Web Analytics for Business Insights and intelligence

I had earlier written a blog post on “How do you Implement & Measure Form Performance and Conduct Form Analysis” which detailed about implementation part of form analysis plugin, However what I have observed, business owners are not sure how to make best use of them, due to couple of reasons.

• Form Analysis are not accurate or does not collect most of the form data which are required.
• Data looks junk or messed up or unable to read and understand to derive insights out of it.

Here is a 2 stage enhancement which I had made to one of my client to get form analysis plugin better and to make use of the data collected to derive insights out of it.

Enhancement to Plug-in:

Stage 1: Enhance the plug-in to read the form or form element not just with name but also by id attribute.

Plug-in developed by Omniture engineering team reads the form and its element based on its name attribute. However in many instances developer might omit adding name attribute or just add “id” attribute or visa-versa , in other words attribute usage might not be consistent.

Existing Plug-in code: form name and form element name are picked by name

Changes made: form name and form element name are picked by name first, if name attribute is not available then its picked from id attribute.

Stage 2: Enhance plug-in to track visitors who close the browser or click on a link without touching the forms.

What if, if the user lands on a page and closes his browser or clicks on any link move to a different page, Omniture plug-in will not track these scenario, a small change in the code will enable to track abandon due to browser close or click on a link without touching forms.

I am unable to show the test data here, but you can try doing these changes it works pretty well and data now looks lot more comprehensive.

Enhancement to Reporting:

Now that we have data how do we use it?

Here is how the collected data will look like, it contains data like page name, form name, action status - all these in a single row?

Stage 1: Classify it

By classifying this way you can actually view data in different dimension and at the aggregated level as well. For example you can see the list of forms broken down by elements by action so it clearly states where does the max visitor are abandoning the forms.

Area of Improvements:
- More detailed level of tracking can be adopted depending on the level of analysis required, if the domain main objective are lead generation, through additional event usage data representation can be improved.

Stage 2: Automate the classification Process

- Unless classification process is automated its really pain in the neck to create SAINT Classification file every time we need to upload.

Please feel free to comment out your idea and inputs and how have you used this plugin to benefit your clients.

Interesting reads on form abandonment:

• Omniture Form Analysis Pitfalls, How to avoid and optimize
• Form Abandonment by Rudi Shumpert

- Pradeep SV

All of us take meeting notes of each of our meeting and there are many ways we send out the meeting notes, sometime text format, sometime we send out the through mail and sometime on a word document.

If the meeting is one time meeting or one way meeting it make sense to send it inline with the mail. However if we have a recurring meeting, and needs to be viewed edited and updated everyday by different team members and also if it needs to maintain a log of everyday meeting notes to refer back with the previous meetings and follow up, how do you normally do? Which is the best of way doing it?

• How can each of the team member can have access meeting notes at almost real time
• How can each of the team member can edit at the same time?
• How can anyone can access there meeting notes from anywhere?
• How can we make changes so it get reflected to all at the same time?

Simplest way to solve the above need is to manage all the meeting notes through Shared Microsoft OneNote and store it on SharePoint. Solution looks very simple but beauty of it is the way you can manage the entire setup. I will show you on how to Create and Manage Shared OneNote by storing in a SharePoint.

How to Create a new shared notebook in a SharePoint library

When you add a new notebook to a library, the notebook becomes a folder in the library, and the sections are stored as files. Adding content to it and revising it are similar to working with your notebook in any shared location

On the Share menu, click Create Shared Notebook.

In the New Notebook Wizard, do the following:

• Under Who will use this notebook?, click Multiple people will share the notebook, and then click On a server (SharePoint document library, network share, or other shared location).
• To tell others about the notebook, leave the Create an e-mail with a link to this notebook so that I can send to other people check box selected.
• Click Create.
• Note    When you make changes to your notebook, it may take a few minutes for others to see the changes or for the changes to synchronize, depending on the way your network is set up.

How I use this set up @ Project.

