 4 options have their merit depending on your time, budget and skilled resources available to you. Current received wisdom (although clearly not everyone’s opinion) suggests that a responsive web design should be the vision and aim for every serious online business/site.

For those not familiar with the term Responsive Web Design (RWD) I like Stanford University’s definition:

“ A website that responds to the device that accesses it and delivers the appropriate output for it uses responsive design. Rather than designing multiple sites for different-sized devices, this approach designs one site but specifies how it should appear on varied devices.”

This means from a site owner ‘s perspective you update your website once and the site presents the content in different but appropriate ways depending on the device (or size of the window) being used by the end user.

Sounds great doesn’t it, and it is if implemented well, it can be very effective.

RWD from an analytics perspective

There are 3 immediate things to consider:

1. Dust off your forgotten technology reports

I’ve read a number of blog articles that have written off technology metrics as not being particularly useful compared to more “sexier” reports. However we believe 2013 will see the return to favour of these reports due to the multi-device world we now live in.

Segmenting your key reports with technology dimensions (such as device, screen resolution, window resolution, browser and operating system) often produces some very useful insights.

Bear in mind that whichever analytics tool you use, you should understand how it collects technology dimension data. Notably many of the standard web analytics tools are not entirely accurate when they try to identify specific mobile devices, although this is improving all the time.

With these dimensions you should be able to start analysing much more effectively how well your responsive site is in delivering content and sales across a range devices.

2. Revisit your personas and key customer journeys

If you haven’t already, it’s probably a good time to re-analyse your analytics data using your renewed friendship with the technology dimensions and understand your key customer journeys.

In particular if you have sufficient data you should be able to start creating hypotheses as to what role different devices play in your key customer journeys and conversion funnels e.g. how many of your prospects/customers access your site with a mobile device at some point through the buying process? or Are mobile devices used for research and PCs for purchase?

Without a hypothesis to start with it will make any future testing and a CRO strategy very difficult to implement.

3. Understand Visitor (not visit) journeys

We are now on the cusp of the most important change in digital/web analytics. Traditionally we have analysed data and traffic based on visits.

With a greater understanding of what we are trying to measure and the growing sophistication of tools available to us we are now in the position to attempt to record a visitor’s journey across visits and across devices i.e. the full customer journey and potentially even off-line activity.

Although we are still very much in the early days this focus on visitors rather than visits is key to understanding how users use your site across different devices along the customer journey.

Without this you will be analysing visits in isolation rather than in the context of the journey which in turn will make it difficult to truly understand how your responsive site is working for you and take appropriate action when your site isn’t working for you.

A solid CRO strategy is always underpinned by a solid analytics setup (both people and tools). The 3 specific analytics requirements detailed above are essential to delivering effective testing on a responsive site.

RWD from a CRO perspective

Again, 3 important actions to take.

1. Understand how your responsive site works across all devices

Even if you have all your analytics data available to you and you have created some insightful hypotheses I can’t stress enough another pre-requisite before jumping into your favourite testing tool. Before fiving Visit your site with as many devices as possible and experience first-hand what the site is like.

It is important to note there are a number of different techniques within responsive design.

Ask your development team, in particular your lead front end developer how the site has been built in a “responsive” approach and understand which particular method was adopted i.e. what was the thinking behind it? Or what customer needs are being met with the chosen approach?

2. Use qualitative to understand the ‘why’

Qualitative tools can bring to life the reasons why your site is or isn’t working effectively. Usability testing, eye-tracking, in-page analytics tools and surveys can provide incredible insights when used correctly.

More and more companies are now using such tools to ensure a positive customer experience is maintained across devices e.g. Whatuserdo.com which offers a cost effective remote usability testing service is now providing this for mobile and tablet devices.

We strongly suspect 2013 will be the year when qualitative analytics/insight tools will have to provide mobile/tablet related services as standard to maintain their position in their marketplace.

