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!

Test test test!

Why do we (royal we) spend so much time arguing over the minute details on websites, pages, page sections and even at the level of individual images? We (again, all of us) must have spent hours in the past, to-ing and fro-ing over the meeting room table offering (forcing!) opinions based on feel and subjective judgement...sometimes even based on experience!

It takes a lot of time though. Not everyone comes up with the right answer every time. What is the right answer though? Well, logically, it's what your customers/users say is the right answer. Your customers will tell you the right answer by voting with their hard cash. Thing is, investing in change can be risky and expensive.

Bringing an end to the long meeting room wrangles, mitigating risk and justifying ROI before hand is actually easier than you might think...mostly ;-)

Moneyspyder has invested serious amounts of time tailoring our unique Rails based e-commerce platform to cater for A/B split and multivariate testing using the Google Website Optimiser coupled with our in house analytics capabilities and Google Analytics.

We have run multiple experiments using the A/B, multivariate and multivariate A/B models (yup, all different models). We have tuned the platform to enable rapid test rollout and enhanced reporting for all our clients. This is a key feature of the platform - enabling all clients on the platform to benefit from enhancements made to the core 'flexshop' product.

So, now, rather than chew over contentious details ad nauseum, we take the option that saves time and money and gets the right result every time...it's not always the result you expect but it is the answer that is given directly by your customers SO LISTEN TO THEM!!!

All together now, 'TEST TEST TEST'!

Happy testing ;-)

Improving e-commerce articles by Dr. Mike Baxter

Dr. Mike Baxter is the Moneyspyder Director of Customer Experience. Catalogue and e-Business magazine recently published a series of Mike's articles on improving e-commerce. We are delighted to announce that these articles are now available on the Moneyspyder website.

Moneyspyder - who, what? Why are you so good?

Yes, what is the big thing about Moneyspyder?

Well...

First of all, we are using Ruby on Rails as the core of our technology offering. It's still considered new and therefore cool! Yes, cool for technical folk but the end result is certainly considered cool by our clients. I'll explain:

A core strength of Rails is its support for rapid development and an Agile approach - ho hum, that old spiel again. Yes but with a twist. We enable our clients to play to our strengths you see. We have a core set of Internet retail site components on which we can build custom specialist functionality very quickly and to a very high quality.

What's at the core then?

• Users


• Products


• Variants


• Categories


• Brands


• Baskets


• Orders


• Payments


• Fulfillment


• Promotions


• Search


• Content Management


• Split Testing


• Analytics


• Gifting

Yup, I think that just about covers what would be considered 'standard' in a web shop. (Do let me know if you think of any more.) Thing is, not all of these components are always going to be required. We can add and remove these components through quick and simple configuration. Not coding - just a config tweak and kazam! Gift wrapping is available. Less time focusing on technology integration - more time focused on client sites performing better month on month with new functionality.

Each component listed above is built as a Rails Engine - a plugin module if you like. Now Rails allows us to drop in a new component really quickly, easily and safely...oh, and we can choose the version we want to use (thanks to Piston)....it could be one of our components or a 3rd party plugin. We pick the one we are happy using and it's pinned at that version until we say otherwise. In summary, our modularity gives us speed, strength, flexibility and reliability. We like these and we know our clients like them too. They tell us. This is certainly a case of pragmatic technology choices doing the required job with little or no techy bling for the sake of techy bling.

Analytics, testing and gathering data is a core feature of the Moneyspyder philosophy. We make sure our framework captures as much data as possible so that we can say with certainty what customers are doing and when. For example, we can see when promotions work. We know the right types of promotions to setup on our clients' sites. We also know that promotional messaging is key to promotion performance. Our promotions module will let customers know how much more they have to spend to secure a 10% discount or free delivery. We call this Promotion Proximity Warning - PPW. It works - we see a clear uplift in both conversion and AOV when PPW is turned on.

Customers think searching is cool - data says so, customers say so. We make sure our search solution fits hand in glove with all our searchable components to maximise conversion on clients' sites. Products, brands, categories, static pages - all indexed and searchable. Our search is not indiscriminate though - it honours archived or pre-live entities. If your new product range is not set to go live just yet - they remain safe from appearing in search results until you say so. Search uses internal tagging to relate products, brands and categories - really handy for automatic intelligent population of related products when trawling through 1000 products and relating them really should be a job for a smart machine. We consider internal SEO to be just as important as external SEO - especially considering the 3x more likely purchase propensity of searching customer over casual browsers.

Well, that's a start. Drop us a line if you want to know more about us...

Hello and welcome to our blog. We are passionate about data, taking the 'think' out of ecommerce, cool technology and good manners. We take 'not being evil' to the next level and stay there!

We will be posting news about our clients, their successes and how we enable them to maximise their business potential.

We will talk about acting on data - not gut feel or whims. We will be telling you how we use the latest technology such as Ruby on Rails, the latest analytics techniques and sound business expertise in combination with hard evidence and an excellent partner network to create an unbeatable formula for success in ecommerce.

We're excited about it - we hope you will be too!