1. We have created Shared OneNote (Picture #1) and Stored it in SharePoint (Picture #2
2. All the Work Sheet created (#2) will be stored as files in the SharePoint, you can see it in #2 in Picture #2.
3. Any one who need to see Meeting notes can either download it and see at onetime or they can import to there local OneNote so it automatically syncs as and when we update it, like they can get the daily updates.

How I Utilize this Setup

Best Part of this Setup

• Multiple users can simultaneously access shared notes and contribute to them on an ongoing basis
• A library is a central location on a SharePoint site where people store and manage their files
• You can manage who has permission to view the notebook or contribute notes
• You can also track versions of the notebook, so that people can view or restore an earlier version if needed and receive updates when the content changes by using alerts or RSS Feeds
• When you share a notebook, everyone with permission to contribute to a SharePoint library can access a shared set of notes at the same time
• OneNote synchronizes everyone’s changes to the notebook on the SharePoint site. OneNote also maintains a separate offline copy of the notes on each user’s computer
• Participants can edit notes locally even when they are disconnected from the network. The next time they connect to the shared notebook, OneNote merges their changes with everyone else’s.
• You can see your meeting notes either it from home computer or from your office and you need not send it over mail.

Just try it and you will start seeing its Use.

Please feel free to comment out if you have any more ideas.

-Pradeep SV

Not everyone will talk about naming the menus within SiteCatalyst. Few things which made me write this article are the questions which would arise in developers as well as business owners mind.

Developers:

• I am seeing the value in c3 on the debugger where do I see the report or which menu should I have to see it in? (I know its simple and can see at custom insights 1 to 10, however the problem is if we have not enabled prop2 and prop3 then prop4 appears in second line item, which might be mistaken for prop2 instead of prop4)
• How do I map back custom variables which I am seeing in debugger back, to Omniture reports.

Business Owners:

• If I do not know the report name how do I indicate or index a report back in SiteCatalyst?

Real time Questions:

#1: How do I relate the props I am seeing in debugger to menu within Omniture?

Best Practice for Menu Naming and Convention

• Indicate each of the menu item to there respective customer variables numbers, convention as below.

Reason for using v, c and e for eVar, Props and Events Respectively

• To match with debugger or Omniture image beacons (See Screenshot below)
• Also to align with the Omniture Standards (As per the Implementation Manual)

Menus After Renaming to Standard Naming Convention

Usually it will be difficult to indicate a particular report by name which could be made much easier if each menu has some numbers.

It is a good practice to have a consistent naming convention if you are working with multiple clients and follow the same standards across the organization.

Answer to the Question asked above (#1):

• Its pretty clear that c3 is mapped “New Repeat Visitor” through the proposed naming conversion.
• Also even if we have not enabled any of the variables in the middle of the menu, it still can be correctly mapped with the number indication

I would strongly recommend to use the same naming convention.

-Pradeep SV

GAIQ: A Good Way to authenticate your knowledge on Google Analytics

Its one pending task which I wanted to do since many days, and this weekend was the best suited for me and made up my mind to take it, GAIQ Test.

Well, I asked myself why should I have taken this test spending $50 just for an online certificate.

when I was thinking and mentioned about taking GAIQ test, Many people commented like its an open book test, you can easily pass if we 2 or more people sit together who have knowledge in GA , I would totally agree them, However I still wanted to take this test…WHY?

Not because it’s a certification by Google or cos I will get one certificate that adds to my resume or it adds honour to my skills, its cos

• it’s a Sense of satisfaction to clear and get authenticated your knowledge on Google Analytics
• Its a benchmark to say I am sound in Google Analytics.
• That’s when you feel you have reached a goal (Goal setting you see..:) )

Google describe The Google Analytics Individual Qualification (or Google Analytics IQ) as “a proof of proficiency in Google Analytics that is available to any individual who has passed the Google Analytics IQ test”.

I totally agree with it.

This Saturday is a personal working day for me cos whole day I spent time in going through all the slides and @ 6 I thought of taking the test, as always I am super lucky!!! Power Cut (For one hour)

@7 I started test at last, and passed in flying 99%

After going through all the training material, GAIQ was not that difficult, but definitely there are few tricky questions.