3. Develop testing strategies carefully

Testing at the best of times is time consuming and requires patience. Testing for a responsive designed site requires even more time, patience and attention to detail as you may have to create subtly different variations on the same test depending on the rendered experience being served up to the end user.

On occasions it may be appropriate to test a variation on only one device experience typically the PC one and then roll our across other rendered views once you are confident the test has initially worked on the PC.

Equally you may only want to test on a certain rendered view e.g. a tablet because the tablet experience for your particular business/site has a very specific role in the customer journey. A number of the leading CRO tools such as Visual Web Optimiser and Optimizely are now offering testing specifically for responsive designed sites.

So, what’s your view?

In this new responsive world there will be significant learnings to be had over the next 12-24 months that I am sure we will blog about. If you have had some interesting experiences with analytics/CRO for a responsive site we would very much welcome your comments and views.

We have 10 resolutions for you and I can promise they are all more readily achievable than sticking to a gym membership for 12 months!

1. Audit your tags

It’s the nature of websites and in particular e-commerce sites that they change. Pages and site sections get added and amended, new functionality is added, new interactions are created (I’m thinking of Video and Social media content as examples).

Unless you are super organised it is likely that you will have forgotten to add your web analytics tracking tags to some of these additions. The more pages/functionality that are not tagged on your site the less effective your analytics tool is becoming.

I would recommend that you undertake an audit of all your pages, in-page interactions and ecommerce tracking to make sure you are completely covered from a tracking tag perspective.

If you are a brave person who likes to do things  methodically you could you use a number of manual auditing tools such as (WASP, Charles, Fiddler, Ghostery, Google Analytics Debugger if you are using GA) to go through each page to check your tags are correctly implemented. This is only really sensible for a site with a relatively small number of pages.

If you are running an enterprise scale site and tracking/analytics is crucial to the success of your business I would strongly recommend an automated auditing tool such as ObservePointwhich will scan your site and report back on any missing tags.

2. Audit your config

Now that we are in early spring clean mode lets go the whole hog and review our web analytics tools as well as our tags.

Just as changes to your site can affect tagging they can also make your correctly setup reports such as Goals, Conversion Funnels, event tracking suddenly start to churn out utter nonsense.

When you have a spare moment or if you have the budget get an independent analytics consultant to audit your analytics account to make sure it is reporting accurately what you want it to report.

Better to do this now than suddenly realise when presenting to your team and or board that your data makes no sense whatsoever.

3. Implement a tag container

If you meet at least one of these criteria:

• You use a number of analytics and CRO tools on your site
• You dread the moment when you brief your development team on implementing another analytics solution and anticipate a minimum three-month wait for it to be implemented
• You want to add some campaign tracking tags for a quick campaign but once again you need to use the often limited time of your development team to implement them.
• You’d like the ability to add tags to you site without development resource
• You’d like more control on when your tags fire to ensure better data accuracy
• You don’t want to slow down your site with 19 tracking tags

Then you need a tag management system. Over the next 12 months I suspect more and more companies will begin to grasp the benefits of using a tag management system.

There are plenty of solutions around and with tools such as Google Tag Manager and QuBIT Opentag being virtually free (unless you have more than 1 million pageviews a month) there are solutions for every budget.

4. Review your analytics tools

So many businesses still think they can get all the web analytics data they need from just one tool – whether it is Google Analytics, Webtrends, Omniture SiteCatalyst or Coremetrics they can only tell you so much.

At best they can tell what is happening on your site but not why – when was the last time you saw “What the user was thinking?” data in your analytics tool.

If you haven’t already, start to broaden your tools and methods you use to gain greater insight about your site and site visitors. These should include using:

• In-Page Analytics tools such as Clicktale or Mouseover
• Surveys: The choice of online survey tools is incredible at the moment
• Usability testing: DIY testing tools such as Whatusersdo and UserTesting.com are relatively cheap for gaining priceless thoughts from your target audience about what they think about your website, mobile site or app
• Competitor analysis tools: probably one of the most underused aspects of analytics at the moment
• Customer service records: identify any common complaints or questions

5. Analyse your page speed

Moving away from tools and thinking more about your site users’ experiences one of the biggest factors in limiting conversion on your site is page download speed.

