Google Analytics 4 vs Kissmetrics: Deep Dive

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Google Analytics logo vs Kissmetrics Logo

Unless you pay big bucks for Google Analytics (and most of us don’t), you’ll be forced to move to Google Analytics 4 (GA4) on or before July 1, 2023.  If your company has a website, you’re probably using Universal Analytics (UA), which will stop collecting data as of that date.

Unfortunately, GA4 is a huge change from UA, and it takes a lot of time and effort to set it up – our customers (and in-house engineers) tell us it took them a lot of swearing to get to “engagement” metrics. And what does “engagement” mean, anyhow? It’s just the time a user has your site or app in focus.

Most of our customers use Kissmetrics to track user behavior on their sites and in their products, and we wanted to know the real differences between our platform and GA4. 

Onboarding

If you’ve ever implemented an analytics tool, you know there’s no such thing as setting it up without swearing at all. But the amount of swearing you do vastly increases with GA4 over Kissmetrics.

Fundamentally, the amount of swearing comes down to (1) how confusing the setup is, and (2) how much support you get while you’re setting it up. 

GA4 Setup

GA4 setup is, well, confusing. And if you’re using Google Tag Manager (GTM), it’s even worse, since you can’t entirely auto-upgrade from GTM to GA4 – you have to configure a new snippet in GTM via GA4 to allow the upgrade. (That sentence alone is confusing enough.) If you’re using WordPress or another vendor, you’ll have another layer of conditional instructions, many of which actually contradict earlier instructions.

Let’s just say that our engineering team wasn’t in love with trying to get to GA4 with our WordPress/GTM environment.

Kissmetrics Setup

Setting up Kissmetrics for website tracking – while not completely painless (what analytics product is?) – has much clearer instructions. We’re not going to go into it in detail here, but it comes down to (1) install the JavaScript tracking code, (2) enable page views (unless your site is huge), and (3) tell Kissmetrics what to track.

Is it more complex to get SaaS product or e-commerce data into Kissmetrics? Yep. Reporting on more than just your website changes based on how you built your environment. But we’re talking about website tracking in this post, since that’s what most folks use GA for. 

Using the Tools

You’ll have very different approaches to using GA4 and Kissmetrics in your day-to-day work. GA4’s primary focus is on “engagement,” whereas Kissmetrics allows you to focus on answering business questions about your website and product.

Using GA4

In addition to “engagement,” GA continues to focus on user acquisition. Their primary out-of-the-box reports focus on new users by acquisition channel and other UTM parameters. They have a generalized “activity” report without any explanation of what “activity” is or a way to exclude certain activities. 

GA4 has other reports, like retention, top pages viewed, top events, and purchases by item name (that mysteriously still exists even when there are no purchases to report). These currently exist with limited organization and very limited filtering.

Using Kissmetrics

We designed Kissmetrics to be flexible and work for any business. As a result, it takes a bit longer to configure all the reports you’ll want to see, but you’ll find that you can answer much deeper business questions using Kissmetrics.

Kissmetrics will guide you to which kind of report works best for your business goal, and the reports are categorized based on what you’re trying to see (e.g., path, funnel, cohort, revenue).

screenshot of Kissmetrics' report guidance

Most of our customers spend a significant amount of time in Kissmetrics during high-intensity reporting seasons. Here are a few examples:

  • They’ll dig in to see how various channels and campaigns drive pipeline and revenue each quarter while they plan the next one. 
  • They’ll look at user paths and cohorts while they do customer journey analysis. 
  • They’ll check on A/B test results while running experiments. 
  • They’ll report on revenue when they want to look at business performance.

Things to consider when you’re deciding what tool to use:

  1. Scope: 
    • GA4 comes across as specifically focused on marketers who want to track “engagement” at the expense of everything and everyone else. 
    • Kissmetrics is extremely broad, allowing marketers, e-commerce managers, and product managers to drill down into whatever metric is most relevant for them.
  2. Ease of use:
    • GA4 gives you predefined reports and lets you toggle some limited parameters – useful for beginners
    • Kissmetrics gives you extreme flexibility, but very limited predefined reports – great for power users
  3. Speed vs. accuracy:
    • GA4 has quick-running, directionally-correct reporting on sampled data that may be inaccurate.
    • Kissmetrics reports on accurate (debuggable), complete data, but as a result has slower-running queries. If you like accuracy, patience wins. 
  4. Cost:
    • GA4 is free.
    • Kissmetrics starts at $299/month, although we give discounts for annual agreements. 

You can also look at our handy comparison grid of the two tools. You can try Kissmetrics for free or chat with us to see what features would be best for your business.

How to Measure the Success of Social Media Campaigns

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If you want your company to reach as many potential customers as possible, you need to maintain a presence on one or more social media platforms. Social media is a great way to interact with your current customers and advertise to new ones through social media campaigns.

But how can you measure the success of social media campaigns? Furthermore, what should you measure? Let’s start at the beginning.

What is a Social Media Metric?

Social media metrics are data points that measure the impact of social media activity on your company’s revenue and help you determine whether you’re achieving your social media goals with your current strategies. 

Some examples of common social media metrics include:

  • Follower count on a single platform like Instagram.
  • Number of impressions, or people who have viewed a single post.
  • Click-through rate if your post includes a URL.

Why it’s Important to Track Social Media Metrics

It is essential to track social media events using a behavioral analytics tool like Kissmetrics so that your marketing team can measure the success of their campaigns, how their strategies perform, and the overall impact of social media on your business. 

The Success of a Campaign

If the success of an individual campaign is the primary focus, it can be measured in a variety of ways. You can compare the content of one campaign versus another through an A/B test. You can analyze which social media platforms perform best with your target audience.

You can also generate individual URLs for each campaign and track which people are clicking through to reach your website’s landing page. 

From there, analytic tools like Kissmetrics can chart the user’s journey through your website and conversion rates, keeping all of your data in one place. 

Social Strategy Performance

Knowing how to portray your company across social media is crucial if your campaigns are to succeed. Even a well-crafted campaign on the right platform can fail if it doesn’t match your company’s social strategy. 