Course Material was very comprehensive and would sure would not be able to make it in test without going through all the slides.

Though I am kind of happy to see 99% scored, I am still unhappy for not having a badge or a kind of logo to say I am a qualified professional (just like Omniture have)

About Google Analytics Individual Qualification (GAIQ):

“Google Analytics Launches Individual Qualification Program” we heard this on March 3, 2009. This was mainly created program to display proficiency in Google Analytics.

I had actually promised writing about Implementation on Mobile Analytics using Omniture SiteCatalyst as a Web analytics solutions, But due to time constraints I couldn’t managed to write on it, But I will definitely will write about it actually its on queue : )

Well without disappointing this time something on Web Analytic Metrics, We normally get the request from our partners to enable MUVs ( Monthly unique visitors)  to some of the specific reports however most of the time we push them to use DUVs (Daily Unique visitors) instead of MUVs, specially if its support sites.

There is couple of reason for this,

• For me DUVs and MUVs are just numbers to watch the trend month over month for particular section of the website (you know even Avinash is also not too fond of Daily Unique Visitors : ) )
• It drives cost to the company in enabling this additional metrics to any reports.

For this reason we normally ask what is the business value that’s going to drive using MUVs in particular report, believe me 99% of them didn’t had any reason other then just watching the trend of the unique visitors.

If you ask me, Visits, Unique Visitors (Daily or monthly) are just number to watch the trend and the number of people visiting the website, that is they are not an Action Driving metric (A perfect example for Action driven metrics is Bounce Rate - A sexist web metric - Avinash Says : ) )

Due to frequent request, for MUVs (Monthly unique visitors) we have decided to enable DUVs (Daily unique visitors) for whom it requests and educate them to “Estimate” Monthly unique visitors, its little tricky here, it’s just an estimated number of Monthly unique visitors but might not be accurate.

Let’s see how in simple calculation we can calculate Monthly unique visitors using Daily unique visitors.

Assume you need MUVs in most popular site section report, however it has only DUVs enabled, here are the simple steps to add calculated metric MUVs

1. Pull Daily Unique Visitors for one month (site level)
2. Pull Monthly Unique Visitors for one month (site level)
3. Calculate the ratio of between them.
4. Pull the report where you need to MUVs from DUVs 
5. Calculate Estimated MUVs metric by Multiplying DUVs by Average ratio created in #3

1.      Pull Daily Unique Visitors for one month (site level)

2. Pull Monthly Unique Visitors for one month (site level)

3. Calculate the ratio of between them.

i,e Ratio = MUVs/DUVs

4. Pull the report where you need to MUVs from DUVs
5. Calculate Estimated MUVs metric by Multiplying DUVs by Average ratio created in #3

Have a look at the difference between the actual and the estimated Monthly Unique visitor, its negligible or I would say it’s acceptable anywhere between 10 to 20% of discrepancy.

Please drop in your comments just in case if we have better way of calculating Monthly Unique Visitors or if you feel calculation displayed above is wrong or your recommendations if any.

Note: This was not my orgninal idea, it was proposed by my co-partner who is a program manager.

I had a request within my company to instrument Form Analysis plug-in, so I thought why not I write about the measuring form performance or the term “Form Analytics”,

• What is a form? What are its key issues
• What to measure while doing the form analysis (to know about causes of failure or the reason for abandonment of form?)
• Solutions to track form interactions
• Setup and Configuration of Form analysis plug-in
• And the Usage part of form analysis.

What is a form? What are its key issues

Form is a bridge between the user and the site owner or just a info collecting junction from the visitors or in a bit technical terms Form is just the bucket or the bowl which has many elements used to collects the data from the user, and form has to be organized such way user should feel happy about filling it up rather it should be projected in such a way user should fill in completely.

Normally, you must have seen there is lot about the analysis, tips, benefits suggestion on most of the web analytics concepts however you must have not observed clubbing all the above along with the implementation and instrumenting part of it, lets see how well I could put forward the combination of both.