There are a growing number of case studies proving that there is a strong correlation between page speed and conversion rates especially when servers are dealing with peak loads such as at Christmas and New Year sales.

There are a number of tools and solutions you can use to analyse your page speed which often will provide initial answers as to why a particular page or set of pages is slow in loading.

This could literally save you £1,000s if not £100,000s.

6. Get forensic with your site

When was the last time you really looked through your site in detail, tried all the key functionality such as site search, registration, checkout process and customer service channels?

Take a good half-day to go through your site in detail and I’m  certain you will spot a number of errors (even the occasional 404), typos, potential usability issues and problems that may have occurred as your site has changed and grown.

If you are too familiar with your site ask someone else within your business to look at it or once again if you have some budget why not try some usability testing or an expert review of the site

7. Adopt a testing strategy (not just a few tests here or there)

If you really want to improve the user experience and conversion rate of your site over a sustained period then you need to adopt a testing strategy.

Once again this is not just about buying a split/MVT testing tool. You also need to consider your time, budgets, resources, skills available within your business and most importantly buy-in from the management.

Without these your testing strategy is just a theory. Delivering testing strategies can be very time consuming so you may want to consider partnering with a CRO company or recruiting a CRO specialist.

8. Review your winning tests

For those of you who have already adopted a testing methodology there is nothing better than identifying a conversion issue, proposing an alternative to test against it and then being proved right with a thumping statistically proven test win.

Even the most opinionated Director of E-commerce can’t argue with tests like that!

However on many occasions when a test win is rolled out across the site over time it doesn’t always deliver the same results that you anticipated. I would advise reviewing all your test wins in 2012 and check whether they are still delivering the same level of uplift as they did when you initially tested them.

9. Don’t be afraid to fail

Not all of your tests are going to work. This is not a problem. In fact you should positively welcome this.

By ruling things out you can often find real focus in solving problems. Testing helps you do this.

Do not be afraid to say to your boss, clients, and colleagues that a test failure is good.

If they can’t accept that, then you are working in a “non-test zone” or more accurately in the wrong working environment!!

10. It’s the people, Stupid!

Avinash Kaushik, analytics guru, has a very simple rule about people and analytics tools. It’s the 90:10 rule. You should be spending approximately 10% of your analytics and CRO budget on tools.

The remaining 90% should be spent on people. If your budget is not skewed in that way you probably have put too much faith in your tools solving your problems.

If you are to adopt any of the resolutions for 2013 adopt this one. By recruiting the best analytics and CRO talent (whether as internal staff or as partner agencies/consultancies) you will have a serious head start against your competitors.

Remember your analytics tools don’t understand the context of your business or understand human emotion and buying behaviour or can stand up in front of your board and tell them what’s what. That requires people and talented people at that who have a variety of skills (analytical, statistics, technical, marketing, business acumen, usability, research).

Good talented analytics and CRO people will pay for themselves within weeks/months.

Finally we just wanted to wish everyone a great Xmas and successful New Year. If you have any questions about this blog or would like some help with your analytics or CRO strategy please contact us.

What I find generates at least a flicker of interest is when I say I help businesses improve their websites and learn from their mistakes. For an industry that helps businesses learn from their mistakes it is ironic that we seem not to learn from our own when it comes to data quality and web analytics implementations.

