Don't get lost in Google Analytics - here's the map

It should be pretty obvious that we think Google Analytics is neat. Neat as in essential to your business! It qualifies as one of those technologies that is clever, cool and seriously useful. The inherent risk using clever, cool and useful tech is that one can get awfully lost in the clever and cool without gaining any value.

For example, I have been guilty of spending many an interesting hour building and rebuilding custom reports - a great new feature in the GA beta interface. I had to catch myself though - were these reports relevant? Were they useful? Were they aligned with our clients' Key Performance Indicators?

I undertook an exercise to rationalise the custom segments and custom reports we had available to our GA account.

The general profiles and filters that we set up in the last blog post are exactly that - general. Sufficiently generic so as to be useful to 90% of GA users...probably. Anyway - custom reports and custom segments should be developed so as to be aligned with business Key Performance Indicators.

Think about it: Why would a board member be so interested in the bounce rate on the website broken down by OS, browser type and browser version? Would a developer really be 'bovvered' by relative marketing campaign keyword performance? Probably not. So, as we created profiles to capture filtered data, we can also create profiles to present data.

Let's say we created a developer specific profile - this doesn't mean to say other users can't view the data but it is a profile focused on the preserntation of data that a developer would want to see. Any report - even a custom report can be added to the dashboard for the profile that you are currently viewing:



And here is the report added at the bottom of the dashboard:



Remove the 'clutter' from the report for the given profile by hitting the X in the top right of each report overview in the dash board.

Now you can have a dashboard for each business function tuned to specific needs, custom segments and reports that are relevant and useful!

How Moneyspyder increased DC4UK.com's sales 2

Acquisition Strategy

DC4U had focused on email as the primary customer acquisition route with a large initial effort in building a database of email addresses. There were, of course issues with the organisation of the database during this initial push:

• Source tracking


• Identifying cost per acquisition
  


• Generating data on email performance


• Segmentation


• Platform robustness

Moneyspyder's analytics guru, Dr. Mike Baxter cast his expert eye over the data James had gathered and through in-depth analysis and a collective effort was able to provide the crucial answers to the questions regarding email performance, organisation of the data and the cost per acquisition.

...and that's useful 'how' exactly?

These answers on their own yielded crucial insight into the email campaign performance but coupling these answers with strategic insight has enabled DC4U to know what emails perform, to understand why the emails perform, to target customers, product ranges and promotions specifically and to know based on hard evidence that the money spent on a campaign will yield the expected return on investment.

Ultimately, the sales figures speak for themselves - 128% increase in sales revenue in 4 months.

Next, we'll look at the Moneyspyder ecommerce platform in more depth, why it works well for DC4U and how the inherent flexibility has been capitalised to add to the efforts discussed so far.

How Moneyspyder increased DC4UK.com's sales 1

This is the first post describing how Moneyspyder increased sales by 128% for DC4UK. This was a multi-pronged effort covering all aspects of the current business - there is more to come though - success is never final!

Introduction

First some background: Moneyspyder worked with DC4U initially on a consultative basis with James spending 1 day every two weeks getting to know the DC4U team and aligning their business strategy ready for growth. James had identified the business as having huge potential so in May 2007 Moneyspyder launched the new DC4UK.com site on the Moneyspyder platform so that the business had an appropriate platform on which to base this growth.

The big decision

Crucially, DC4UK.com and Moneyspyder jointly made the decision to port the site onto the new platform with as little change to the customer facing website as possible. This meant that we could use the strength and flexibility of the Moneyspyder technology to introduce change in a controlled manner. Controlling change, and importantly measuring the effects of change have meant that all changes have meaning and value to the business.

Change and measurement

For example, a change to the presentation of product colours and sizes showing stock status was demonstrated to reduce frustration in not finding products have made size and colour choices.

Further to this, not all changes were immediately visible: Using YSlow to understand how pages were being downloaded enabled significant speed improvements to be made with no impact to site reliability.

Finally, an exercise in data cleansing and validation ensured that the effects of the changes described above were accurately measurable without being soiled by 'noise' from poor customer experience or data impregnated with HTML.

Thus, DC4UK and Moneyspyder had in place, a culture of control, reliability, partnership and change and measurement on which to build the future success of the company.