Form filling is of one of the checkpoint or the lead generation stage for most of the website, wherein form has to be clearly optimized to generate the lead i.e. it should be projected in such a way user should not get bugged up in filling rather they should fill it in no time with out compromising in collecting the relevant data. This makes analyzing the form more comprehensively where its border line in making use to convert from pre sales to post sales.

Through form we tend to learn lot about the user, what they need and what they are looking, it’s most necessary to make them to fill the required form with in the website and this is the issue/challenge here and we are trying to analyze how quick and how much easy we can make the user to fill the forms.

What do we need to measure while doing the form analysis (to know about causes of failure or the reason for abandonment of form?)

This is a good question, here is where we need to make the decision, we need to decide what to capture to take a better action on optimizing the form lets break this into different parts,

1. What we need from the form? or who have actually filled it?
2. Possible reason for not completing the form or Why user just Abandoned it,
3. Form look and feel.

So generically, we need to know why the form left unfilled and also why it was completed (you must be surprised to see this question have a look into below description)

1. What we need from the form or analyzing who have actually filled it.

If we get the successful form completion that’s not the end and don’t think you have achieved perfection.

There is lot many questions need to be answered even after form is filled completely like,

• Time Taken in filling up the complete form
• Have they filling it sequentially? Or randomly, which form element was filled first.
• Have the user filled the entire form element or anything left out which was kind of optional.

Above details would be much helpful in further optimizing complete form.

2. Possible reason for not completing the form or Why user just Abandoned it,

Again you need to know what could be possible reason in not filling the form completely,

• Technical problem? Like browser compatibility issue? etc.
• Length of the form, too much of field elements.
• Naming conventions, good labeling of each of the field is also important.
• May be even the security issue.

3. Form look and feel.

Presentation is amazingly important wherever you go and whichever field you take, for should look beautiful for user to complete it.

Solutions to track form interactions

Keeping all the above questions, reasons and analysis in mind, we need the web analytics solutions to track all the user interaction within the form and that’s the need of the plug-in to the existing solution.

As I am currently working on the Omniture SiteCatalyst Solution, it has a plug-in for form analysis which you can add to existing code, you might have to request this plug-in from your omniture account manager.

Setup and Configuration of Form analysis plug-in

As I had mentioned above you need to request for Form analysis plug-in from your account manager, insert into your JavaScript file.

There are 2 sections in the plug-in,

• Configuration section.
• Function definition section.
• Form Testing
• Metrics

Configuration section

You need to decide, whether data need to tracked into traffic reports or the commerce reports and set the config variable accordingly. Under commerce you can measure mainly three events a. Abandon, b. Success, c. Error. Based on the decision on viewing the reports (Traffic or Commerce) configuration code will get changed.

Three main configuration variables useCommerce - set to be true if you are using commerce reports, varUsed - need to be set with all the variables used to populate for example prop or eVar variables and eventList - if commerce is used then event list needs to be triggered on success, abandon or error.

Function definition section

On any event like Success, Abandon or Error you have to call below function,

For example if the user while filling the credit card details enters 10 digits instead of 16 then you can call the plug-in function along with the details like error type, page name, form name and description of the error.

sendFormEvent( error_type, page_name, form_name, element_error)

Form Testing

Have a look at the below image, you can see event3 is triggered on successful submission of the form and eVar1 is used to fill the details.

Click on the image for clear picture.

Metrics/Reports

Click on the image for clear picture.

And the Usage part of form analysis

Here the main theme is to provide the comprehensive analysis of each of the users or a bigger picture of information on Success and Failures of the form filling.

Main metrics I would recommend to collect is

• Time Spend in filing the form
• Any unfilled elements
• What stage user abandoned the form?
• Rate of abandonment.

Updated:

1. I have found some of the interesting article that was published on form analytics, one which was impressed me was from Click Tale but I am not sure how difficult to implement it to get those details of data.

2. I have also found the way of implementing of form optimization in one of the article which might interests one who is using Google Analytics as the web analytics solution  “Optimize Form Length with Input Analysis“