You’re beginning to ask what has this got to do with Google Tag Manager. Bear with me I’m getting there. Whether you are a business owner, E-commerce director or Marketing Manager the following scenario will be quite common:

• You have toiled for months on end to get your brand new, shiny website designed and built.
• If you are fortunate you may have a significant budget to launch the site through a plethora of marketing channels.
• When it comes to understanding how the online part of your business is performing you will naturally turn to your chosen web analytics solution.
• At this point there is a deep in-take of breathe when the analytics solution you hoped would deliver miraculous insights (this was never going to happen anyway, but that’s a discussion for another day I think!) is actually churning out poor quality data.
• This is invariably because the web analytics solution has been poorly implemented or setup without a clear understanding of the objectives of the site that is being tagged.
• And when you try to start to fix some of the tracking problems it feels like you are walking through treacle.

If this sounds as familiar as England losing in a penalty shoot out you’re not alone. A recent survey conducted by DBD Media found that 80% of Google Analytics accounts are used incorrectly often due to poor implementation and setup.

Anecdotal evidence suggests this is not much better with paid for solutions. So why is this important? Well if your boss doesn’t trust the data they’re certainly not going to trust your analysis and insights derived from that data. Poor analytics implementations have dogged the digital industry for years and there is little sign of it improving.

To counter this problem site owners (especially those responsible for business critical websites) need to accept that analytics implementation is a specialist skill that requires dedicated resource and not something to be automatically expected from a site development team.

Additionally businesses may want to consider using a Tag Management system to give more control to the marketing/analytics departments over the tags on their site. Up until recently this meant investing in a paid solution such as TagMan, Ensighten and BrightTag to name a few.

However similar to how Google disrupted the web analytics market with the launch of Google Analytics in 2006, I believe it may have disrupted the tag management market with the launch of Google Tag Manager (launched 1st October 2012). Although GTM (Google Tag Manager) has fewer features than many of it’s paid for competitors I believe it has a core offering that will appeal to a lot of businesses.

First of all what is GTM:

I could bang on about it being a tag management system however I quite like the benefit driven description on Google Tag Manager’s home page:

“Google Tag Manager lets you add and update your website tags, easily and for free, whenever you want, without bugging the IT folks.”

If you want to get to more specific details about what GTM is and how it works, Justin Cutroni – Analytics Advocate at Google, has written 3 great articles on GTM.

So why should you consider GTM:

• GTM is relatively simple to implement so there is less chance of an incorrect implementation i.e. BETTER QUALITY DATA
• GTM passes more of the setup of analytics solutions from development teams to web analysts and analytically focussed marketing managers who should know what and how they want tracking i.e. BETTER QUALITY DATA
• GTM allows analytics implementations to be much more independent from development lifecycles allowing more quality time for tagging implementation and testing i.e. BETTER QUALITY DATA
• As part of the GTM solution there is a preview mode which allows you to test your tags before you put them live to ensure your tags are firing correctly i.e. BETTER QUALITY DATA
• GTM has a rules based system which ensures your analytics tags are only fired when you want them to fire i.e. BETTER QUALITY DATA

Additional benefits are:

• Ongoing maintenance of your tags will almost exclusively lie with your analytics/marketing team with little-to-no reliance on your busy development teams potentially saving time and money
• If you want to implement an additional tag, such as a campaign tracking tag, this can be done within minutes/hours rather than days/weeks giving you much more flexibility in your marketing activity i.e. if you want to track a last minute campaign you can.
• Any analytics tags within your GTM container tag are loaded asynchronously meaning that your page loads are not affected when your tags load. As page download speed is critically important to some sites this is a particularly useful feature.

What GTM can’t do:

• Although GTM can handle most types of tags, Google has made it clear that tags with ‘document.write’ functionality built into the snippet and A/B testing tags should not be used.
• Some paid-for tag management solutions have a much richer feature set than GTM and if you have identified tag management as a critical element to your digital analytics setup then you should shop around. (However Google have made it very clear that the current GTM is version 1 and that there will be future developments to the product. With the recent launch of Google’s Universal Analytics approach (29.10.12) I strongly suspect GTM will become more and more an essential weapon in the digital analyst’s armoury.)

