How to work on your Digital Measurement Strategy?
Imran Kapadia
Marketing Lead | Digital Performance Marketing | Google Black Belt | Growth Hacker | SEO | SEM | E-commerce | Analytics | PPC | CRM | Affiliates | CRO | Media | Marketing
To be honest Digital Measurement Strategy is one of the most underestimated and least talked about topic in the digital industry.
Every brand that has a digital store, website or app should have a clear digital measurement strategy.
But sadly that does not happen in the real world.
Why is it so important to measure?
According to Peter Drucker if you cannot measure anything you will not be able to manage it and if you cannot measure it how can you expect to optimize it?
The most effective way to initiate this is by taking the following steps;
- Identifying your business objectives
- Understanding your consumer journey
- Tracking the entire website Journey and tracking the right things
You can start this by using the Ring Model.
What is Ring Model?
In simplest terms;
The Ring Model is the quickest and most effective way to identify where your biggest leaks are.
If you cannot understand why someone is dropping off from your website? You cannot optimize it
Why is your bounce rate high on some pages? You cannot optimize it.
In order to understand all this, you need to have a correct measurement strategy in place so you can measure the right things, identify the real issues and optimize them timely.
Rather than shooting in the dark.
The Ring Model was developed by Craig Sullivan, it is a way to look at the ‘layers’ or ‘levels’ reached.
It works for many (but not all) websites. It focuses on the depth of engagement, not pages viewed but gives you a perspective so you can focus at the right place and sort out your priorities.
It’s similar to a funnel as it helps you see the key loss steps. The objective is to help you see the macro picture.
If you have developed a beautiful website following all the best practices but you are not getting conversions from you paid and organic activities.
- This will help you identify where your users are bouncing off.
- It will highlight you where the traffic is stuck.
- Focusses your attention to the exact area that needs the most help.
How can you use Ring Model?
You can use Google Analytics report to develop it:
Behavior -> Site Content -> All pages.
You will need to use a to-fold strategy here:
- Map out your website's traffic flow per each layer (and see where the flow is stuck)
- Most importantly please verify whether the goal funnel has been configured properly. (You will need to run a Google Analytics Health check to verify this)
How can you develop it?
From an analytics perspective, this flow is actually the manual development of a funnel.
By doing this manually instead of using funnel reports in GA, you’re making sure the data is correct.
Especially in cases when:
- Goals have no data, unreliable and broken
- Flows are mixed in funnels (mid-stage joiners) happens with e-commerce brand a lot
- The data you actually need does not exist
For example Here’s the flow:
You need to start with a manual walkthrough of the website to map out the URL structure.
You need to understand the entire URL Structure first.
If the URL structure is not specific about the type of the page (e.g. */product/*, */category/*, etc), in that case, make sure to start tracking virtual page views for the same types of pages.
If you run an eCommerce site, layers might look something like this:
- Home or Landing Page
- Category + Search Page
- Product Page
- Add to Cart
- Checkout steps (Depending on your checkout complexity and payment options)
- Checkout completed
Also, Count the unique pageviews per layer.
Go to Behavior -> Site Content -> All Pages report in Google Analytics and type the URL identifier of each layer to verify this
i.e. “/products/”, or “/cart/”, or “/checkout/step2/” or whatever pages they are depending on your website's journey and URL structure.
Check the numbers against what you see in Conversions -> Goals -> Funnel Visualization.
If you see discrepancies, the funnel has most likely been set up incorrectly.
I also take one more step here. I also cross verify the final purchases with backend report so I can understand that the most important event is being tracked correctly first.
You can use a visual representation to map this out or use a visual representation to understand it.
The above visual description will help you identify the most critical steps.
If you had 500k product page views, 10k add to carts, and 2k checkouts, where would your problem be?
Cart adds! maybe? You will need to do a deep dive to identify this by understanding where the biggest leaks are coming from and why?
If you had 300k product page views, 100k adds and 1k checkouts, you know your problem is in a different place.
Google Analytics Health Check
In most of the cases, all analytics configuration is not implemented correctly and is not working well so before you start to collect data please be sure that you check your analytics and set up according to your needs. This will require a detail Google Analytics Health Check. You can check out https://cxl.com/ for the analytics health check updates.
According to CXL Nearly all analytics configurations are broken
90% of setups either have insufficient tracking, or broken configurations. That is why this is very important.
Health checks are underestimated and are a very serious issue. Running with bad data renders all of your work useless and misrepresents what is actually happening on the website.
To summarize this: Health checks are a series of steps taken to sort your analytics.
Analytics and instrumentation checks that answer the following questions:
- “Does it collect what we need to measure?”
- “Can we trust this data?” Have you validated it? Are you sure this data is correct?
- “Where are the holes?”
- “Is there anything that can be fixed?” There are a lot of things you will come across when you will run a health check
- “Is anything broken?”
- “What reports should be avoided?” just a key tip here - measure what matters and measure what will help your cause only.
Funnels and Goal Flows
Goals and Funnels are very important.
You need to set up a funnel and measure drop-offs per each step. This is the easiest way to see where the website has the most issue. I have discussed this in my last conversion optimization update as well. This can greatly help you improve your conversion rate but for that, you need to measure the entire journey properly first.
The funnels will help you figure out where is the problem and then you can dive into details of problems by goal flows.
Way Forward
You can outsource this service to a third-party analytics expert or you can do it yourself but by having the right understanding of the client's goals.
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