How to create insights from consumers’ click histories

Without any action behind it, data is just a bunch of numbers. Clickstream data is particularly valuable, providing insights about what consumers are doing.

Data alone does not lead to insights. Analyzed data backed by a hypothesis and placed in the right context, on the other hand, does.

Clickstream information is a particularly good set of data for marketers to examine if they want to understand their customers better and connect with them based on their actions.

The many benefits of clickstream data

With clickstream data, you can examine not only how customers are interacting with your brand, but also what they are doing before and after they arrive at your site.

Clickstream information is based on consumers’ actual click and browsing behaviors, with records of click-throughs and URLs visited collected in the order they occurred, giving marketers important, industrywide insight into online behavior, the customer journey through the funnel, and user experiences.

Rather than providing simple numbers of visits or sales, clickstream information reflects consumer behavior based on their activity and identifies areas companies could improve where the competition might be doing it better.

The insights garnered from clickstream data may not always match your hypothesis, but they are always useful if you ask the right questions.

Don’t collect data just because numbers are nice to fall back on. Instead, focus on collecting information like click history that is directly tied to your business objectives and key performance indicators.

Identify what you want to learn, and focus your collection and analysis on that specific data subset.

Make the most of your clickstream data

Creating actionable insights out of your data is essential to portraying a full and accurate picture of the customer journey. Maximize the effectiveness of your clickstream analysis by employing these three tactics:

1. Have a hypothesis

This is a minimum requirement for a data project to be efficient and lead to insights. Without a hypothesis, you’re just wasting time. The more specific you are in your data requests, the easier it is for your data team to pinpoint exactly what they need to pull, analyze, and provide.

You don’t have to be sure of the outcome, and the data may prove you wrong, but that’s OK. Just be sure your data team enters a project focused and that they reach a conclusion.

Let’s say you run a display campaign to drive awareness and clicks to your own site for a product. If you sell that product through third-party distributors, like Amazon or Target, your hypothesis might be that your display campaign is influencing purchase behavior and conversions on these third-party sites. Without clickstream data, it’s very hard to connect those two pieces and prove or disprove this hypothesis.

2. Tie your analysis to KPIs

Your analysis might reveal plenty of information about how consumers reach and interact with your brand or with your competition, but not all information yields actionable insights. You might find that consumers searching your website tend to search three times. That’s interesting, but you don’t gain real insights from it without understanding how their search activity affects their subsequent behavior or how it differs from consumer search activity on competitors’ sites.

Structuring your hypothesis and analysis around KPIs diminishes the risk of reaching insights that are not actionable. If your leading KPI is, say, trial subscriptions, look into the trial conversion flow of your competitors, and reverse engineer their customer journey through the funnel to detect conversion and abandonment trends at each step.

If the vast majority of consumers bounce during step three of five on your site (but not on your competitors’ sites), test out consolidation steps to improve the user experience and increase conversions.

3. Identify your output goals

Without a clear goal for what you intend to do with clickstream data, you cannot transform it into actionable insights. Are you studying customer journeys to optimize conversions or user experience? Are you looking for details about PR or case studies to grow brand awareness and generate leads?

Answering these questions and setting intentions for your data will help you in many ways, from filtering data requests from the get-go to guiding your thought process when focusing your data request and analysis.

By analyzing customers’ online actions – clicks, purchases on other sites, and their browsing history — with specific output goals, you reveal a world of insight into how they interact with your brand’s web properties, your competition, and how they react to your offering.

Don’t collect clickstream data just for the sake of collecting it. Understand what you want to investigate and how you can benefit from it. Make sure it’s relevant to your company, and then analyze clickstream data to better understand your customers’ actions and optimize their experience.

Marketers need to go beyond just the numbers and patterns that data provides if they want to successfully understand and connect with consumers. Focusing on customer actions will lead to a better understanding of your audience and what resonates with them, increasing the success of your marketing efforts and, ultimately, creating a better business.

This is an abridged version of an article published earlier this week on our sister site ClickZ.

from https://searchenginewatch.com/2016/07/01/how-to-create-insights-from-consumers-click-histories/

From http://kateninablog.tumblr.com/post/146772966049

source https://jessicaevieblog.wordpress.com/2016/07/01/how-to-create-insights-from-consumers-click-histories/

How to use images to bring real world credibility to your digital presence

We all know the importance of imagery, especially on mobile. However, the focus on icons and the fear of oversized pages has caused many designers to forget the power of pictures.

The right emotive photograph of the right proportions that loads rapidly is a fantastic way to bring your offline identity in a homogenous digital world.

