Many companies, especially startups, come to us ready to “start marketing” or “testing channels.” However, most of the potential clients we speak with have not yet set themselves up to measure their user behavior properly. So they don’t know where they are losing customer – or why. As a result, they have often engaged in Acquisition activities such as PPC, SEO, Facebook Ads, or PR without first determining the correct success metrics, or getting a measurement system in place. After 15 years of doing this work, we believe engaging in marketing activities before Analytics is in place and the whole organization understands what constitutes success is a great way to waste lots of money. That’s why we have a standard protocol that we follow, to ensure all of our engagements move in the right direction from the very start.
1. Analytics Audit
The very first thing we do, before evaluating whether a potential client is a good fit for us, is to sign a mutual NDA and take a take a look at your current analytics setup. We’re mainly looking to see whether your analytics have been instrumented properly, what you’re measuring, what your Goals and Funnels looks like, and who consumes this data. About 90% of our prospective clients do not initially have their analytics optimally instrumented (!), and do not have a systematic process in place for management to review the right KPIs each week and each month.
2. Analytics Instrumentation & KPI Selection
If we don’t know where users or customers are dropping off, we won’t know how to improve things, or where to start. So before attempting to improve conversion rates, sales funnels, average order size, or any other KPI, it’s crucial for companies to ensure their websites, products, apps and call centers are instrumented properly. So we go ahead and do that.
In addition, we help you determine what specific Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) you should be measuring right now, based on your business and the stage your company is in. These KPIs should be reviewed (and often revised) quarterly, and yearly.
During instrumentation we interview your management team to understand what their analysis needs are, write custom event code, create Goals and Funnels, and create custom dashboards for different parts of your management team. For example, the CEO might be looking at KPIS across the business each month while the marketing manager might be looking at much more granular website conversion funnel data each week.
The initial audit, interviews, KPI selection, and instrumentation can take anywhere from 2 to 4 weeks depending on how many sites/products/apps we will be measuring, how much customization we will need to create, and how many stake-holders we need to interview.
Note: As a project the above audit and instrumentation, can run anywhere from $12,000 – $60,000. However, 75% of the time clients have us bundle this service in as part of a holistic Analytics, UX Research, CRO and A/B testing retainer.
3. Funnel Analysis – What should we fix?
Once we have your analytics instrumented correctly, we’ll typically collect at least 2-4 weeks of data to we quickly find where user experiences are broken and where users seem to drop off. It may be your mobile funnel. It may be your home page funnel. It may be in the middle of your checkout flow. It may be your French-speaking funnel. It may be that everyone does pretty well except for Safari users, which it turns out constitutes 28% of all of your visitors. Such is the value of proper analytics research. It tells you WHAT to fix first.
Passing the Baton
No matter where your site or app has friction, we will discover where the friction exists. However, discovering where users are experiencing friction and what they’re doing or not doing is only half of the story. If I know that 80% of my users drop off between step 2 and 3 in my primary funnel, it doesn’t necessarily explain why they choose to leave. Which brings us to the other critical aspect of our work: UX Research and Customer Development.
Any questions we can answer for you?
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