Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability and Science of Customer Centricity

The benefit of comparing segmented trends is that instead of figuring out which of 1,800 variables is causing an impact, you can identify and then investigate just a few relevant variables.

You can truly step up the game by combining Recency with Loyalty. You’ll know exactly how many times visitors from campaigns 1 and 2 visited your website, which is another excellent measure of post-campaign

When visitors move along through these pages, then that’s success for you. Think of going from Add to Cart to Start Checkout to Complete Credit Card Info, and so on. The Exit Rate, on any page, indicates a “bad” exit. But in this case it is called Abandonment Rate, to distinguish what is actually happening in terms of customer experience.

You can capture data from your website in a number of ways. JavaScript tags are currently the most common method. You can also use web logs, packet sniffers, or web beacons.

So, you need to measure the Bounce Rate of your site on at least two levels. You need to measure in aggregate at an entire site level, as shown in Figure 3-22. And you need to measure the Bounce Rate of your top landing pages (also called the Top Entry Pages report), as shown in Figure 3-23.

You can measure campaign success by measuring Visits to Signups but hand out a bonus for campaigns that deliver visitors with a high Loyalty number.

Chapter 8 contains a number of sources you can use to get benchmarks, including sites such as the Fireclick Index, tools such as Google Analytics, or associations such as shop.org.

The core idea is to try a targeted approach so that you can correlate the data to your offline data sources and detect a signal (impact).

By integrating an intelligent tool or engine into your website-serving platform, you can use data from your customers to optimize their customer experience. This could be as simple as switching the main images on the home page based on the search query, banner ad, or social media link the visitor came on.