Sounding a bit like a BBC presenter trying to be as impartial as possible I’d like to point that there are many other tag management systems available (however GTM is the only one I am aware of that has enterprise tag management features which is free). Equally I’d like to offer one big caveat: GTM and other tag management systems are not a panacea for bad data. There are many reasons and factors that will cause bad or inappropriate data to creep into your analytics solutions. However GTM and other tag management systems as part of a properly planned digital analytics strategy can help reduce the repeat offenders that are poor analytics implementations and poor data quality.

If you have already tried Google Tag Manager or have thoughts about the post it would be great if you could leave a comment below.

Just a word about terms.

In my view, conversion rate optimisation isn’t simply about the simple formulae of the number of transactions divided by the number of visits. It’s far more than this. It’s the process of improving the website to maximise its commercial potential.

As you will see there are a number of ways to increase sales, of which conversion rate is only one.

Let’s look at the performance of a certain e-commerce, a fictitious one in this case, but perhaps not dissimilar from one you might manage or have worked on.

Over the course of this post, I’ll show you the impact of improving a number of key factors by 10% and what happens to sales.

In this example, our first challenge is to reduce the bounce rate. We know that if you can’t convert a visitor into a customer who has only viewed one page. In this case, we have improved  the website’s bounce rate from 55% to 45%.

Lowering the bounce rates means another 100,000 visits who may go on to convert. In another blog post we’ll explore a number of ways you can lower your website’s bounce rate.

Overall, the process is concerned with identifying the need of the visitor from their traffic source (e.g. the keyword they used to find the website) and matching the content of landing page to this term. Often called ‘scent trails’, meeting the needs of visitors is ensuring there is  a coherence between what they are looking for, evidenced by their keyword or traffic source, and the key themes of the page they land upon.

Lowering the bounce rate, whilst keeping the other metrics the same, results in an increase in sales of £294,000 – a 22% improvement.

Improving the website’s conversion rate – again the subject of another blog post – predictably increases revenues. Conversion rate can be positively affected by improving the product page by focusing on improving the add-to-basket ratio as well as reducing checkout abandonment by focusing on areas where there is a considerable dropout from the checkout process.

In this case, we are only going to improve the conversion rate (of those who have visited more than one page) by the same level as before – 10%. This is not 10 percentage points, from say 4% to 14%, but from 3.5% to 3.85%

The combined effect generates a 34% increase in turnover, and we would need a similar increase in visits to achieve the same improvement in sales. Remember to date we have only improved bounce rate and the conversion rate by 10%

Another key metric of an e-commerce website’s performance is average order value or AOV. AOV can be improved by focusing on the quality and relevancy of cross- and up-sells, and now there are a number of tools, which when properly configured, can automate the product recommendations, basing their suggestions on what previous visitors have viewed and / or purchased.

This increase in annual sales of £633, 570 equates to a 48% increase. This is remarkable improvement is based on tweaking the bounce rate, conversion rate and AOV by just 10%, but the compound effect is impressive.

Finally, if we can increase the number of times customers buy from the website each year, again by 10%, we get at 63% increase in revenues – see below:-

Increasing the average number of orders placed by customers over a 12-month period is achieved by focussing on the relevancy of your customer retention campaigns. Segmentation of your email marketing based on previous purchase history is one way to improve the number of times a customer will buy. As you increase the relevancy of your retention campaigns, the proportion of customers who respond goes up and annual repurchase frequency also rises.

This post is designed to show you that you have many more levers at your disposal than just driving to your website. By adopting the conversion rate optimisation process and making small step-changes in your website performance – in the area of bounce rate, conversion rate, AOV and annual repurchase rates – you can get great results.

The table below shows the impact of each improvement added to the previous one.

We would love to hear how you have improved your website’s sales – post a reply below.

These two benefits are:

• Irrefutable Proof – Since split testing concurrently serves different web pages to a random sample of your website audience and compares the results, it is proves beyond reasonable doubt that one version over the others produces superior results.

