Analytics for UX Workshop. Web Analytics for UX,

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1 Analytics for UX Workshop 1

2 About Me Mike UX Architect, ITHAKA Author, Practical Web Analytics for User Experience Co-founder, Ignite UX Michigan (igniteuxmi.com) 2

3 Meet Google Analytics 3

4 What Can You Use Analytics Data For? 4

5 Why Are People Coming to Your Site? 5

6 What Did People Do On Your Site? 6

7 Examine Relationships Between Pages 7

8 Measure the Effects of a Design Change A/B Testing Looking back on a design change on your actual site 8

9 Triangulate with Other Data Sources 9

10 Analytics vs. Other Methods Analytics is good at: Large datasets Historical data on actual behavior Answering questions relatively quickly But not so good at: Understanding why Measuring types of behavior you didn t think to measure in advance Generating new ideas, mostly 10

11 It s easier than ever to do quantitative work Web analytics tools like Google Analytics A/B Testing tools like Optimizely (and Google Analytics) Books Quantifying the User Experience Measuring the User Experience Search Analytics for Your Site And if you want to be exhaustive, my book 11

12 Today s Agenda 1. How to think with quantitatively and use web analytics tools 2. Understanding how people use your site 3. Funnels 4. Understanding why people come to your site a. Segmentation 5. Wrap-up 12

13 How to Think Quantitatively (And use web analytics tools) 13

14 Understanding Data with Averages 14

15 Look at Proportions 15

16 Rates 16

17 No Data Are Perfect 17

18 Look at Trends and Compare Proportions 18

19 Understand the Data For seeing the story of data, visualizations are your friend Rates and proportions are important, but don t ignore the magnitude of the numbers. Ask: What do these data tell me? What action do I want to take based on data? How were the data collected? What do they measure? What haven t we measured? Are there others factors that may influence users? 19

20 Understanding How People Use Your Site 20

21 In this Section 1. Page Level Metrics 2. Visitor Flow 3. And an exercise! 21

22 Page Level Metrics 22

23 What Are You Looking For? Ratio of pageviews to unique pageviews A bounce rate that is unusually high compared to other pages And does that page get a lot of entrances, or only a few? An average time on page or exit rate that is much higher or lower than other pages Really high or really low values for anything 23

24 Why Look at Paths? Find places where people may be having trouble navigating Infer users intent about why they go to a page Learn what features on a page people use 24

25 Visitor Flow 25

26 Visitor Flow 26

27 What Are You Looking For? Thrashing / pogo-sticking: Moving to the same page repeatedly or back and forth between a few pages Unexpected pages Unexpected places where people exit the site Compare usage of different features / clicks on different links 27

28 Limits of This Approach You can only visualize the most common paths, but that may still be a minority of your users Best for looking at relationships between a few pages there are too much data to look at complete visits 28

29 Next Page: Google Analytics 29

30 Exercise 1 1. Break into groups 2. Discuss the questions and data in the exercise handout 3. Someone in the group should be prepared to speak about what your group discussed 30

31 Funnels 31

32 In this Section Just funnels. 32

33 What s a Funnel? What s it For? For a sequence of pages or actions on your site where users go through them in order: Where are people dropping out of the sequence rather than completing it? How many people are dropping out at each step? What s the overall completion rate for this sequence? The classic example is an ecommerce checkout 33

34 An ecommerce Checkout 34

35 Funnels 35

36 Things to Remember About Funnels They don t show people that enter the funnel after the first step They don t represent pages that people visit inbetween the checkpoint pages People may visit the checkpoint pages multiple times and funnels won t represent this As always: good or bad is relative 36

37 How Do You Use Funnels? Google Analytics (free edition): You set them up in advance and only have a few Google Analytics (premium): You can set them up ad hoc on existing data Adobe Analytics: You can set them up ad hoc on existing data 37

38 Understanding Why People Came to Your Site 38

39 In this Section Understanding where people came from Referrals Landing pages Segmentation An exercise! 39

40 How to Approach Why People Arrive? Where do they come from What specific pages do they arrive on? What did they search for? What content did they view? Caveat: You can only infer intent from web analytics data 40

41 Where People Came From Referrals Organic search Direct / (none) Paid search Social Typically, these will be called channels. You may see more channels in your analytics account, depending on marketing activities. 41

42 Hypothetical Example: Graduate Program Applications 42

43 Google Analytics Channels Report 43

44 Google Analytics Referrals Report 44

45 Landing Page Report 45

46 Queries Report (Search Engine Keywords) 46

47 What is Segmentation? Isolating a subset of all of your users based on some characteristic and only looking at their data 47

48 How Can You Segment Data? Some trait that they have (browser, geographic location) A behavior (whether they viewed a particular page, what they searched for) Basically, according to any of the data you gather about users Some tools, like Google Analytics, let you segment according to whether users did a specific sequence of actions 48

49 What Can You Do with Segmentation? Analyze differences in behavior between groups of users Did people buy more stuff if they came from a Google search or they came directly to our site? Filter out noise from users that you don t want to analyze Only 5% of our users visit the subscription page. Let s just look at data about how those people. 49

50 A segmentation example 1. What pages do people land on based on what they searched for? 2. Among people that went to the university application page, what pages did they land on? 3. Among those people that went to the application page, what paths did they take through the site? 50

51 Segmentation Example 1 51

52 Advanced Segments, Part 1 52

53 Advanced Segments, Part 2 53

54 Advanced Segments, Part 3 54

55 Advanced Segments, Part 4 55

56 What to look for with why they came to your site Flesh out personas with real usage data Characterize user needs Uncover unknown user needs Look for gaps in your content or features Find out what language people use Ultimately, it s dependent on what you re trying to find out about users 56

57 Exercise 2 57

58 Measuring the Effects of Design Changes 58

59 In this Section Look at data about stuff that s live (backwardfacing) A/B testing (front-facing) 59

60 Framing the Question of How Well is it Working? What is the purpose of the design change? How does this purpose map to something analytics can measure? Approximately how many visits do you need? Quantifying the User Experience, Sauro and Lewis 60

61 How Do You Measure Success? Why are you designing and building something? What business goal does it tie into? How does it help the organization? What specific behavior are you trying to influence? Immediate: Clicking on a button, registering for an account, downloading a white paper Ultimate: Buying something, subscribing, donating, registering, applying Find specific actions users can take on your site indicating they met the short and long term goals. 61

62 Hypothetical Example: Graduate Program Applications 62

63 A Trend Line 63

64 Comparing a trend line to a trend line 64

65 Analytics Goals In web analytics, a goal refers to an action that users can take on your site that contributes to the success of the organization or the website. As such, they make good candidates for things you want to influence through design changes. In Google Analytics, go to the Conversions section to see these reports. 65

66 A funnel visualization report from Google Analytics (Screenshot from 66

67 How Could We Measure Success Better? We care about whether people leave the website to apply to grad school, but what s the ultimate goal of the application page? Enrollments 67

68 A/B Testing com/2010/06/24/the-ultimate-guide-to-a-btesting/ Measuring the User Experience, Tullis and Albert 68

69 The Best Way to Learn is by Doing So let s frame some design questions! 69

70 Wrap-up: Topics I Didn t Get To 70

71 Topics I Didn t Get To Event tracking Search engine keywords Site search keywords Getting involved with setting up analytics How does this apply to apps? 71

72 The End! 72