For example, if your company comes across as earnest and kind, a campaign that focuses on smearing a competitor is unlikely to appeal to your existing customer base. 

Impact on Overall Business

Higher-level executives may be wary of increasing the marketing budget, but if the team shows that they have significantly impacted sales, they’re more likely to be given greater access to necessary resources. So if your marketing team can present demonstrable results from their campaigns, it will be easier for them to create and promote the next one. 

Steps for Measuring Success of Social Media Campaigns 

Measuring the success of social media campaigns doesn’t have to be tricky. By utilizing an analytics tool like Kissmetrics, you can compile many different data points into a single report so that you can draw meaningful insights from the information coming in. 

The following steps show how to measure your campaign’s success. 

Set Goals

Depending on historical performance, your marketing strategies and the current size of your user or customer base, you should work with your marketing team to create realistic goals. 

Your goals could include increasing the number of followers on a platform, achieving a higher click-through rate on your individual posts, or promoting the posts so that more people see your company profile. 

Create Metrics for Measuring Goals

Once you have decided which goals you want to focus on, you’ll need to select the metrics that measure how effective your campaign is at achieving those goals. 

Monitor and Report

As the campaign proceeds, you should gather daily, weekly, or monthly reports that compile the data from your social media metrics and compare that data against your targets. If you find that you’ve fallen short during one timeframe, you should consider why users aren’t engaging and what improvements you can make. 

Optimize

As you continue to monitor your campaign, you might find that certain aspects could stand improvement. Luckily, it’s quite easy to create a new post and give it a separate URL so that you can track how much impact your changes had on your overall campaign. 

What to Measure

Knowing what to measure in your social media campaigns is the first part of deciding which KPIs to monitor. 

The following metrics are often the most important.

Engagement

Measuring engagement means looking to see how many people liked, shared, or commented on your social media post. Generally, when you create a post, the only people who will see it are your followers.

While this is a great way to interact with existing users or customers, the only way to expand your user and customer base is for followers to share your post with their followers or to pay the platform to promote your post. 

Impressions or Reach

Reach is essential for attracting new people. Ideally, your post’s reach far exceeds your follower count so that potential customers will become aware of your company and what you offer.

ROI

Depending on how much you’ve invested in the current campaign, you’ll want to calculate your return on investment (ROI) by measuring how much revenue you can tie to the campaign. 

Widespread campaigns with lots of interaction may not be profitable at the end of the day so you’ll want to know how to budget and optimize  future campaigns. 

Response Rate and Time

Response rate measures how quickly or often your company responds to users and increases interaction. When people expect your account to respond, they’re more likely to comment or ask questions on your posts. 

Just ensure that your team responds in a friendly and timely manner.  

What is a Key Performance Indicator (KPI)?

Any demonstrable means of assessing an item, service, client, employee, or company is referred to as a KPI. KPI’s have the following attributes:

  • They Are Key Indicators of Progress Towards the End Goal – The real-time data provided by KPIs lets you observe how the campaign is performing and how long it takes you to reach specified goals. 
  • They Focus on Strategic and Operational Improvement – By tracking your chosen KPIs, you can quantifiably measure where you need to improve so that you and your teams can plan strategies to address those issues. 
  • They Provide Analytical Basis for Decision Making – Decision-making should always be based on analytical data, instead of gut feelings. Seeing exactly how your campaign is performing is a much better indicator than just asking your marketing team how they feel about it. 

What are 5 Key Performance Indicators

The following KPIs provide relevant insights into how your business is progressing towards your goals. 

Revenue Per Customer

This is a simple and straightforward KPI to track. By dividing the total revenue per year by the number of customers enrolled, you get to the annual revenue per customer. This gives you a rough estimate of how much individual customers add to your revenue and can help you calculate how much you should be spending on customer acquisition costs (CAC). 

Average Class Attendance

For companies that offer fitness, education or other classes as a product, average class attendance is a good way to measure how many users are actually tuning into the classes their subscription is paid for. Full classes are likely to be the profitable ones as well as the result of a good instructor or course content. 

Retention Rate

Retention rate measures the percentage of customers who continue to use your products or services or maintain their subscription during a given timeframe.

Profit Margin

Your company’s profit margin during a campaign is usually one of the most important metrics. It is measured by adding up the total revenue attributed to the campaign and subtracting the costs involved in creating and promoting the content. 

Average Daily Attendance

Average daily attendance measures how many people utilize your product or service each day. 

Conclusion

When you spend time and effort planning a social media campaign, you want to monitor it throughout its entire lifecycle to ensure that it not only engages current and potential customers but that it also brings in revenue. Otherwise, it wasn’t successful. By measuring the right aspects of your campaign, you can optimize future efforts to promote your company and achieve your goals.

 

Visit Kissmetrics for more information about tracking social media campaigns and measuring their success. 

 

Sources:

What is a KPI? Definition, Best-Practices, and Examples | Klipfolio

All of The Social Media Metrics that Matter | Sprout Social

The 7 Most Important Social Media Marketing Metrics | Keyhole.co

Customer Lifetime Value: What is it and How to Calculate It

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One of the most critical KPIs for your company to track is your customers’ lifetime value (CLV). Customers are key for any business and knowing what your customers are worth is critical. Customer lifetime value is a perfect metric for companies looking to understand the potential each new client brings to the table.

What is Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)?

Your CLV is the calculation of how much money the average customer contributes to your company over the duration of their relationship with your company. This KPI is helpful for seeing how much each customer spends and determining the true value of gaining and keeping a new customer. 

Why is CLV Important?

Customer lifetime value gives your company important insight into the potential value of each customer, making forecasting a much easier process.  It’s critical for any business to understand what each customer is worth from a financial perspective. Customer lifetime value gives your company a clear view of the financial value provided by each customer. 

For instance, when looking at customer retention, CLV is a perfect KPI to use for justifying a budget. CLV can also help determine customer loyalty programs. Discounts or incentives can be justified based on the value each customer will continue to bring to your business.        