In the physical world, many people love (or love the idea of) shopping in independent shops – music shops, fashion, books, surf shops, bicycles, delicatessens etc. – eating in independent restaurants and/or staying in independent hotels. There’s some joy in their individuality, expertise, quirkiness, familiarity. However, this differentiation often fails to translate into the digital world.

This is particularly the case in retail. Too often websites are simply a list of products, often the same or similar products as can be found on plenty of other retailers… sometimes at a better price, with little (bar a logo) to express the retailer’s unique selling proposition (USP) that is so evident offline.

A perfect picture is worth a thousand words

On the high street consumers are attracted into stores, restaurants, bars by what they see. The façade, name, logo, and any call-to-action, e.g. 50% off all helps gain attention, but mostly it is what we see inside.

This is why all shops and many other establishments have big windows. Sometimes it’s just a showcase window display, but often the window provides the opportunity to gaze into the soul and grasp the identity of the place.

It is this unique identity that most websites lack online and really lack on mobile.

Take a look at the mobile site of Daunt Books below. That photograph of the flagship London store tells you more about this retailer than any “about” section, review or product catalogue.

It’s there: front and center, whatever the device. You don’t need to ever have visited the real store to know this isn’t Amazon, Walmart, Tesco or Barnes & Noble.

Daunt Books is not a perfect mobile experience, but it is considerably better than many independent retailers (plenty of chains also) and, with those images, it is certainly one of the most elegant.

If you’ve got it, should you flaunt it?

So while we’re shopping in London, let’s visit the iconic department store Liberty. The image below shows the different experiences that greet the visitor to the physical store and to the mobile site. To find a picture of the store on the mobile site you need to look in the location tab.

Then let’s skip across the channel to Paris, to compare the gorgeous interior of Galeries Lafayette, pictured below, with its digital presence.

As you visit more sites of the world’s iconic department stores, it quickly becomes clear that they have all taken the decision to focus solely on product, with a utilitarian (though ironically not always user friendly) mobile web presence.

Try this: put your finger over the logo on any site (web or mobile), would you recognize the site? Is there anything that gives a hint of retailer’s real world physical presence, heritage or brand? Is there anything that demands: when I’m in New York, I’m going straight to this store?

Try Bergdorf Goodman, Bloomingdale’s, or any other of New York’s temples to shopping.

Does this matter?

It seems surprising, when you have an iconic physical presence not to capitalize on it online, just to remind the customer of the heritage. But these department stores have strong brands, perhaps they feel the logo (with the look and feel of the site) is all that is required to give customers a sense of place, belonging and loyalty.

And of course, you can be sure that every retailer has conducted methodical tests to see what works best with mobile customers. Right?

But what about smaller stores, that aren’t such well-known brands?

Pick a list, any list.

Here’s the test.

Everybody loves a “best of” list. Best hotels in Singapore. Best restaurants in Berlin. The best surf shops in the world. Best coffee, boutique, pubs… whatever your poison.

All best of lists have a tried and tested format.

• Name of store/outlet/place
• Photo of store
• Description of store
• Name of store
• Photo of store
• Etc…

For example, take a look at: America’s 15 Greatest Independent Record Stores  according to Gear Patrol. This was chosen purely at random for this test.

Record stores are great example because they look fantastic in photos, even if you are not a big fan. If you are a fan… you can almost smell the vinyl. But all sorts of outlets look great in a good photograph, inside or storefront: skateboards mountain bikes, shoes, garden nurseries, bars, restaurant, hotels… That’s why we love the tried-and-tested list format.

The question is: when you tap through to this outlet that looked so great in the physical world, do you get a mobile (or PC) experience as compelling that image? Because, let’s face it, no normal person is going to physically visit 15 record stores from San Francisco to Brooklyn; but plenty of people might indulge in a little m-commerce.

The image below shows a screenshot of our record store list on the left (a tablet view, much reduced), with screenshots from various examples, good and bad, mobile friendly and not, from the sites to which the list linked (the screenshots are taken on a Samsung S6, but iPhone 6 looks similar using Mobilizer, which is a freemium tool).

How to research

Conduct tests repeatedly on all best of lists you can find. You can use directory services such as Yelp or TripAdvisor, but these are less fun or interesting than random curated lists.

The test:

• Pick lists related to, and unrelated to, your business.
• Try best in the world and by country, city – not just your own.
• Conduct it on a mobile devices – ideally more than one type of device.
• Don’t just do it on WIFI, do it at the bus stop, on the train, in the pub.
• Rate each sites on immediate impact. Does it grab your attention and draw you in? Why?
• Did the images make the site slow to load? Enough time to make you bored?
• Do images justify the real estate they take up on the screen?
• Then conduct a more thorough investigation.
• Then back up your findings with user testing.

