BSCOM/250T: Communication Technology// Week 5 Discussion – Analytics, User Behavior, and Preparing for the Future

Topic 10 Introduction TranscriptDownload Material
One of the biggest factors of improvement and success in almost any field lies in
feedback loops and the ability to measure effectiveness and then make improvements
based on that feedback. A feedback loop is a system or mechanism for measuring
performance after the fact based on previous actions taken.
Olympic runners can see almost instantly whether or not they won, which place they
came in, and their race time. In the business world, these metrics are called key
performance indicators (KPI). KPIs are the metrics we track to measure
performance.
10.1: Olympic running.
Photo by Jonathan Chng via Unsplash.
Now, imagine you are an Olympic runner and running in a race. You give it everything
you have, and then you cross the finish line. However, for whatever reason, you don’t
see other competitors, you have no idea what place you got, and you don’t even know
how long it took you to run the race. To make matters worse, you don’t even know
what you’re trying to do! Are you trying to get first place? Is the goal to go fast, or
slow? Perhaps the goal is to run in the most interesting way possible?
Not knowing what you’re even trying to achieve and not knowing any of your stats, you
go back to train the same way you always have. You don’t know if you need to make
adjustments to your training strategy, form, or nutrition because you have no idea if
what you’ve been doing has been working. The day of your next race then arrives.
You run as fast as you can, and still, you have no idea how well you did, what you
were aiming to do, your place, or your time.
Were this to go on for long, it would be hard to imagine there being much improvement
on your part, mainly because you have no way of knowing whether or not changes to
your strategy have any effect on your performance. You don’t even know what you’re
supposed to be doing!
Similarly, it’s extremely important that all business communications have a clear set of
KPIs designed to measure outcomes and that these KPIs are based on the overall
objectives of the company. This will allow the marketer to gain insight into
performance and more quickly adjust strategy to improve performance. So how does
one go about setting and measuring KPIs?
10.2How to Set and Track KPIs
The first step to setting correct KPIs is to establish or be aware of overall business
goals for the year, quarter, or month. Where is the company trying to go? What is the
entire company expected to achieve? How is success measured within the
company?
One of the biggest mistakes new marketers tend to make is not knowing the overall
objectives and goals of their company. What does the executive team look to in
order to measure success? How do they know if they’re winning? Secondly, how do
the marketer’s actions impact overall success and what specific things can they do
to make a positive impact on that success?
Breaking Down Goals into Individual Goals
Major company goals, the kinds of things the executive team is working toward, may
look something like these:
•
Improve profit margin by 3% in quarter 1.
•
Grow market share by 15% within the calendar year.
•
Grow shareholder value by 25% in the next 6 months.
These goals should be known by the entire company, and everyone should know
where the company stands in relation to completing the goal. It then becomes the
responsibility of different departments and stakeholders to set individual goals that
contribute to the company hitting its main goals.
For example, if your company goal is to improve profit margin by 3% in quarter 1,
then a goal for the marketing team may hinge on reducing expenses by pushing
more organic content or decreasing investment in paid media. They may, instead,
focus on decreasing the customer acquisition cost (CAC), or how much money it
takes to acquire a customer, by improving the quality of leads and reducing the
number of people that fall out of the funnel (as we discussed in Topic 6.)
Department Goals
If the goal for the department is to reduce CAC, then KPIs for the marketer in charge
of content could be metrics like the following:
•
Number of leads generated by each piece of content.
•
Cost of content production and promotion.
•
Average cost per lead (total costs ÷ number of leads) per piece.
Individual Goals Contribute to Company Goals
What this will do is allow the marketer producing content to know whether or not their
content is working as it pertains to helping the company complete their overall
objective of improving profit margin.
▪
Content production costs go down and number of leads generated by
content go up.
▪
Average cost per lead for the content team goes down.
▪
Customer acquisition costs for the marketing department goes down.
▪
Profitability for the entire company goes up and the goal is met.
Having this level of clarity will ensure that each piece of content, every ad, and every
web page is aligned with the company goal. This helps to reduce friction and ensure
job performance and security. Too many content marketers are eager to report on
views, likes, or other metrics that don’t mean anything for the overall company goals,
only to find out that doing so makes them appear out of touch with the rest of the
organization.