How Does CLV Relate to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)?

Customer lifetime value is a great KPI to compare directly against customer acquisition cost.  When dividing CLV by CAC you then get the ratio of CLV to CAC, a sign of customer profitability and how efficient your marketing strategy is performing. 

Remember, attracting new customers to your business can be an expensive process, especially if you don’t have a clear understanding of what each customer can bring to your company. So, It’s also important to make sure CAC isn’t outpacing CLV. 

If your business model does not rely on many repeat customers, then you’ll need to account for the cost of acquiring new customers. CLV is a helpful KPI to use when setting budgets for attracting new customers. 

How Do I Calculate Customer Lifetime Value?

Customer lifetime value is a calculation of multiple data points. These points can vary from company to company depending on the products or services being offered. Kissmetrics can help you narrow in on the most important metrics for your situation with our Metrics tool. Some of the most popular data points to calculate CLV:

  • Average purchase value
  • Average purchase frequency rate
  • Customer value
  • Average customer lifespan
  • Final CLTV

Average Purchase Value

The average purchase value is a metric that represents the average cost of a purchase made by a customer. This metric will often be used alongside a metric that shows the average number of units per transaction. Average purchase value will vary widely depending on your products or services. Kissmetrics can help you narrow in on a good goal for your company. 

Average Purchase Frequency Rate

The average purchase frequency rate is the measure of how often customers are buying services or products from your business. The calculation for this metric is the number of goods or services sold in a period divided by the number of unique customers in the same period. The period for this measure can be set based on how far back you’d want the trends observed.

Customer Value

A metric that shows what value each customer brings to your company over a given period is customer value. When you combine the average purchase value and the average purchase frequency rate, you can then calculate the customer value metric. The customer value metric is also time-sensitive, so it will need to be calculated over set periods of time.

Average Customer Lifespan

The average length of time a person is an active user with your company is calculated as the average customer lifespan.  The parameters for what constitutes an active customer will depend on your business but should include customers that are spending money with your business on a regular basis. If a customer leaves for an extended period and then returns, they would most likely count as a new customer. Average customer lifespan is the final metric needed to calculate customer lifetime value.

Final CLV

In order to calculate the CLV, you need to have your business’s average purchase value, average purchase frequency rate, and average customer lifespan. With these metrics, you’ll know how valuable each customer is at any given time and how long they are likely to stay a customer of your business. These measures will then give you the CLV metric, which is key for projecting the long-term outlook of your business.

What Main Factors Affect My Company’s CLV?

Customer lifetime value is influenced by many factors in your business so it’s important to monitor all metrics that drive your CLV, but some are more important than others. For most businesses some of the key factors are:

  •  Churn rate
  • Customer loyalty
  • Customer satisfaction
  • Scalable sales and marketing

Churn Rate

When referencing customers, the churn rate is the number of customers that leave your business over a given period. Some churn is normal for all companies, but it’s key to monitor this metric and compare it to the new customers gained over the same period. Since churn rate measures how many customers are leaving your business, it plays a huge factor in your company’s CLV metric. Finding ways to reduce your churn rate and hold on to customers is an excellent way to increase your CLV.

Customer Loyalty

The customer loyalty metric is a measure of how likely it is that a customer does repeat business with your company. This metric is also set over a specific period, depending on your business type. Getting a new customer to your business is important, but bringing back a customer for repeat business is even better. Customer loyalty has a huge impact on your CLV KPI. Even slight increases in the number of customers that become repeat shoppers will yield big increases to the CLV number.

Customer Satisfaction

How happy your users are with your company is the customer satisfaction metric. Unlike the other metrics, feedback from customers is required to measure customer satisfaction. Tools like feedback forms, surveys, product reviews, and other rating forms can be combined to create an overall customer satisfaction metric.  Customer satisfaction has an indirect effect on many metrics, most importantly CLV. No matter what products or services your company offers, customer satisfaction should always be something a company strives to improve.

How Can I Improve My Company’s CLV?

Improving your company’s CLV is vital to the growth and success of your business. A few great ways to improve your CLV are:

  • Email and SMS retargeting
  • Loyalty programs
  • Open communication
  • Effective onboarding

Email and SMS Retargeting

Some handy tools for helping convert more sales are email and SMS retargeting. It’s important to collect existing, and if possible, new, email addresses or phone numbers from your customers in order to send them retargeting content. Emails or SMS can contain things like requests for product reviews, reminders to finish checking out a cart, sales notifications, new product alerts, and other notifications to get them back to your business. These are great ways to get more customers back to your site, increasing your CLV metric.   

Loyalty Programs

Creating a system that rewards customers for staying with your company would be considered a loyalty program. Signing up for emails or SMS could be an effective option for loyalty programs. As customers spend more money, the rewards could increase, giving increased incentives for the customer to remain loyal to your company. Rewarding top customers helps customer satisfaction and increases CLV.

Open Communication

Creating open channels of communication helps build customer trust and holds your business more accountable. Gathering customer feedback to look for improvement is a good example of open communication. Customer opinions can often provide insight on products or services that may not have been previously considered. Having a quick and responsive customer service department is a great way to achieve open communication with your customers. Better interactions with customer service improve a customer’s satisfaction which helps to increase their CLV.

Effective Onboarding

Customer onboarding is key to setting up a good relationship with new customers. Making sure customers get the proper information about your products and services maximizes the value your company delivers. The onboarding process can also be about teaching customers how to work with your business. It’s a good opportunity to establish a good line of open communication, critical for improving CLV.

Conclusion

While the calculation for CLV may vary slightly by company, the importance is high for all companies. When making decisions in your business, always keep CLV in mind. Kissmetrics can help you track your CLV and other important KPIs. Company growth and success depend on a strong customer base that continuously returns to your products. 

 

Sources:

The Case for Customer Value as your Lead Metric in 2021

The Value of Open Lines of Communication with Customers

The Four Secrets Of Achieving Customer Satisfaction

What Are the Stages of the Customer Lifecycle?

