Using advanced analytics to read between the lines.

In my decade-long journey of working on 1000s of campaigns, I can say with confidence that analytics solves more problems than ad-level optimisations.

Most of the marketers run towards making changes on Meta and Google ads dashboards in case of inefficiency.

The resolution to the underperformance is hidden in the user behaviour, either reading direct, black-and-white data or reading between the lines on how users navigate the website before either shopping or dropping off can unravel insights behind underperformance.

Establishing benchmarks is equally critical.

When you do campaigns on Meta or Google or any other platform, users land on your website at different stages of the buying cycle and with different understandings of your brand.

It also depends on the intent of these users depicting their chances to convert.

Destination also plays an important role, whether the users are coming to the website or the app.

Irrespective having a view of user behaviour on the website will help you understand how can you serve the more relevant content to the users with the layer of hyperpersonalisation.

The primitive analytics method is tracking user journeys from the homepage to the thank-you page.

This is a given, this is the bare minimum today, you need to have a view of the below data:

Businesses have moved beyond this data insight.

Drop-offs from each stage of your e-commerce website and respective trigger-based communication are something that I have provided for many websites now from Day 1.

All the businesses that reach out to us for website development tasks, get this base analytics integrated from day 1.

However, today I will give you a few advanced ways of looking at user behaviour data.

1.DAU to registration rate:

How often have you come across the argument of ‘quality of traffic’? I assume multiple times. What determines this quality? How do you define ‘low quality‘ or ‘high quality‘ traffic?

Most of the websites anyway have a conversion rate of 1% or less.

Does that mean that quality of traffic is an inherent problem with every e-commerce website that ever existed?

Not really.

A few CMOs determine the quality of traffic by Bounce rate. While I do not completely deny the logic. But there are considerations here that they miss out on:

The bounce rate can be inherently high if there is no brand awareness.

If the purpose of the page is to provide information (blog) pages then user would usually get that information from the same page and bounce off.

Or the content/banner strategy on the website is incorrect. It may need a refresh.

I have observed in multiple cases, that changing the Hero banner on the homepage can have a direct impact on the bounce rate too.

Hence a deeper way to consider the ‘quality‘ of traffic is DAU to registration rate.

This means how many users visit your website daily and how many of these users are leaving their digital footprint in the form of Email IDs or phone numbers or both.

The actual rate is different for different categories and markets.

A month-on-month track of this metric will give you an insight into how tweaking the paid campaigns or because of SEO ranking your first-party base is also trending.

Usually, this rate fluctuates a lot when you do an awareness campaign or once you start getting traction from SEO.

2. User stickiness with DAU/MAU ratio: 

In a nutshell, the DAU/MAU ratio, also known as the stickiness ratio, compares the number of Daily Active Users (DAU) to Monthly Active Users (MAU) for a platform or service.

This metric helps gauge user engagement by showing how often users return to the platform within a month.

A higher ratio indicates higher user engagement, as it means a greater proportion of monthly users engage with the service daily.

DAU/MAU ratio can vary from 5% to 15% depending on the infrequent purchase cycles, seasonality and sales cycles, customer segments, market maturity etc.

Marketing automation and remarketing campaigns play an important role in a healthy DAU/MAU rate.

For one of the e-commerce websites we built, we implemented marketing automation capability from Day 1 for them. Maintaining a healthy DAU/MAU rate of 10% as per their category.

While we also do SEO, performance marketing and social media management for them, integrating all these channels with marketing automation helps us to keep things under control.

For a business, there is always merit in hiring a marketing consulting firm or agency to build the website to reduce the interdependency.

Hence most of the work we do starts at the grass-root level of building a fundamentally strong website and thereafter also generating sales from it.

3. Unravel the hidden gems in Product search data:

Today, almost every website has an in-built search bar.

But how many of the web owners look at the ‘search’ data?

I can bet you, that’s the absolute gold mine.

Searches in the search bar directly correlate to the intent with which users come to your website and what they look for.

For one of the websites we manage that is in the ‘meat’ category, we realised that the most searched item in the search bar was ‘dressed chicken‘ & the website had no results or webpage against that result.

Fixing that saw a rise in product search to product page view rate by more than 70% and a subsequent rise in conversions.

The product searches offer great insights on campaign ideas and homepage banners/sections too.

4. Banner clicks to conversion rate:

Banners on your homepage can have an impact of ~20% on the conversion rate of your website.

You may have 5 to 10 banners on your homepage but which of those is driving just clicks? Which are driving clicks and conversions and which are leading to drop-offs?

In my experience, I have noticed that the Hero banner on your website may be a good drive of clicks, but it is usually the subsequent banner or one of the banners on the 2nd or 3rd scroll that drives better conversion rates.

Banner click-to-conversion data tells you the story of what users truly liked on your website as these clicks may not be driven by high intent every time.

This funnel may go through a shift when you do a sale or promotion because of the offering most of the clicks can happen on the main banner. However, when you are not running an aggressive promotion, this can be interesting data to look at.

Suppose one product on your website is sold more than the others. In that case, it can be worthwhile to see if people are searching for that product from the search bar which can be a decision influenced by the surround sound you are making about the product on social or emails or any other visual channel.

Or if the conversions for that product are driven by banner clicks signalling the importance of banners in product discovery and thereafter driving analytics on Banner clicks to conversion rate.

Deriving these analytics metrics and connecting them to the performance marketing approach and goals is critical.

An in-depth learning on these metrics is waiting for you on the other side of the Dream Performance Marketing Masterclass.

We are running with an EarlyBird offer for the same till 23rd March.

Use code LIVE10 at the checkout.

That’s it for today, folks.

Have a great Sunday ahead.

Cheers,

Apurv