7 Tips I Learned from Avinash Kaushik’s Web Analytics Course

January 24, 2013 By BJ Cook,

After spending 6 weeks taking the Market Motive Web Analytics Course, instructed by the great Avinash Kaushik, I have received my Certificate of Completion in Web Analytics Practitioner Training. I have to say this was a great course. It taught me not only the fundamentals but tips of the trade that would have taken me years of experience to come up with on my own. This course really puts you on the fast track to producing exceptional reports and provides different methodologies for analyzing web data. I would recommend this course for those who are just starting out or who want to expand their knowledge of marketing into web analytics, no matter if you use Google Analytics or another tool. Check out 7 interesting tips I learned from taking the course:

Create a segment to exclude Visitors who stayed on the site for less than 5 seconds. The key here is to separate out those who did nothing on the site, so they won’t skew your data. Focus on those who stayed on the site, navigated around and actually saw your content.
KPIs should be revisited every quarter; 25% of them should die annually and be replaced with new ones. As business objectives change throughout the year, so should your KPIs and in turn, your reports should also reflect these changes. Your weekly, monthly, quarterly reports should really only include actionable data. If the data isn’t representative of information that is meaningful, it is just a waste.
Value microsegments, those smaller segments which are producing the most revenue or generating the most action on your site. For example, one microsegment could look at visitors who came in the morning, from search, and visited more than 4 pages.
Determine your “Visitor Orbit Strength”. Look through your Visitor Overview section in your Analytics tools. Segment out New Visitors and find out what your most loyal visitors are doing on your site. Check your Visitor Recency Report and find out how often they are coming, how long they are staying and how deep they are searching.
Include a “Change Report” which quickly and easily displays what has risen and fallen since the last report. This allows anyone who is viewing the report to instantly see what is improving or failing.
Don’t waste time on trying to find one magical path to conversion. In the end most of your visitors will not follow A,B,C,D; they will go back and forth A,C,B,C,D. Only really rich or structured experiences will take a visitor through one flow. Plus, you wouldn’t want to make decisions based on a path that less than 2% of your visitors actually follow.
Always include Voice of Customer. Whether it’s an opt-in survey near the bottom of your site or pop-up survey after attempting to leave the page, there are 3 main questions you always want to ask:
1. What was the primary purpose for your visit?
2. Were you able to accomplish the task you came to site for?
3. If not, why?