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A common misconception is that a user doesn’t become a customer until they make a purchase. Some companies compound this mistake by assuming that once the purchase is complete, they should focus all of their attention on finding new customers and moving on. 

In reality, someone becomes a customer the second they hear about your company and should be catered to throughout the entire customer lifecycle if you want to increase your revenue.

We’ll take you through the entire customer lifecycle in the sections below. 

What is the Customer Lifecycle?

The customer lifecycle is a measurement of where your customers are in their experience of your company. The lifecycle shows what stages your customers go through before purchasing a product and what they do after purchase. 

When someone discovers your company, they begin the customer lifecycle. There is no ‘ending’ to the lifecycle, because ideally, you bring a customer from the first stage to the last one and keep them there. Tracking and maintaining customer lifecycles is crucial for all successful businesses, regardless of industry.

What Are the Customer Lifecycle Stages?

There are five or six stages of the customer lifecycle: 

  • Discovery/Awareness
  • Engagement (an optional stage as it may not apply to every customer or industry)
  • Evaluation
  • Purchase
  • Use
  • Advocacy

These will be covered in detail in the sections below. 

Discovery/Awareness

The initial stage of the customer lifecycle is when the customer first discovers your company. Nowadays, users are bombarded with ads all over the internet, during their YouTube videos, commercials on streaming services, and in their social media feeds. With so many companies trying to catch their eye, you will need to do more to stand out from the crowd.

In this stage, people learn your company’s reputation, the types of products or services offered, and how you interact with your customers. You may take the Rule of Seven with a grain of salt, but customers are much more likely to remember you and buy your products if they’ve seen at least a few different advertisements. 

Remember that seeing direct ads is only part of the discovery process. Users are more likely to continue to remember and research a company if it was recommended to them by someone they trust. Recommendations through word-of-mouth or social media posts from influencers are potent ways to spread the word about your company. 

Engagement (Optional)

Depending on your industry and where you advertise, potential customers may reach out to your customer service reps for information. While the next step also involves research on the customer’s part, this stage focuses on the initial interaction with your company. First impressions are vital, so ensure that you have plenty of ways for potential users to contact you.

This is much more common in businesses where the service or product is a major investment for the customer or business (either in time or money). Cars, loans for bad credit  banks, major software upgrades or switches, insurance packages, and similar items require a large financial commitment from the user, and will likely require them to learn a new system, which can lead to lost productivity. So they’re more likely to reach out before making a decision. So they’re more likely to reach out before making a decision.

Evaluation

At this stage, customers will begin their evaluation of your company and your available products or services. They’ll likely check online reviews of your company and compare it to your competitors. In order to facilitate their research, we recommend having an informative website that is visually appealing and easy to navigate.

Some customers want to avoid the hassle of reaching out to a company directly (with certain exceptions, as mentioned above) and would rather direct their own research. If you make it difficult for customers to find crucial information about your company or product, they are likely to move on to one of your competitors.

Part of this stage is knowing what customers deem ‘useful information’. You can deduce what they find useful by learning about your audience, their demographics, and what they’re looking for. Kissmetrics’ person profile can give you detailed information about your individual customers.

Purchase

This is the stage of the customer lifecycle that every company looks forward to. The customer has decided to try your product or service and have committed to purchase. However, your work is far from done. Customer acquisition costs are often much higher than customer retention costs, so you should ensure that many of your customers stay loyal to your company. 

You can keep customers loyal by understanding what they want to see from you. Kissmetrics offers a variety of reports to measure user interaction with your products so you can see which features they utilize frequently. 

This is also a stage that may require additional support or assistance from your sales team. Customers in older demographics might have trouble completing online purchases, or slow internet could cause other customers frustration when the page loads too slowly. Poor UX could also make it difficult for customers to figure out how to complete the purchase. Those will be customers lost if you don’t take proactive measures to assist. 

Kissmetrics lets you track form abandonment and which customers continued through the sales funnel. We show you where customers drop out of the sales funnel so you make fixes to prevent such abandonment.

In the digital age, live chats are often preferred for customers who have trouble completing their purchases. Calling a line usually leads to being on hold for a while, and emailing can be the same. Live chats, on the other hand, provide a quick and straightforward access to a representative or chatbot without the inconvenience of making a phone call. 

Use/Experience

This stage of the customer lifecycle describes the customer’s experience with your company’s products or services. This is a vital time for your company to demonstrate good service should customers run into difficulties with your product. This stage is often a make or break piece of the puzzle for repeat customers.

Our path report demonstrates the number of customers who complete designated events in a given sequence. This can show you if the people who perform certain actions are more likely to commit to a purchase. Similarly, an activity report will monitor the number of customers who perform a designated action, like creating an account with your website. 

Even customers who don’t have any issues using their product may continue to read online reviews of your company and will continue to evaluate the value that your product adds. As stated previously, customer retention costs are often much cheaper than customer acquisition costs, so this is not a stage to overlook when it comes to staying on top of your customers’ satisfaction. 

You can also track social events like activities on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter with Kissmetricsr. 

Bonding/Advocacy

Assuming your customer had a positive experience buying and using your company’s product, they may become loyal to your company and start advocating on their own. This could be as simple as mentioning their experience to their loved ones or posting about it on social media. Even if they aren’t influencers, word-of-mouth recommendations are valuable to your company because they come from trusted sources. 

Helping a customer become devoted to your company is essential for companies to make it big in their industry. For example, Apple has developed a dedicated following who always want the latest products and are vocal about their feedback because they know that Apple listens. 

Developing that kind of reputation isn’t easy, but it’s worth it in the long run.

Kissmetrics Tools for Customer Lifecycle Management

Kissmetrics offers a variety of tools for tracking your user base, so you can determine where they are in the customer lifecycle. 

Our funnel report charts users who perform events in a certain order so you can stay on top of where each user is in their customer lifecycle. For example, if you want to track the number of users who first click through an ad to your website and then navigate to a product page, our funnel report will show you numbers for each step of your sales funnel. 