• A learning opportunity – The results from split-tests provide a valuable opportunity to learn about the behaviour and preferences of your website visitors. Depending on your split-testing tool, you will also be able to analyse how the tests performed with new vs. returning, branded vs non-branded, paid vs. organic, etc.

In this post, I examine the issue of local maxima and being bold in your tests for both those who run websites with large volumes of traffic as well as those who have a more modest number of visitors.

Websites with high numbers of visits

If your website receives hundreds of thousands of visits per day, then you have the opportunity to learn quickly and benefit from statistically significant trials. If this is you, then your challenge will be that of hitting what Andrew Chen has called “local maxima”.

This is the point where, using incremental improvements you have reached the maximum performance of the website in its current form. After this point there are diminishing returns in continuing to optimize in this way.

Your approach now is no longer to tweak the current design, but to take a new approach to your audience and website.

Smaller websites

For websites receiving a lot less visits, then your issue is not so much of hitting the point of local maxima, but the speed with which you can get the results from split-tests.

Let’s look at an example to show you what I mean.

This fictitious e-commerce website receives 9,000 visits and has a conversion rate of 1.82%.

Let’s suppose we do a split-test, with just two variations – one new version and the other being the control. How long will it take to get statistically significant results, in other words at a confidence level of 95%?

Note: This data is based on Visual Website Optimiser’s Split Test
Duration Calculator

You can see the table above that if your split-test only resulted in 5% improvement in conversion rate you might have to wait for as long as 77 days to call the result – remember, you are waiting for 95% confidence levels. In all likelihood you should be able to declare a winner in 39 days – but that’s still 8 weeks, and you are only testing one variation against your current page.

However, if you wanted to get your results far more quickly, you need a far higher level of improvement in conversion rate. We will look at what this would mean later on.

With 4 variations tested, that is 3 tests and 1 control, then the duration of split tests increases substantially.

With only a small improvement in conversion rate, then you are likely to be waiting for 11 weeks to declare which of your four variations is the ‘winner’. That’s a long time, for not much uplift. You are likely to have spent time and money setting up the test, waited a long time to release the results and then the results aren’t that startling. Disappointing.

Clearly, if you had hundreds of thousands of daily visitors, then a 5% uplift is certainly worth having, but in this example, you don’t.

The value of being bold

We all know that the bigger risk you take, the bigger the potential reward.
Conversion rate optimization is no different.

If you are larger website you can take small, incremental steps in improving your conversion rate, but over time this form of tweaking will reach a point of local maximum.

For smaller websites, given your traffic levels and the resources required to set up a split-test, you need substantial improvements in order to declare a winner is a reasonable time frame.

So for both types of website there is clear value in taking a new approach to split-tests. But let’s be clear that being bold, or taking a very different approach to your website visitors, has a greater chance of the control outperforming the test variation(s) – but you knew that, right?

Up until now, you have been changing a few elements of the existing design. To be bold you need to question your approach to both your audience and your offer.

Useful questions might include

• How well understood is my value proposition?
• How have my competitors approached their customers?
• Why do single purchasers not make more than one purchase?
• How profitable is my current customer base, are there other segments that could be more profitable?
• Why do visitors come to my website and what are they trying to achieve?
• What differentiates my high-spending customers from my low-spending ones?
• Does the way our merchandise is categorized represent the way in which our customers group our products in their mind?

Having answered these questions, ideally using a mixture of quantitative and qualitative methods, you are better able to develop new, bold designs.

This level of analysis is far more likely to help you to develop greater insights, interesting hypotheses and re-alignment of current thinking than changing the colour of your Add to Basket button.

As Joshua Porter says on his 52 Weeks of UX blog: -

And when the time comes to make the bigger changes, when you decide to jump from your local maximum to some other design possibility, make the decision with conviction. But don’t forget that the optimization has only just begun.

Please let us know what you think about this post by adding your comments below.