A guide for anyone in ecommerce or D2C interested in analysing their digital performance in order to drive growth.

Book Summary: YOUR NUMBER’S UP!

Get a grip on data and measurement to accelerate ecommerce sales

Who should read this book?

Heads of Ecommerce, Senior leaders in digital, Media teams, CRM teams Traders, Merchandisers, Content creators.?

If you work in direct-to-consumer (D2C) or are involved in or have responsibility for ecommerce, interested in the details (data and measurement) that will make a big difference then this book is for you (or a team member).

This is your reference manual for measuring your business at the front end.

Exec Summary

There’s?no short-cut to success. You have to focus on the finer details.

This book is not a difficult read and won’t require hours of reading to understand concepts, what to implement and where to focus your attention.

It’s split into 6 main chapters with sub-sections and there’s additional content in the Appendices.

Ultimately you want to be informed enough to be able to make a decision. Whether that’s about a product, a skew, a channel, a campaign, a piece of content, an affiliate, an audience, a segment, a partner/referrer, traffic, purchase behaviour, engagement behaviour, transactional behaviour. All of that is available to you if you spend a little time understanding it and following it through.

FULL SUMMARY

You don’t need to read the book end to end. If you want to better understand measuring campaign activity jump into that chapter. If you’re interested in how mature your business is in terms of its approach to measurement jump into chapter one. If you want to just know what Google Analytics gives you straight out of the box just read the appendices.

What follows is a high level overview of each chapter.

Introduction

There’s a foreword by Avinash Kaushik, Google’s Digital Marketing Evangelist.

The sections in the Introduction cover the basics; clarifying common terms, why you need to create a culture of measurement, the importance of digital as a percentage of total revenue, and an example of how the recent pandemic impacted traditional vs transitional companies.

Chapter 1 — No Half Measures

This chapter focuses on the measures themselves and presents a maturity model. It’s very easy to follow and if it’s not your responsibility directly you can ask the team that is, if any of what’s in the maturity section is in place e.g. are they doing that today?

1.1 The four levels of ecommerce maturity.

Covers the visibility of?Engagement?metrics,?Shopping?metrics,?Traffic?metrics and?Transaction?metrics, with measurement challenges.

1.2 Measurement maturity checklist

Presents a handy checklist so you can see what you’re already capturing and what you’re not and some key measurement challenges.

1.3 The four areas of ecommerce measurement maturity

This section looks at the four areas you should be concerned with;?Customer?(what they see and experience),?Brand?(it’s role in digital)?Business?(goals to improve growth) and?Evaluation?(how to review performance). The section finishes with the complete ecommerce measurement maturity model.

1.4 Understanding your measurement maturity — actions

Lists the 3 main action points for you to follow based on what’s in Chapter One. Always good to have a to-do list after you learn something.

Chapter 2— Wake up and smell the metrics

Here the book spells out the importance of taking action, not just reporting. May sound ridiculous but you’d be surprised how many businesses are great at reporting but rarely take the right action. It also highlights ‘who’ in the organisation should be involved and take action.

2.1 Your most important metric

Which is it? Do you know? How about?Lifetime Customer profit?

2.2 The four types of metric

Here they look at the 4 types of metrics;

Outcome?(those relating to revenue), Performance?(those related to sales behaviour — conversion rate/average order value), Behaviour?(those related to visisor actions — add to cart) and?Volume?(how visitors engage — visitor and brand).?And as it states not all information is created equal, some is informative and some is important.

2.3 Metric owners

Who should you involve and empower to take action? Those who are responsible for?Trading,?Merchandising,?Media?and?Content. nd don’t create too many actions across teams all at once.

2.4 Metric audiences

Leadership, Management?and?Operations. Different audiences within the organisation require different types of information to make a decision, so make it easy for them. Don’t make them wade through lots of detail trying to find what’s important.

2.5 Introducing the metrics

Overview of the metrics themselves and how they align to maturity level.

2.6 Metrics for traffic visibility | 2.7 Metrics for transaction visibility | 2.8 Metrics for shopping visibility | 2.9 Metrics for engagement visibility

These four sections provide very useful tables listing the metrics by category. That’s a lot of tables! Super useful if you’ve never done this kind of measurement. They’ll help you get to grips with important metrics fast.

2.10 Knowing the important metrics — actions

Lists the 3 main action points for you to follow based on what’s in Chapter One. These 3 action points appear at the end of each chapter and are a great way to drive you to take action.

Chapter 3— Analysis. Interpretation. Action!

3.1 The role of analysis

Now that you understand the maturity model you can dive into analysis. Actionable insight not factual observations, it’s good to know the difference and therefore what’s interpreted, what’s prioritised and what’s translated to which team to take action.

3.2 Seven steps to move from analysis to action

This section breaks down the 7 steps of analysis to action;?Define, Collect, Clean, Examine, Identify, Translate, Execute.?Who it’s owned by, what to do and examples to bring the definition to life.

3.3 A real world example

Provides a scenario with?objectives, analysis, interpretation?and?action?following the 40/40/20 rule.

3.4 Moving from analysis to execution — actions

Lists the 3 main action points for you to follow based on what’s in Chapter Three.