Measuring KPIs
It’s one thing to talk about KPIs and goals on paper and have everything neatly
mapped out. It’s another thing entirely to then actually track those metrics.
Organizations are often dealing with such large numbers, and the expectation for live
or near-instant data is getting increasingly large. Simply adding up conversions or
leads on a spreadsheet will be cumbersome at best and will almost certainly result in
slow and inaccurate data.
Fortunately, there is a lot of helpful software designed to measure custom KPIs
which will allow marketers to pivot strategy and improve performance.
10.3Analytics
There are myriad software solutions on the market, each designed to provide
analytics on site traffic, measure how that traffic behaves, track conversions, and
more. Selecting software to track site activity will depend largely on the following
factors:
•
Budget: Software designed for commercial use is often very expensive.
For large organizations, this is rarely a problem, but for startups or even
medium-sized businesses, this can have a significant impact on which
product will be selected.
•
Size: Some software is designed for small teams running small sites with
small amounts of traffic. Trying to use this kind of software on a large scale
will often result in problems when considering unique situations that crop up
as companies grow. Similarly, using software designed for large enterprises
when running a small marketing team often means unneeded complexity
and a poor user experience.
•
Ability to Gain Insight: Knowing what your team and company hope to
know from a data perspective is important when selecting analytics
software. Some software can get very accurate conversion or customer
spending data, while others forgo that spend accuracy in favor of real-time
traffic data that precedes a conversion. Often, the best solution is to
combine multiple pieces of software to tailor fit a solution to your company’s
needs.
•
Compatibility with Existing Marketing Stack: Marketing stack refers to
the existing set of marketing-focused software currently in use by a
company. An organization may use one piece of software for analytics, one
for email marketing, one for competitive research, and one for content
generation, for example. Knowing the software a company currently invests
in, how that software works, and what platforms that software can share
data with is important when it comes to selecting the right analytics
platform.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a service that tracks and reports website traffic. According to
Google and estimates from industry experts, between 50 to 60 percent of all
websites use Google Analytics.1 This is for several reasons:
•
Google Analytics is free for most users.
•
Most companies have sites that earn a relatively small amount of traffic,
making the free version of Google Analytics a good fit.
•
Google Analytics is easy to use as far as analytics software goes, and there
are a plethora of free training materials produced by Google designed to
help someone easily set up and navigate the platform.
•
Google Analytics is compatible with many different marketing platforms and
also has the ability to export data into other platforms via spreadsheets
where no integration is provided.
Conversely, Google Analytics isn’t for everyone. Google Analytics is not a good fit for
the following businesses:
•
Businesses that require more data security. Most Google Analytics
accounts store their data on Google-owned servers. To securely store that
data on their own servers, companies must pay for upgraded plans which
get very costly.
•
Businesses trying to look at a time period that has a large amount of
sessions. Google Analytics starts to sample data once the site gets too
much traffic. If you’re trying to look at a time period that has over 500k
sessions, then Google Analytics will start to “sample” data, or only show a
smaller amount of data and then use assumptions to fill in the gaps. This
can be a problem if those assumptions are incorrect.
•
Businesses that desire or need functions that Google Analytics doesn’t
provide, thus forcing them to explore other options.
Despite the drawbacks, because of an almost universal usage of Google Analytics,
it’s very important for most content marketers to understand how Google Analytics
works and how to gain insights needed from the platform. Fortunately, knowing how
Google Analytics works can also be a good base for learning other analytics tools.
How It Works
Google Analytics starts with a tracking code that looks something like this:
10.2: Google Analytics code.
This tracking code will be placed on every page of the website and is custom to each
site. When a user visits a web page with this code installed, it will first check for a
previously existing cookie to determine if the user is a repeat visitor. If the user is a
repeat user, it will put an updated cookie on the user’s browser and record that user
as a repeat visitor. If the user has no cookie, then it will put a cookie on the user’s
browser and mark the user as a new visitor. This process repeats itself every time
every visitor hits a new page on the website. By doing so, Google Analytics can then
track which pages are visited by which users anonymously. Marketers can then use
that data to see how visitors interact with the site, how long they stay on which
pages, and whether or not they convert.