Alternatively, if you aren’t sure which events usually lead to conversions, Kissmetrics has a path report which shows you precisely what steps users who become customers took before and after purchase. This path report can convey numerous insights such as:

  • What steps lead to a higher conversion rate
  • If there is an alternative path that leads to a shorter conversion time
  • Where your marketing team should focus their ads and which channels have the highest number of conversions

Why is the Customer Lifecycle Important?

Knowing where your customers are in their lifecycle allows you and your marketing team to tailor your communications to them accurately. People in the discovery stage are often not ready to make a purchase and will need more information before they reach the evaluation stage.

On the other hand, if a customer has been sitting in the evaluation stage for some time, they may be ready for a call-to-action that encourages them to purchase your product or service. 

Understanding your audience and what they need is the best way to steadily build heir trust and bring them in as customers. 

Conclusion

Understanding your customers is key to attracting new users and retaining existing ones. Everyone wants to feel like they’re understood and taken care of, and knowing where your users are in the customer lifecycle allows your marketing team to provide customized communications and your customer service team to provide assistance. 

Check out Kissmetrics for more information about managing and tracking your customers through their lifecycle. 

 

Sources:

  1. Definition – What is the Customer Lifecycle? | Tallyfy.com
  2. What Are the Stages of the Customer Lifecycle? | Astute
  3. 5 Stages of the Customer Life Cycle (Updated 2021) | Fool.com

Customer Analytics: What It Is and Why It Matters

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Understanding customer behavior can be a challenge for some businesses. To gain a better idea of your customer’s mindset, you need data about customer behavior. This data can help shape your strategies and processes to create better customer interaction and lead to higher product satisfaction. 

Gaining customer insight through data is key to success for modern businesses. The process of gathering customer data to help make decisions in your business is called customer analytics. 

Customer analytics can be broken down further into two types of analysis: market segmentation and predictive analytics. Here, we’ll discuss how to gather your customer data. 

Market Segmentation

The market your company targets is likely large and diverse, but targeting all customers with the same tactics can be ineffective in increasing profits and growing your market reach. 

Market segmentation is the process of dividing your customer market into smaller segments based on customer characteristics or traits. By dividing your customers into groups, you can target these groups with specific ads based on their habits and where they are in the buying process. Market segmentation will also allow you to see which type of marketing is most effective for each segment. 

Social media may be the best form for one group, while emails may be more effective for another. The messaging in your advertisements can also be changed from segment to segment. This will help your company resonate with all customers no matter how different they may be from one another. 

Market segmentation is a vital strategy for companies looking to create efficient marketing plans to grow their customer base.

Predictive Analytics

Studying current and historical data to make predictions about future events is considered predictive analytics. Predictive analytics has many uses across many industries, and sales and marketing are no exception. 

By analyzing historical trends of customers, you can start to make predictions about future actions. Many outside factors can affect customers’ shopping habits, such as weather or stock market performance. By looking at historical trends of customers during certain events, you can start to make better predictions about future customer behavior. 

Predictive analytics can also be used on your company’s current customers. Analyzing the behavior of new customers can help recognize patterns such as how long customers spend browsing your site or what products long time customers tend to focus on. 

This can help you predict how future customers will act and allow you to tailor your site to fit their needs.  

What Is the Goal of Customer Analytics?

With customer analytics you gain greater insight into how your customers or potential customers behave which allows you to make more educated business decisions in the future. 

The goal is to move away from a hunch about how your customers will react and use data to back up your future actions. Some businesses stay with certain processes out of tradition but customer analytics can give teams the power to see if traditional lines of thinking are working for the business. 

Kissmetrics has successfully helped several businesses leverage their customer analytics.

How Do You Use Customer Analytics?

Once you’ve started gathering customer analytics data, you need to create actionable items. Some ways to use customer analytics are:

  • Direct marketing
  • Site selection
  • Customer relationship management

Direct Marketing

A marketing message sent straight to a consumer would be considered direct marketing. Forms of communication like personalized text messages, emails, or social media messages would be direct marketing. 

Messages can be tailored to users in specific situations using the data gathered from customer analytics. For example, targeting new homeowners with home improvement products will result in a higher conversion rate compared to a mass email. 

Direct marketing can also be targeted to users who have visited your site but did not make a purchase. Sending a reminder message with details about the products they viewed would be a perfect use of direct marketing.  

Site Selection

Choosing the location of a new store or site is an important process for any company. By using user analytics, your business can get a narrowed view of what sites or locations would be successful by analyzing your customer base. 

Knowing where your current customers frequent is key to selecting a good location. If you’re looking to grow your user base, it’s important to look at predictive analytics to see where your company’s best potential growth area is.

Customer Relationship Management

Customer satisfaction is a key metric for the success of all businesses. Customer relationship management is the focus of analyzing how a business interacts with its customer. Using large amounts of data gathered during user analytics makes it easier to understand what communication methods and styles work best with your customers. 

If your business caters to younger users who frequent social media, you may find it best to communicate with users via a social media platform.

Why Does Customer Analytics Matter?

Gathering and analyzing large amounts of data on your customers can be a challenge for some companies. Some of the big reasons you should be collecting customer analytics are because you can:

  • Increase sales
  • Lower customer acquisition and retention costs
  • Reduced customer churn
  • Increase customer loyalty
  • Increase marketing and promotion ROIs
  • Increase sales force effectiveness

Increase Sales

Targeted advertising using customer analytics means customers see ads tailored for their needs and wants. This more effective way of advertising leads to more customers and increased sales for your company.

Lower Customer Acquisition and Retention Costs

Gaining and keeping new customers can be costly for some businesses, so if customers are leaving, it’s important to understand why. The data provided from customer analytics can give you insights into customer dissatisfaction.  

Customer analytics can also show you what potential customers are interested in and what features would drive them to a new product. By having this information at your disposal, you can target the proper customers saving you customer acquisition and retention costs.

Reduced Customer Churn

Customer churn rate is a measure of the number of customers that leave your company over time. Gathering data on why customers leave would be part of your customer analytics dataset. 

Gathering information on what’s driving customers away is the first step to fixing customer churn.

