How to use digital analytics tools such as Google Analytics to find out where your users are failing

1. Tracking Gaps In the User
Experience
Charles Meaden
Digital Nation

2. The Very Brief Intro
• Been involved in web analytics for 20 years
• Run a small agency specialising in analytics and usability based in Swansea

3. Great Quote
Ease of use may be
invisible, but its absence
sure isn’t.
IBM

4. The Flow

5. The Blockages

6. It’s A Combination of Things
• Websites often fail due to multitude of issues
• The whole experience is death by a thousand cuts
• Aggregation of marginal gains

7. Analytics Will Get You Halfway There
• Properly configured, it’ll tell you where you have an issue
• Can’t necessarily tell you the important

8. Look at Device Type
• Mobile has 38% of all traffic
• Bounce rate is at 41%
• Conversion rate is just 0.69%
• Clearly an issue with mobile and good place to start

9. Browser and Browser Version
• Don’t just look at browser
• Look at browser and browser version
• Remember Internet Explorer 8?
– Visitors were seeing this at the checkout!
–
• Estimated loss of revenue was £75,000 a month

10. Funnels and Funnel Flow
• Statement of the bleeding obvious….
• Gives you place to start looking for gaps
• If using Google Analytics, don’t stop the at the default goals
• Make friends with the API
• Learn how to use tools such as Analytics Edge

11. Funnels and Funnel Flow

12. 404 Error Pages
• At the very least track the referrer page
• Segment against channel
• Calculate how many are entrances to your site
• Look outside your analytics
– Crawl the site with ScreamingFrog
– Use tools such as Textpipe to crawl log files for errors

13. Failed Search Terms
• Capture search terms which generated zero search results
• Analyse these to understand
– Are they phrases your users use to describe your products
– Are they for services you don’t (yet) offer
• You can then finetune your search engine
• At the same time, analyse all your search terms for their effectivness

14. Error Messages
• Capture the error messages on all your forms as events
• Youcanquicklyseewherepeoplearehavingissues

15. LiveChat Interactions
• Where are people initiating the sessions
• What questions are they asking?
• Are they things that are not clear on the site?

16. Track Incoming Phone Calls
• At the very least assign a unique phone number to the website
• Ideally assign a unique number to each campaign
• Get whoever answers the phone to make a note of common questions

17. Navigational Choices
• If you can track which navigational elements people selected
• Are people selecting
– Menus
– Images
– Links in the body text
• What are the most post popular choices
• What elements are people ignoring

18. Toast: Case Study – Home Page

19. Toast: Case Study – Filters

20. Navigated To Pages
• Which pages are your visitors choosing not to visit
• Simple to calculate
– Unique Page views minus entrances

21. Track Timings
• Are there any pages that
people less time on than
expected?
• Use page speed reports to
determine whether some
pages are slower than
others
– Set the sample rate at
10% of higher
• Look into user timings to
understand how long it
people to complete a
certain task
• Read
Tracking Conversion Duration in Google Analytics

22. Track When Things Go Wrong
• Track key events such as logins
• Vonage clearly didn’t
• UseIntelligencealertstospotwhenissueshappen
• Orbuildyourown

23. Heat Maps and Screen Recordings
• Use a tool such as HotJar, Crazy Egg or Decibel Insight

24. Ask Your Users Why
• Context Sensitive Questions
• Post Sale Survey Questions
– Why did you choose to buy from us
today
– Is there anything that might have
prevented you from buying

25. Thank you and get in touch
Email charles@digitalnation.co.uk
Twitter @charlesmeaden
LinkedIn https://uk.linkedin.com/in/charlesmeaden