While there are many metrics to be found within Google Analytics, the main metrics
Google Analytics grabs to analyze all this information are the following:
•
Users: How many different people visited a given page within a designated
time period?
•
Sessions: How many total visits were made to a given page within a
designated time period? Consequently, there should almost always be
more sessions than users when measuring the same page within the same
time period.
•
Bounce Rate: How many or what percentage of users leave the site
completely after visiting a specific page within a designated time period?
•
Session Duration: How much time, on average, do visitors spend on a
specific page within a designated time period?
You’ll be able to see these metrics below in a typical Google Analytics report.
10.3: Google Analytics report.
You’ll notice that you can also see metrics centered around conversions like
“conversion rate,” “transactions,” and “revenue.” In this case, these numbers are
coming from another piece of software that handles payments and processing and
then reports that data automatically back into Google Analytics. In other instances,
where that e-commerce software is not available, Google Analytics users can set up
goals in order to track conversions or leads.
Additional Media
Check out this article titled “The Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Google Analytics” from Moz.com
to get a thorough rundown on how to use Google Analytics.
10.4Setting Goals in Analytics and Tracking Conversions
Once the custom analytics tracking is installed on every page of the website, the next
step will be to set up analytics goals. Google Analytics goals are custom metrics set
up and designed to track the most important objectives of your site.
There are four types of goals that can be set up in Google Analytics:
•
Destination Goals: This goal counts as completed when a user visits a
specific page. For example, you may set up a destination goal to fire every
time a user visits your “thank you” page, implying that each visit to the page
is a conversion or purchase.
•
Duration Goals: This goal fires every time a user spends a specified amount
of time on a given page or set of pages. You can set up a goal like this to
show how many users are engaged with the content on your site.
•
Pages Per Session Goals: This goal fires every time a user visits a specific
number of pages on your site. This, too, can indicate user engagement.
•
Event Goals: This goal fires when a defined event happens. The types of
events you can track are clicks of a button (for example, you may track clicks
on the “submit” button to track the number of people that fill out a lead form),
how far down a page someone scrolls, or the number of times a video on
your site is watched.
The importance of setting up these goals is to intelligently track the things that are
most important to your site. It’s crucial that you set up a goal to track the macro
conversion, or the most important goal of your site, and all micro-conversions, or those
smaller steps leading up to a macro conversion.
All your business communication pieces should be made with the ultimate goal in
mind, and then analytics and goals should be set up on each of these pieces to track
their effectiveness. Once the piece has been written, analytics is installed, and goals
have been defined, what then should you do with that data?
10.5Turning Analytics into Actionable Marketing
Setting up these goals will then allow you to view reports centered around your goal
metrics. For example, you can see how many people ended up purchasing your
product who came from your ad campaigns versus how many people ended up
purchasing your product who came from organic social media campaigns. Without
goals, analytics tend to revolve around traffic volume rather than ultimate
conversions, which can be deceptive.
For example, you may see in Google Analytics that you’re getting 10,000 visits from
social media and only 1,000 visits from SEO, or Google organic search. This might
lead you to double down on social media. However, if you overlay conversion
numbers from the goals you set up on top of those traffic numbers, it can tell a
completely different story. You may see that while you’re getting 10,000 visits from
social media, you’re getting only 50 conversions (or 0.5 percent). And while you’re
getting only 1,000 visits from SEO, you’re actually getting 100 conversions (or 10
percent). This would show you that, in order to see the strongest growth, you may
want to consider investing more in SEO.
How Tracking the Wrong KPIs Leads to Disaster
First, it’s important to note that effort and careful attention should be put into
ensuring you’re tracking only the right things for your strategy and not getting lost in
analytics trying to track everything. Analytics platforms are meant to be customized
to your unique business, your unique situation, and your unique strategy. If you
dump a lot of resources into tracking every possible metric, you’ll not only waste
those resources when you find out you don’t need all that data, but you’ll also end up
steering your communications strategy in the wrong direction.