Increased Customer Loyalty

Keeping customers loyal to your company is a great way to strengthen sales and increase your bottom line. Customer analytics can give you data on why customers choose your products and what keeps them loyal to your company. 

By understanding why some customers don’t return to your site, you can adjust your products or services to suit their needs better.

Increased Marketing and Promotions ROIs

Running marketing ads and promotions can be expensive for any business. Spending money advertising to customers who have a low chance of buying your products is not a good use of resources. So by ensuring your ads and promos are targeted to the right audience, they’ll be more effective and thus save you money and increase your ROI.  

Increased Sales Force Effectiveness

An easy way to help your sales team is to provide them with good customer analytics data. Information on what markets are performing well and what details customers are interested in is a great way to help your sales team be more effective. 

By using predictive analysis, you can give your sales team a better idea of where the market will move to allow them to plan for upcoming changes.

Conclusion: How Can I Optimize Customer Analytics for My Business?

The process of collecting and analyzing customer analytics can be a large task for businesses. 

Knowing what metrics are important to your business and how to track them is key for proper analysis. In addition, using the correct tool to gather customer data is necessary to create effective plans to improve your business strategies.

Customer Analytics is something all companies should be collecting and analyzing. Properly utilizing this data can lead to higher customer satisfaction and cost savings for your marketing campaign. By having the proper information, you can target your audience and convert more potential customers.

Visit Kissmetrics for more ideas on optimizing your user analytics. 

 

Sources:

  1. Market Segmentation Definition | Investopedia
  2. Direct Marketing Basics | The Balances MB
  3. How To Prevent Customer Churn With A Simple Phone Call | Forbes

What Is Time On Site? Everything You Need to Know

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One of the buzzwords frequently mentioned in digital marketing is time on site or session duration. It’s often discussed in conjunction with bounce rate, time on page, and similar metrics and collecting this data is a good idea. But learning how to leverage it to move the needles is a better one.. 

Time On Site vs. Time On Page vs. Bounce Rate

Time on site, also known as session duration, is the total amount of time that someone spends navigating through your website. It is calculated by noting the timestamp when a visitor clicks through a search engine or link to your landing page and the timestamp when the visitor navigates away from your website. 

Time on page, as the name implies, measures how long someone spends on a single page. Bounce rate, on the other hand, measures the percentage of visitors who visit a single page on your website before ending their session and clicking on another website.

Why is Time On Site Important?

Time on site is the best metric for determining how useful visitors find your entire website, instead of just focusing on one page. It answers questions like: how long do they spend shopping before purchasing a product? Are they reading multiple articles from the blog entries? 

Is Time On Site the Same as Dwell Time?

Dwell time is a measurement of how long a user spends on a single page found through a search engine. The dwell time is measured by timestamps marking when a user clicks a link from a search engine to when they navigate back to their search results. Time on site, on the other hand, is the total amount of time a visitor spends on your website.

If a visitor spends a few minutes evaluating the webpage and navigates away from your website, it won’t count as a session because sessions don’t include time spent on exit or bounce pages. 

What is the Average Time On Site?

The average time on site takes the total number of hours spent on a website during a specified period and divides it by the number of new sessions. Keep in mind that a single user may have multiple sessions if they log in to your website over a number of days or come back to what they were doing later. 

How is Time On Site Measured?

Time on site is measured by using Kissmetrics’ analytics tool to note the timestamp when a user begins their session and compare it to the timestamp when the user exits their session. From that information, the tool determines the length of time someone spent on your website. 

Is Time On Site a Search Ranking Factor?

Time on site is not a search ranking factor. Google is the most commonly used search engine, and since over half of their websites don’t use Google Analytics, they have no way of accurately measuring time on site for those sites. Without that data, time on site can’t be a factor they use in ranking. 

How to Analyze Time On Site Metrics

There are a few things to keep in mind when analyzing your time on site metrics. The first is that your average time on site may not answer all of your questions about user activity and how they’re interacting on your website. For example, simply telling you that the majority of users spend thirty minutes on your website doesn’t provide actionable information.

The same thing could be said for individual user time on site. Someone might’ve only spent a minute on your site because they realized they didn’t enjoy the content, the page took too long to load, they were frustrated by the advertisements, or the next steps weren’t clear. You simply don’t know the details.

How to Report Time On Site Metrics

Segmenting users into cohorts based on the amount of time they spend on your website can help you determine whether you are providing enough instructions about how to proceed down the conversion funnel. If you notice that a large percentage of users are following the conversion funnel faster than you anticipated, that could indicate that they are skipping some critical steps or have found a faster path.

Alternatively, if you notice that a large percentage of users are spending more time on your website than you anticipated, there may be some confusing factor that is slowing down their journey. This could be a lack of internal linking, slow-loading pages, or other issues that are bogging down your users. 

How to Improve Time On Site?

In many cases, you’ll want users to spend more time on your website. If your website only has a home page and product pages, visitors who don’t want to make a purchase won’t have any reason to stick around on your website. Even people who do make a purchase can do so fairly quickly. If you want to improve time on site, try some of the following options. 

Include High Quality Content

In addition to your products or services on offer, the majority of websites include other pages full of high-quality information. These pages might describe the company founders, what they hope to accomplish, where the products are made, instructions for using the products, information about the features, and ways to use the products. 

Whatever content you decide to include, ensure that you grab your readers’ attention and keep it. Choose a tone that represents your company and information that appeals to your audience. From there, your users will want to read more about your company and what you produce. 

Use Relevant Keywords

You might have the best content in the world, but it won’t matter if the right people can’t find it. Writing an in-depth article about hurricane insurance won’t be of any use to people looking for information about car insurance. 

If you don’t use relevant keywords, your article may appear in a search for people who aren’t looking for housing insurance or may not appear when people search variations on the terms. 

Optimize Your Page Load Time

One of the biggest reasons for a high bounce rate and minimal time on page is a slow load time. People expect pages to load within a second and for every second they spend waiting for your content to load, they become increasingly likely to navigate away without ever seeing your page.