Mobile as a brochure for your real world experience

Arguably it is even more important to capture the essence of your physical presence, if mobile (and digital) is a vehicle to drive and/or pay for visits to your business in the real world.

If you are in the any of the following kinds of businesses, it’s not just a very good idea, it is, arguably, an imperative to use powerful, compelling imagery:

• Hotels, restaurants, bars and clubs.
• Museums and galleries.
• Entertainment e.g. sports centers, bowling, ice skating.
• Shopping centers.
• Locations – countries, cities, neighborhoods, parks, beaches.

Not only do customers need to know what they are committing to/purchasing, i.e. is it their sort of place, people, good time; but also what the place actually looks like, so they can find it.

The following image shows four mobile experiences for the first five featured on Top 10 Museums and Galleries according to National Geographic. Two of the five, Le Louvre, Paris, France; and The Acropolis Museum, Athens, Greece (not pictured) lacked a mobile-friendly presence.

The homepages of The Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. USA; State Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia; and The British Museum, London, England all suggest quite different approaches to mobile – including use of imagery.

Now let’s look at hotels:

The following image shows the four results randomly chosen from Top 10 good-value hotels in Singapore according to The Guardian.

The images are iPhone 6 screenshots using Mobilizer. While all sites appeared to be mobile-friendly, Mobilizer found some of the sites slow to load and other sites on the Guardian list impossible to load. This may indicate some usability issues, which may or may not be caused by the images used.

Is your picture worth its weight/wait in gold?

A quick test of the four museum sites highlighted above using the excellent WebPagetest revealed that the best performer over a mobile network (at the time of the test) was the homepage of The Smithsonian. Looking at the images you might guess that, but the other results were less predictable.

• The Smithsonian had a mobile load time of 2.3 seconds.
• British Museum: 4.1 seconds.
• The Louvre: 5.8 seconds.
• State Hermitage: 13.3 seconds.

With the exception of Smithsonian, the WebPagetest results suggested that one of the issues was images and suggested compressing the images should improve performance for all three.

Images will always come at a small cost when it comes to performance on a mobile network. It is essential to test your site to check that images are not causing unnecessary delay to page load. Consumers are becoming increasingly intolerant of slow mobile sites, so you must take measures to identify and reduce performance lag.

It is absolutely imperative that you test. Read this guide to testing the mobile-friendliness and performance of your site.

The following tools will help expose any issues, including image problems:

• Site Speed Data tool in Google Analytics.
• SEMRush
• Google Mobile Usability Report.
• https://mobile1st.com/
• Google Mobile-friendly test.
• Bing Mobile Friendliness Tool.
• Google PageSpeed Insights.
• http://www.webpagetest.org

It is absolutely imperative that you also user test to establish if your imagery works with the users and if it justifies any latency in page performance. Read this guide to how to user test.

Among other measures, you should:

• Use onsite and remote user testing.
• A/B testing.
• Heatmaps, such as Clicktale.

Read the full report: DNA of a Great M-Commerce Site Part 1: Planning 

from https://searchenginewatch.com/2016/07/01/how-to-use-images-to-bring-real-world-credibility-to-your-digital-presence/

From http://kateninablog.tumblr.com/post/146772965639

source https://jessicaevieblog.wordpress.com/2016/07/01/how-to-use-images-to-bring-real-world-credibility-to-your-digital-presence/

Five most interesting search marketing news stories of the week

Look, I’ll level with you, I’ve pretty much just spent the week staring open mouthed at the internet while one more UK political crisis collapses into the next. You probably have too.

It may not have affected your work, but you’ve probably felt less of a need to bingewatch anything particularly dramatic on Netflix.

So basically this is all the latest search-related news that you may have missed over the last week, and frankly nobody would have blamed you if you had. Heck, Google could have announced a new line of sentient killer robots built suspiciously like Arnold Schwarzenneger and nobody would have noticed.

Well hey, let’s see what happens…

Facebook tightens its News Feed algorithm again, publishers feel the pinch

In what is the equivalent of a bank manager shouting at “lousy freeloaders” and emptying a bag of broken glass onto the ground to stop them from sleeping in the doorway, Facebook has strengthened its News Feed algorithm in order to show users fewer posts from publisher pages.

But, as this Buzzfeed article puts it so eloquently, it has been a public vote – and one against seeing more news.