Elephants and KPIs
In the 1960s, biologist Allan Savory was working to establish some natural parks in
Zambia, Africa. Specifically, his goal was to fight creeping desertification. The grass
plains needed to be protected in order to support life in the parks.
10.4: Allan Savory.
Photo by Savory Global, February 3, 2014, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
Savory, through his experience, data, and research, concluded that what was
causing the greatest harm to the plains were the elephants. His view, and the data
he had access to at the time, led him to believe that too many animals and
overgrazing were wiping out the plains that supported the ecosystem of the parks.
Therefore, it seems logical based on that data that removing grazing animals would
help to preserve the grasslands. Essentially, Savory had correctly established the
goal of preserving the grasslands but then established a main KPI of reducing the
elephant population to accomplish that goal.
Sadly, Savory then led and participated in the slaughter of over 20,000 elephants
over a number of years. After all was said and done, the land actually got worse.
Savory refers to that time as the “saddest and the greatest blunder of [his] life.”
Savory later concluded that the soil compaction from elephants combined with their
waste actually served to protect and feed the grasslands.
So we can see, despite being armed with mountains of data, selecting the wrong
KPIs can be disastrous, as was in the case of Savory and his destruction of 20,000
elephants and acceleration of grassland desertification.
Common Uses for Analytics in Business
Communications
While Google Analytics is one of the most user-friendly platforms, it becomes easy to
get lost in the data and start coming to incorrect conclusions just due to the sheer
amount of information. The best way to approach analytics is to come armed with
questions that need answering rather than to discover those questions within
analytics. So what are some of the most common questions you’ll want to answer
within analytics?
•
Which marketing channels are driving the most traffic to my site?
•
Why do people leave my site?
•
How do people respond to my calls to action (CTAs)?
•
Is my website working as intended?
•
How could it be improved to help users and increase conversions?
•
Which of my marketing tactics are driving the most conversions?
•
Where are people getting hung up in the conversion process?
•
What content seems to be the most effective in generating conversions?
•
What devices are people using when they interact with my site or my
business?
•
What landing pages need to be improved and in which channel?
10.6Summary
In today’s world, we have access to more data than ever before. This data is
simultaneously crucial to the success of business communications and often a sticking
point. It’s easy to get lost down the rabbit hole of tracking and interpreting data, losing
sight of what’s most important to your organization and your communications strategy.
The point of all this data is to provide you with quick, often live, insight into the
performance of your communication strategy. That insight should be precise, quick,
and direct your next function or even direct your strategy for the near future. Without
insight into how content is performing, it’s almost impossible to improve as a marketer.
A feedback loop via analytics is imperative to help you learn about your audience and
which messaging produces the effect you’d like to achieve.
But the data and the feedback loop is and will always be a means to an end. All the
data in the world won’t produce results the way simply acting will. Data should only
work to amplify the effectiveness of those actions. In some cases, the best way to get
data and that feedback is to blindly take some steps and see what happens. Just
make sure you’ve got the tools in place to record and analyze what happened after
taking those steps.
BSCOM/250T: Communication Technology
Week 5 Discussion – Analytics, User Behavior, and Preparing for
the Future
Materials
Gray, P. & Rackham, S. (2021). Communication technology (1st ed.). MyEducator, LLC.
This week, your textbook covered the use of KPIs and analytics to measure the effectiveness of
communication and content created by organizations. Reflect on the Olympic runner example
mentioned in Topic 10. If the runner does not know what their objective is or how well they are
doing, they will have no way of knowing how to adjust for success. Similarly, setting and
measuring goals is crucial to developing effective business and communication plans. Reflect
on your own organization or an organization that you are familiar with and respond to the
following questions. 175 Words
•
•
•
•
Explain the type of content or communication that is being developed by your
organization.
Share the type of data or analytics that would be helpful to monitor the performance of
this content or communication.
Explain how the use of this data and KPIs supports your organization’s content and
communication strategies.
Identify the type of communication technologies your organization uses to track and
support these strategies.
Provide examples and support for your conclusions.