While some users will try refreshing the page, you can’t count on everyone to have fast internet connections, so you’ll need to design your web pages for the lowest common denominator.

You can optimize your page’s load time by limiting the use of complicated graphics, fonts, or formatting. Minimizing the use of tactics such as moving images, embedded videos, or automatically activated music can help your pages load faster. 

You can never go wrong with a clean, sleek aesthetic, especially if it’s the difference between people staying and immediately leaving out of frustration. 

Use Internal Linking

Another way to show your readers that you have more great content waiting for them is through internal linking. Linking to your sources during informational articles is necessary to prove how thorough your research was, but linking to other pages on your website is a good way to keep your audience engaged for longer.

For example, if you create a blog detailing the benefits of one of your products or how to use a key feature, you should add a link to the product description page. That way, if a visitor finds the page on a search engine, they’ll be able to find the product you’re describing. Or, you can link to more internal content that delves into similar topics if the reader wants to learn more. 

Limit On-page Widgets, Pop-ups, and Ads

Finally, you should do your best to limit the number of pop-ups and outside ads on each page of your website. Adding a few links to affiliates isn’t a problem, but your visitors are there to learn more about your company, not someone else’s. If you have multiple pop-ups that assault the reader as they scroll down or on every page, they may get frustrated and stop their session.

Conclusion

Understanding how long your users spend on your website gives you information about how deeply they’re interacting with your content. As you create and refine your conversion funnel, it’s useful to know how long it takes users to proceed from finding your website to making a purchase. Alternatively, you can find out how much time they spend reading the articles you create. 

Check out our website for more information on reporting essential metrics and how to leverage the information.

 

Sources:

  1. What is Average Time on Site? – Average Time on Site Definition | Popupsmart.com
  2. What Does Avg Session Duration Tell You? [vs Time on Page] | Hotjar.com
  3. What Is Dwell Time & Why It Matters for SEO | Search Engine Journal

Everything You Need to Know About POP Marketing

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The concept of POP marking is nothing new for traditional in-person businesses. Cardboard displays in grocery stores have been used for decades to help drive up sales of certain products.  For ecommerce sites, there are different techniques to use POP marketing on customers.

What Is POP Marketing?

The strategy of targeting users while they’re already shopping is POP marketing. This is a late-stage form of marketing because users are on your site and in the process of purchasing. POP marketing would not be considered top of the funnel marketing. 

The idea behind POP marketing is you target users that are already in a buying mood, making it potentially easier to add on to or upgrade the product they plan to purchase. Pop marketing could be signage around the product showing more details or suggesting complementary products to what’s already in a customer’s cart.  

The strategies for POP marketing are things you may see every day and not even realize. Signs at gas pumps offering a sale on soda inside the convenience store would be considered POP marketing. Customers are already stopping to purchase gasoline, so getting a soda would be a “might as well” purchase. Candy placed by registers is also a form of POP marketing. 

In essence, they’re items that didn’t bring you to the store to make a purchase, but you end up grabbing them out of impulse or ease of access. 

For ecommerce sites, POP marketing would be suggesting similar products or showing opportunities for an upgrade. It may seem more difficult to market products to someone at the checkout online, but there are techniques to get customers to purchase additional products. 

What Is Point of Purchase (POP) and Point of Sale (POS)?

The point of purchase is a marketing term used to describe the placement of products or advertisements around point of sale systems. POP would be considered product displays around the checkout area or at the end of an aisle in traditional brick-and-mortar shops. 

POP can also be considered any promotional activity to help sell a product, such as a two-for-one sale or first-time customer discount. For ecommerce sites, POP would be how products are displayed on your website for customers who are actively shopping.

POS or point of sale is the location and time of purchase of a product. This would be the cash register or checkout system for traditional stores, where goods would be exchanged for cash or credit. 

For an ecommerce site, this would be the checkout page where payment information is entered, and the order is submitted. While the checkout experience may be different from site to site, the process itself should be straightforward for the customer. 

The POS system your site uses must be secure and easy for customers. Accepting numerous forms of payment and having a simple checkout process will lead to higher sales conversion and better customer satisfaction. 

What Are POP Materials?

POP marketing can be enhanced beyond product placement with the use of POP materials. 

Some examples of POP materials are flyers, emails, website pop-ups, or cardboard display stands. These POP materials should help promote your brand and, in some cases, offer more details about your products. Cardboard displays of products are a popular choice for in-person shopping. These can provide more information on your products while also providing a large visual display of your company. 

For online businesses, pop-ups during checkout are one way to show users additional products they may be interested in. Suggesting additional services or warranties on top of a product would be considered POP marketing. Targeted social media posts are another good way to get additional purchases from a customer. Item displays are another common way pop marketing is used in ecommerce sites.

Pop materials should be targeted in a way that is logical for the customer. If a customer is purchasing an inexpensive item targeted at someone on a budget, the POP marketing items should be similar in type and value. For example, you shouldn’t suggest a high-end, top-of-the-line product to someone looking to buy a budget-saving product. Your product displays should be in the same league as the product the customer plans to purchase to maximize the chances of a successful conversion. 

Product displays showcase one or multiple products to customers. There are multiple ways to present products to customers, so it’s good to understand the basic types.

If you need to know what POP marketing ideas or products would be the best fit for your website, let Kissmetrics help. With our tools, you can analyze your user search topics and paths to conversion. 

What Are the 4 Basic Types of Displays?

The key to successful POP marketing is properly displaying the additional products. These are often done on a product page or during the checkout process. Pop marketing should be something all ecommerce sites incorporate to help boost sales and customer lifetime value. The four basic POP marketing display types are:

  • One time displays
  • Similar products
  • Related products
  • A cross mix of items

One Item Displays. A one-item display is the showcase of a single product to a customer. This is a good technique for showing off a new product or boosting a struggling product’s sales. 

A one-item display can be a pop-up or a highlight in the product catalog, depending on your site layout. If you’re looking to dive into more detail about a product, a one-item display is probably the best choice.

Similar Products. Another type of product display is a similar products section. When customers are viewing a product, a list of similar products can be displayed on the same page to give the customer alternatives to what they are viewing. 

