Google Analytics Flow Visualization
I realized as we were recording Marketing Over Coffee this morning that I’ve never done a blog post on Google Analytics Flow Visualization, so let’s tackle that right away. If you’re unfamiliar with flow visualization, it’s a way to visually map out where people are going on your website. You’ll find it in Google Analytics under Visitors > Visitors Flow.
First things first: the tool defaults to geographic location as the starting point for the flow. I don’t especially care where you live, so I switch this to traffic source right away. This gives me the following visualization:
We can see that Google organic search is the top driver of visitors to the site, followed by people typing in the URL, followed by the blog, then Twitter and Facebook. Pretty good so far. Where do people start, page-wise? The top is, of course, the home page, followed by a Google+ blog post, some archives pages, a tutorial on multichannel funnels, and then the long tail of other pages.
Column 3 in the picture above is the first click: where do people go on the first click? From the home page, they go to the Marketing White Belt book page, the welcome page, and then into blog posts. In column 4, we see what happens on the second click, and the chart goes some distance to the right after that.
So what does this tell me? A few key pieces of information are revealed here. First, people coming in by Google are going to individual blog posts from organic search. This means that I should make sure there are calls to action on every single page of my site, because for the vast majority of that traffic, the first page they see is an individual blog post. If your traffic looks like this, then you should be doing the same.
Second, for people who hit the home page, the top place they’re going is a conversion opportunity for me – in this case, buying the book. I’m very happy about this – this is an intended behavior. If the top page on the first click isn’t a conversion opportunity for you, then you have to make one two choices:
1. Fix your navigation and calls to action across your top entry pages so that they drive traffic to a conversion opportunity, or…
2. Adjust the top page for the first click to be a conversion landing page, since it’s already popular.
Either way, if your top traffic after the first click isn’t a conversion opportunity, and conversion is important to you, then you need to make some repairs and choices.
Third, this is just the starting point. You’ll notice up top that you can choose different segments and filters. Suppose I want to see how my weekly newsletter is doing for me. I’ve already got a custom traffic segment for my newsletter that isolates that traffic in Google Analytics, so I select that to see only newsletter traffic, then switch the filter to campaign view so I can see individual newsletters. Let’s see what this tells me about my newsletters:
Item 1 is the most recent newsletter, followed by other weeks’ issues below it. From there, item 2 is one of my prominent calls to action, hiring me to speak. Item 3 is a conversion opportunity as well, a post that has an affiliate landing page. Item 4 after the first click is the book conversion opportunity. It looks like my newsletters are doing exactly what I want them to do: bringing people to different opportunities for conversion.
Google Analytics Flow Visualization is a powerful tool to diagnose exactly what’s happening on your website, to see where visitors are going at each step. If you know what to look for, if you know where you want people to go on your site, it will tell you in an instant if things are working as intended or not. If things aren’t working as intended, it will also tell you where you need to make repairs as well. Give it a try today!
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New Year’s Resolutions 30 Day Trial
It’s nearly December 1, which means that in just over a month, everyone and their cousin will be trying to change their ways for the better with New Year’s resolutions.
Resolutions are a tricky thing. On the one hand, significant dates on the calendar are a great excuse to make changes you might not otherwise be motivated to make, and lots of other people will be seeking to make change as well. On the other hand, attempting significant change normally requires some level of planning, which most people don’t do after the ball drops and the clocks change; the result is usually rapid failure.
So how do you take advantage of the energy of change without the associated planning failure? Here’s a simple suggestion: use the month of December to do a 30 day trial of your upcoming resolutions. Want to lose weight, quit smoking, etc.? Try it out in December and “debug” your resolution, so that you can work out all of the operational issues in advance.
For example, say you want to lose weight. The 30 day trial period will let you figure out how that goal will impact your finances and daily schedule. When during the average day will you have time to work out? What foods will you have to remove from your regimen, and what foods will you have to add? Try things out and see what works and what doesn’t for you, so that when resolutions season kicks off, you’ll be far less discouraged by bumps in the road than in previous years.
By doing the resolution trial run in December, you’ll also know it’s durable. After all, if a resolution of any kind can survive Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Christmas, Ashura, and a variety of other occasions, then you know it’s going to survive the rest of the year.
The 30 day trial period is also a great time to do your research. For example, let’s say in the weight loss example above that finances are an issue, and you can’t afford a gym membership. Instead of that killing your resolution outright (as it often does in the early days of January), you can go Googling for fitness workouts that don’t require equipment beyond common everyday objects, then try them out.
Here’s the only rule of the 30 day trial period: you must pick one resolution and commit to debugging it for all 30 days. If you decide that in 2012 one of your key changes will be weight loss, then you must find a working methodology for yourself in December. You’re not allowed to change on December 12 to a different resolution, because you won’t be giving yourself nearly enough time to research and work around roadblocks.
Take today and tomorrow to make up your mind about the one thing that must change about you in 2012 and then on December 1, begin your 30 day trial and debugging period!
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Fighting the losing price war
Looking out at all of the Black Friday holiday sales promotions, I came away with this basic conclusion:
You’re pricing yourself to death.
Let’s step back and think about when price matters. Price matters to the average consumer – B2B or B2C – under two very specific conditions:
1. The buyer doesn’t understand your value. If your value is opaque, if your value is unclear, price matters. Price becomes vitally important because it’s the only objective metric that the buyer has available.
2. The buyer doesn’t care about your value. If the buyer understands your value but doesn’t care about it, then price becomes important because you’re a commodity, and they want the commodity at the cheapest possible price.
This puts businesses of all kinds into a really unpleasant squeeze, a pressure to keep moving prices downward. Yet not all businesses face the same downward pressures. Take Apple, for example. There’s a ton of competition for mobile phones, for tablet computers, for desktops and laptops, but Apple rarely discounts and rarely adjusts pricing. Why? The average consumer who purchases Apple products understands the value of Apple, and the things that Apple values (design, ease of use, etc.) are things that the consumer values. Thus, Apple can remain more resistant to pricing pressure than its competitors, which is why it’s one of the most valuable companies in the world.
The thing about these two pricing pressures is that they can be remedied. You’re not just stuck in an inevitable price war. In the first case, if the buyer doesn’t understand your value, you have an education problem. B2B companies most often face this issue – they have products or services that are so complex that no one person really understands them, and as a result, no one can make an apples to apples comparison on anything other than price. Take, for example, email marketing services. If you don’t understand email marketing, then all of the companies in the space can pitch you every feature imaginable and none of it will make any sense. As a result, you’ll likely buy from the cheapest priced offering because it’s the only value metric that makes sense. If I or one of my competitors can better educate you, you can then make sense of the various offerings and understand why one is more valuable than the other.
In the second case, you have an alignment problem. You have things that you value that your buyers do not. For example, you may value having an immaculately organized retail store, but your competitor values having the lowest prices possible. If your audience, your prospects, do not value organization, then you are competing in a losing battle. You can either change your values to value what your audience wants, or find a different audience that places a premium on a nicely organized store and would never set foot in the retail disasters that are your competitors.
Unless you are making a conscious decision to compete on price and drive your competitors out of business while accepting incredibly low margins, price should be the last resort marketing trick that you reach for. Spend your marketing time and resources figuring out how to make your value more clear to your buyers and making sure that what you value is what your buyers value, and you’ll rarely have to reach for the price weapon.
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Happy Black Friday!
The sun’s rising over the horizon. The sales are on.
If you’re in sales, especially retail, did all your marketing preparation and campaigns pay off? Did you bust down the doors as a consumer? Did you sell out the shelves if you’re in retail?
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Happy Thanksgiving!
Hungry?
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