Sure you can argue that Facebook is merely doing this to generate ad revenue from branded pages, but ultimately if its 1.65 billion users aren’t engaging directly with published news content, then it’s not doing Facebook any favours to keep it at the top of News Feeds.

Well that’s depressing. Don’t worry, there’s a 50 Cent Gif in a minute to cheer you up.

Google’s Keyword Planner tool became even more inaccurate

As Chris Lake reported this week, the numbers in Google Keyword Planner have always been somewhat vague, as they’re often rounded up and end with at least one zero.

Sadly these numbers will become even less precise in the very near future as Google has begun combining related terms, pooling them all together and reporting one larger number instead.

“You longer can you separate the data for keyword variants, such as plurals, acronyms, words with space, and words with punctuation. As such it would be easy to get a false impression of search volumes, unless you’re aware of the change”

The most common backlinks are natural

In Glen Allsop’s recent analysis of 1,000 search results, he discovered which kinds of links are most valuable for high rankings.

Natural (or earned) links top the chart of most common backlinks:

The research also found that the volume of backlinks does not correlate with ranking, but the variety of linking domains and longer word counts do help.

Check out the complete research here: State of Link Building 2016.

Google’s local 3-pack may now include paid listings

As reported in SEJ this week, Google’s organic listings may begin showing ads for certain localised searches.

Here’s the crappy photo I took of the presentation showing the 3-pack with 1 ad. #SMX #SMXLocal pic.twitter.com/LwCnc2WHPl

— Joy Hawkins (@JoyanneHawkins) June 21, 2016

As SEJ lead news reporter Matt Southern suggests:

“The ramifications of this change mean that any business can become featured in the local pack just by paying their way to get there. That’s good news for advertisers, but could spell bad news for local businesses who have worked hard to earn a spot in the 3-pack.”

Goodbye crappy lyric sites, Google has taken over

If you’re a regular searcher of song lyrics, they will now be served directly on Google SERPs thanks to a multi-year deal between Google and Toronto-based lyric licensing company LyricFind.

It has already begun…

Although Google horning in on anybody’s racket is normally something to be wary of, this is actually quite a good development, as lyrics websites are pretty awful and awash with horrible advertising.

Sadly it doesn’t have the lyrics to 2 Unlimited’s ‘No Limits’ yet, but that’s probably understandable.

from https://searchenginewatch.com/2016/07/01/five-most-interesting-search-marketing-news-stories-of-the-week-3/

From http://kateninablog.tumblr.com/post/146772964904

source https://jessicaevieblog.wordpress.com/2016/07/01/five-most-interesting-search-marketing-news-stories-of-the-week-3/

Top 5 Reasons Why People Share Content On Facebook by @DannyNMIGoodwin

Why people share content on Facebook, and how can you use this information to ensure you’re creating the right types of content for your target audience.

The post Top 5 Reasons Why People Share Content On Facebook by @DannyNMIGoodwin appeared first on Search Engine Journal.

From http://tracking.feedpress.it/link/13962/3769090

source https://jessicaevieblog.wordpress.com/2016/07/01/top-5-reasons-why-people-share-content-on-facebook-by-dannynmigoodwin/

Where SEO and User Experience (UX) Collide by @stoneyd

User experience (UX) is critical in today’s SEO, and there are a number of best practices to apply for optimum website performance.

The post Where SEO and User Experience (UX) Collide by @stoneyd appeared first on Search Engine Journal.

From http://tracking.feedpress.it/link/13962/3766938

source https://jessicaevieblog.wordpress.com/2016/07/01/where-seo-and-user-experience-ux-collide-by-stoneyd/

Erica McGillivray on Nurturing and Growing a Community #MarketingNerds

In this Marketing Nerds episode, Erica McGillivray of Moz talks about nurturing and growing a community around your brand, as well as its benefits.

The post Erica McGillivray on Nurturing and Growing a Community #MarketingNerds appeared first on Search Engine Journal.

From http://tracking.feedpress.it/link/13962/3765426

source https://jessicaevieblog.wordpress.com/2016/07/01/erica-mcgillivray-on-nurturing-and-growing-a-community-marketingnerds/

AMP: Above and beyond

Want to know more about Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)? Columnist Max Prin recaps a session from SMX Advanced 2016 featuring John Shehata of Condé Nast and Google’s Rudy Galfi, product manager for the AMP Project.

Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.

From http://feeds.marketingland.com/~r/mktingland/~3/YcMGH8y4BCw/amp-above-and-beyond-182814

source https://jessicaevieblog.wordpress.com/2016/07/01/amp-above-and-beyond/