Using Analytics to Your Advantage: Yahoo! Web Analytics Tips From Michael Whitaker

June 30, 2009 | In Yahoo! Web Analytics | No Comments

Today’s Y!Store blog is a guest column by Michael Whitaker, CEO of Monitus, which is located in Mill Valley, CA. Michael develops tools for Yahoo! Stores, blogs about Yahoo! Store and analytics, occasionally has seminars about Yahoo! Store, and is the author of two Yahoo! Store books.

I had the great pleasure to speak on the Data-driven Decision-Making panel at the recent Yahoo! Merchant Summit in Boston. As always seems to be the case, there wasn’t enough time to cover everything, so I foolishly offered to write up a list of analytics tips. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but I hope that it will provide at least some food for thought, and help you think about ways you can start using web analytics to your advantage.

Here are some basic tips I recommend for online retailers getting started with web analytics:

1. Add revenue metrics to reports wherever possible.

Revenue basically tells a more compelling story than conversion rate alone. Increasing your conversion rate may be a good proxy for success, but ultimately it’s about increasing revenue. Revenue also provides the basis and context for what you might want to improve on your site.

Let’s take keywords as an example. Suppose you have two different keywords, one with a conversion rate of 10% and the other 2%. If I give you the option of increasing both conversion rates by 20%, which keyword would you choose to optimize? The first one looks like a sure bet because your conversion rate would go up to 12%, whereas the second one would only go up to 2.4%. But what if you bring revenue into the equation? Let’s now assume that the first keyword generates $1,000 in revenue, but the second one contributes $10,000. The picture looks different now and you’d clearly pick the second keyword as it would make you an additional $2,000 instead of $200. Perhaps this is just stating the obvious, but your optimization efforts should take into account revenue and not just conversion rate.

This is of course not just about your best keywords. You also want to know your top landing and content pages, top traffic sources, top products, etc., all in terms of revenue. For more on this subject, check out Dennis R. Mortensen’s VisualRevenue blog article, "Using a Page Revenue Participation metric for Conversion Optimization."

One other note about this example. Notice that I have given you a choice to optimize one thing or the other. Sorry, but you can’t optimize both as you just don’t have the time! Seriously though, you cannot do everything, you cannot look at 80 reports, you cannot write great unique content for thousands of pages. You have to focus your efforts where you will get the best return. I will return to this theme again.

2. How do I add revenue metrics?

Here is a simple process you can follow: Pick a standard report, e.g., Navigation > Entries > By URL. This shows your entry/landing pages with visits and page views. Good traffic info, but we can do better. Next click on "Customize Report." Choose a revenue metric and drag into the main section. Hit "Save." By all means play around with this function and add other metrics that you might be interested in. Once you have a report you like, click on "Bookmark Report" and give it a meaningful title. This report will now be listed in the Bookmarks section in the left navigation.

Repeat the same process to build other reports. Standard Report > Customize Report > Add interesting metric > Bookmark report. Doing this also has another huge benefit. Once you’ve created a few powerful bookmarked reports you can almost ignore all the other standard reports! Instead of having dozens of reports, you can now focus on a select number of reports. Every once in a while you will want to do a deep dive into other reports, but having just a few key bookmarked reports is far more manageable.

Bonus tip: Send those bookmarked reports to yourself by email on a regular schedule. I am a big believer in prioritizing tasks by using reminder and to-do lists. Let’s face it; you’re busy, and life gets in the way, and you forget to check your analytics. So have the analytics come to you, perhaps once a week on a Friday. You can get extra fancy by using alerts, which will only send you email if a certain condition has been, such as an abnormal increase in traffic. To learn more about setting up alerts, you can consult this online help page.

3. Too much data. What to do?

See tip 2 and use a few bookmarked reports as opposed to looking at 80 different reports. It’s important that you set yourself goals that are actually attainable, and for that you have to ask yourself specific questions. If your goal is to increase your global conversion rate, where do you start? This question is far too vague and broad to elicit action. How about: "Let’s look at the top keywords driving traffic to my top landing page. It would appear that the third keyword contributes almost no revenue and has a high bounce rate. Let’s check the text on the page to see if the page is actually relevant for this term. Let’s also check where the traffic came from to see if we spot something." This is a specific problem that can you attempt to solve.

