IMC Vancouver: Avinash Kaushik – Rethink Online Analytics

Don't Suck

The IMC Conference really brought in some great speakers this year. A couple of the talks today were really spot on. The first presentation was by Avinash Kaushik, who spoke about the topic of analytics and understanding your users. His Number 1 Rule? "Don't Suck." Such relevant and a happily irreverant advice set the tone for what was to follow. He exhibited pages related to High Speed Internet PPC Campaigns, which highlighted how many local high speed providers are shooting themselves in the foot by not helping people find what they need.

Hurray for Data

People who market online have a great advantage over offline marketers, who must use expensive means to gather data. Online marketers are just swimming in low-cost data. Anyone who wants to can add analytics tracking to their site and, in no time, have a wealth of data at their disposal. Unfortunately, using the data effectively is still pretty tricky.

Segmentation: Making Sense of Mountains of Data

Segmentation is the act of breaking your analytics down into groups that you can better understand. One of the segments that Avinash discussed were the loyalists (people who visit more than 3 of your pages, i.e., they are really exploring your site). Limiting your analytics results to only this group helps you to see where the interested people are going within your site. In addition to using segmentation, you can examine the top ten pages that are visited on your site and calculate at the bounce rates for those pages. The pages with the highest bounce rates are prime candidates for redesign. People are bouncing for a reason. Maybe that reason is fixable!

You're Probably Wrong

One of the great benefits of working in the online world is the ability to find out quickly when you are wrong. Knowing where you can make improvements is great - it lets you hypothesize what problems those people who come to your site are encountering and how you might be able to fix those problems. Avinash has a great example in point five (cinco) of this behemoth blog post of just how inportant the testing part of this process is. Getting inside the human mind is no easy feat and, try though we might, our plans to divine what kind of page and content will help sites make sales seem almost sure to fail. Testing is the only way to be sure our hypotheses are correct!

Bookmark It