Chapter 4— The good, the bad and the benchmark

To better understand how you are performing over time you need benchmarks. Knowing what good looks like means you can make better decisions. A benchmark provides a stick in the sand from which to move on from. Additionally understanding how you match up against your competition will show you if the gap is shrinking, or growing.

4.1 Setting your benchmarks

How good is good? That’s what you’re trying to define.

4.2 Benchmarking device performance

One example is to look at device specific performance over time. Compare this change over time to understand if the specific device is over or under performing.

4.3 Benchmarking channel performance

See how the metrics have changed over time to understand if there is an issue with a specific channel.

4.4 Benchmarking market performance

Once your own benchmarking is up and running, start to compare your performance against the market.

4.5 Understanding trends

Using comparisons and filters will help you to understand performance, compare information and diagnose why things are happening so you prioritise changes. The section also has two tables; one of comparisons and one of filters.

4.6 Benchmarking to measure success — actions

Lists the 3 main action points for you to follow based on what’s in Chapter Four.

Chapter 5— The magic in metrics

Metrics are your gateway to identifying issues. Use them to diagnose where your focus needs to be and what action you need to take. Here it looks at three practical examples that bring this to life, for three different owners in the business.

5.1 Creating cross team insight

The best performing ecommerce businesses share knowledge across all teams so the insight is collectively known across the organisation. Here they start to bring to life the theory, looking at specific real world scenarios using some of the metrics identified in Chapter 2.

5.2 Analysing ecommerce scenarios

Using three real world scenarios to highlight how teams should work together and share insights. Listing challenge and owner.

5.3 Scenario 1: Increasing content impact

Each scenario is a short question with an answer which is swiftly followed up with detail that covers;?Observations, Diagnosis?and?Action?(Timing and Content).?This first scenario covers?Content.

5.4 Scenario 2: Generating sales

The next scenario covers Merchandising, a short question with an answer which again is swiftly followed up with detail that covers;?Observations, Diagnosis?and?Action?(Product and Pricing).

5.5 Scenario 3: Improving profit

This final scenario looks at Trading with detail that again covers;?Observations, Diagnosis?and?Action.

5.6 Using data to improve your performance — actions

Lists the 3 main action points for you to follow based on what’s in Chapter Five.

Chapter 6 — The art of measuring campaigns

Chapter 6 covers the meat of measuring campaigns using examples and checklists to provide a better understanding of those challenges. Introducing and demystifying the UTM code. It’s simple, easy to own, and you don’t need any technical knowledge. We break down why this code is crucial to any ecommerce business running campaigns and what happens when it is ignored.

6.1 Creating effective campaigns

Marketers control 2 things; who to target and the content that is created. In order understand why a campaign was effective or not you need to know and record the right information. What follows is a run down of those components.

6.2 The power of the UTM code

Your secret weapon. Google Analytics is brilliant with data it knows about (organic search, paid adverts), but it really struggles with data it doesn’t control (email, social, referrals, affiliates and non-Google display). The good news is it’s possible to tell Google about the sources of traffic by using UTM codes which are really lines of code which contain information on source, medium campaign and content and this is what this section covers including structuring your UTMs.

6.3 Measuring social media

Vanity is insanity. There is information you need to capture to ensure your sales-focused social media marketing activity is profitable and not just vanity which is listed as well as a top tip; Split your social media so you can measure paid vs organic social media activities.

There’s also Revenue and Profit funnel examples

6.4 Troubleshooting campaign challenges 6.5 challenge 1: email is missing

There’s an approach section that covers network, campaign and content followed by a section on observations for campaign and content using an example. It then goes on to talk about UTMs and provides a measurement checklist.

6.5 Challenge 1: Email is missing

There’s an approach section that covers validation, spotting the issue and impact, followed by a section on observations using an example. It then goes on to talk about UTMs and provides a email validation checklist.

6.6 Challenge 2: Social investment

There’s an approach section that covers network, campaign and content followed by a section on observations for campaign and content using an example. It then goes on to talk about UTMs and provides a measurement checklist.

6.7 Measuring campaigns effectively — actions

Three actions for measuring campaigns effectively.

Appendices

The appendices contain additional insight including a list of current hot topics, results from some primary research and a table of what comes as standard in Google Analytics (not GA 4)

Hot Topics

Some primary research was undertaken during the writing of the book speaking to people currently working in ecommerce and digital.

The aim was to decipher buzzwords and to provide a measurement perspective on specific hot topics with regard to ecommerce measurement and maturity. The book suggests before you start your measurement journey, to take a look at some of the hot topics and ensure you have your measurement approach in place.

Research findings

In addition to the interviews which helped form the hot topics, they undertook some survey based research with 124 respondents across Europe and North America. The results of which are presented in the appendix. The audience groups were based on digital revenue as a percentage of total revenue.

Google analytics — standard vs custom metrics

Google Analytics out of the box will not give you some of the metrics you need to make informed decisions. In this section we have outlined each of the metrics and which ones are available as standard from Google Analytics (not GA 4), and which ones you will need to spend time on gathering the data.

Ultimately this is book is very simple to follow and understand. High in graphical content and with lots of examples to make it easy for anyone that wants to get more out of their data and analytics in order to drive ecommerce sales.

The book is available in print in the UK and USA and digital EPUB via the?website?and through?Amazon?and?Google Books.

Article originally published on my Medium account here