The name of the game is segmentation. Although we tend to look at overall conversion rate, it is not very actionable. The fact is that you have many, many different conversion rates, for landing pages, keywords, products, campaigns, etc. Don’t use site-wide averages – segment your traffic into meaningful buckets. Ask specific goal-oriented questions that get you to take action. YWA is chock-full of segmentation options and you can even segment by gender, age and some behavioral demographics.

Bonus tip: use the merchandising capabilities (located in the Settings menu) to bucket products into product categories. Simply upload a CSV file to YWA to associate products with categories (you can use a relatively simple breadcrumb RTML template to help you generate this file). The reason why you might want to do this is because it is easier to optimize, say, 20 product categories, than it is to optimize 2,000 products. Or at least the task will not seem as daunting.

4. Go for easy wins

Site Search

I love looking at internal site search data. These are the keywords that visitors enter in your site search box to look for information. Are visitors finding the content they’re looking for? Are they using different words than you do to describe a particular product? Try to incorporate the words your visitors use into your copy so that they will get a more relevant result. I also love the Zero Results Internal Searches report; this shows you the site search queries that resulted in no results being shown. One actual example I can share is the case of visitors looking for a brand that the retailer was not carrying. This definitely qualifies as actionable data because you can either start carrying that brand or suggest viable alternatives.

Bonus tip: Segment your site search keywords against referring keywords, i.e., those keywords that brought traffic to your site from paid or organic campaigns. For PPC keywords in particular, are visitors using site search on the landing page? If they do, this could suggest that you’re not sending traffic to the best spot.

Bonus tip two: If you add a revenue metric to the site search page, you may find that it has relatively low traffic, but accounts for a significant amount of revenue. Don’t treat site search as an afterthought.

Track 404 pages

Hopefully you get lots of traffic from search engines and other sources, but you also delete and create new content all the time. And of course it does happen that other sites link to pages on your site that no longer exist. In this case visitors will see a 404 page aka "sorry page not found." (You do have a 404 error page set up, right?) With a pretty simple technique, you can track in your analytics reports when those 404 pages are generated, along with the referrer info. I send myself this report every day.

5. What are your favorite analytics reports?

In tip 2 I suggested to start off with a standard report: Navigation > Entries > By URL and to add a revenue metric. But we can do one better than that. Customize this report again and drag the referring keywords dimension to the left column. This will now give you the top landing pages and the top keywords in one report! Not only is that very cool, but also very useful. These are the questions you can now ask: Are my SEO or PPC efforts working effectively? Are you trying to optimize for certain keywords that just don’t work on the landing page (by having a high bounce rate or low revenue participation rate)? If you think of matching or exceeding your visitors’ expectations in terms of content, good things will happen! Resist the temptation to optimize for too many keywords per landing page.

I also very much like to get a sense of where visitors go AFTER they have landed on your site. If the landing page is a section page, where do they click next? I’ve often seen that if you have a typical section page with a couple of dozen of product thumbnails in three columns, then the three thumbnails in the first row will get the clicks! Now, how did you decide how to order these products in the first place? Random or in alphabetic order? Why not arrange them in order of sales? Another way to look at this is that your visitors will click on the first three links, so you’d better show them the links you want them to go to.

Extend this idea to the main product navigation. There is no rule that says that you have to list your main product categories in alphabetical order. Consider putting your most important categories first and gently guide your visitors to where you would like them to go!

6. Be goal-oriented

Setting goals for yourself or your company is pretty much common sense, but you can extend this approach to web analytics. Having a bounce rate of 45% or 55% is not necessarily good or bad – what’s important is that you improve metrics over time, to go from a 55% bounce rate to 45%, for example. Trends are more important than absolute values. Set yourself an attainable target to improve ______________ [fill in the blank] over time. Goals in YWA are called ACTIONS and you have a number of prebuilt actions at your disposal, with ACTION = 01 SALE being the one you ultimately care about. But the way to increase sales is not always direct and you should also track "mini-goals," such as newsletter subscription rates. Not every visitor is in the market when they visit your site and could be in research mode instead, so perhaps you can try to sign them up for your newsletter. Or perhaps a customer comes back to your site to look for shipment tracking, so you could measure how effectively she can find the information. You should help your visitors find the information they need even if it’s not related to making a sale conversion. Another way to think of this is that visitors will interact with your visit across multiple visits and many different channels. Improving these mini-goals will help your business over time and hopefully turn prospects into customers, and then repeat customers.

Feel free to contact me with your analytics questions. — Cheers, Michael.

Michael Whitaker
CEO, Monitus
Guest blogger for Yahoo! Small Business

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