This is an effective form of pop marketing, especially for customers that take a direct link to your product page. In a direct link case, the customer may not be aware of other products you offer. By listing similar products, customers may find a better fit for their needs, increasing customer satisfaction and increasing the likelihood of a purchase.

Related Products. An alternative to a similar product display is a related product display. Like similar product displays, related product displays could be shown on a product page or during the checkout process. These related products could be accessories or add-ons to the current product the user is interested in. 

If your business sells products that are part of a product package showing related products is a must. If the product your customer is viewing is an accessory to another product, showing the parent product as a related product display is vital. 

If, after product research with Kissmetrics, you find that customers tend to buy two or three products together, it’s a good idea to make that package suggestion to other customers. 

A Cross Mix of Items. A product display to show the range of products your company offers would be a cross mix of items displayed. A cross mix of items is a great display for companies looking to expand beyond just a popular product. 

Showing customers your company’s range of product offers can increase customer loyalty and lifetime customer value. Showing a mix of high-margin items that are a good fit for your customer is a smart way to increase overall revenue.  

A cross mix of items is also a nice way to increase product awareness among your customers.  

Conclusion: How Can I Use POP Marketing in My Business?

POP marketing is something all ecommerce sites should use. It strengthens sales figures and delivers value to your customers by providing them with options. By making customers aware of a product they may not have known about, you increase can your profits and deliver increased value to the shopper.

Capitalizing on customers already planning to make a purchase is “best practice” for all ecommerce sites. While the process is different for brick and mortar stores vs. online businesses, the thought process behind POP marketing is the same.  Properly targeting customers who are already making a purchase can benefit your company and the customer. 

You’ll need the right analytics data to understand how best to market your products. Request your Kissmetrics demo today to see how we can help you with your customer insights. By properly utilizing POP marketing, you can make your customers happier while increasing your bottom line.

 

Sources:

  1. [Point-of-Purchase] | What Is Point-of-Purchase Marketing? | Chron.com
  2. The Difference Between “Point of Purchase” and “Point of Sale” | Displays2Go
  3. What Is Point-of-Purchase Marketing? | AZCentral

Is Video Marketing Helpful in Generating Leads

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Video marketing has become the most potent tool for B2B businesses in recent years. There are several video formats available by which you can meet your business goals. The main objective of any marketing operation is to create leads that can drive new sales for the particular brand. 

 

According to recent statistics, videos are far more engaging than plain text and images. Eyeing on the trend, various video-sharing platforms like YouTube provide ample options to its users to engage with a maximum global audience. Most marketing strategies today prefer to use video-on-demand as the marketing tool compared to the conventional marketing methods.

 

To avail of the benefits of video marketing, brands need to chalk out effective marketing strategies. In this way, they will succeed in reaching the business goal.

 

Stick with the video marketing objective

 

A successful video marketing campaign can be only started if you have a marketing goal to achieve. Success can be measured when you have a goal. Make sure that you want to attract maximum views or push the audience to engage with your brand. Any revenue-based goal will prompt the video campaign to yield a result like increasing the lead from the inquiries. The brand goals will also involve driving more traffic to the business. The two goals are equally essential to mechanize the overall video marketing strategy.

 

Get information on the targeted audience

 

To succeed in your video marketing campaign, it is essential to know the audience and their desire and serve them what they need. Spend time researching how you can meet the audience’s needs, and according to their preference, you can make videos. In this way, you will be more successful than randomly creating videos.

 

The more specific your targeted audience, the more you can create engaging videos. This is how it assists the buyer’s personas. In this way, you can get information regarding their taste and the type of video content they want. This will help you achieve a new height of popularity, and the videos will serve as the magnet to attract maximum people for your brand.

 

Spread brand message 

 

Since you got a clear picture of the audience and their preference, it is essential to transmit your business message through video content. One thing is to keep in mind that the audience needs a different type of video content while deciding to purchase the products from the same brand. If you know which type of videos can impact thoroughly on them and can influence their decision-making capacity, then you can create such video content and serve them accordingly.

 

There are different types of videos that are needed in different stages. For example, a video that introduces the brand to the consumer is different from a video describing how to use the upcoming product. As a brand, you can make different types of videos, including explainer videos and meet-the-team videos, to make your audience educated about the business entity and the brain behind it. All these types of videos serve different purposes. Making videos with the help of an Online Video Editor is entirely hassle-free, and there are no additional or many resources required to meet the video-making purpose.

 

Tools that assist to make the video marketing a success

 

To make video marketing successful, you should take assistance from a few tools. Some of them are given below.

 

1.      Lead generation form

When you use the Lead Generation Form, it will let you know the information about the potential customers. According to marketers, contact forms and email signup forms are known as lead generation forms. If you want to stand out from others, it will be best to use customized contact forms with different fields. These fields are meant to collect the information from the leads and implement the video-sharing platform where to get the best content.

 

2.     End-screen CTA

 

Call-to-Action is all about telling the audience what you want from them after viewing the video entirely. CTA lets the viewers express their experience or reviews after the video. Without this, most of them may leave without any feedback. The reviews or the feedback you have gathered can be actively used to improve the video further. When you know that maximum viewers are watching the video until the end, it is clear that they like the way you are making the video. It is also called engaging video, which helps to drive leads.

3.     Video analytics

 

If you successfully analyze and track the different metrics of the videos, you can quickly know the video marketing results. In this way, you can maximize your efforts. Different types of analytics provide precise results to measure the success of the viewers. The tracking will let you know the engagement rate, view count, social media sharing, and play rate. Analyzing the comments will also let the admin know what they are talking about the video and the brand itself.

 

Advantages of video marketing

There are plenty of benefits of video marketing. Brands can quickly get engaged with their audience with the help of video content, and they also help you rank high in the search results. They can readily engage with potential customers, and these videos are quite an easy way to convince people regarding the brand and its products. If the brand engages with email marketing, then video campaigns will serve rightly and extensively. 

When you have a proper video marketing strategy in place, it would be best to get the ROI, and the brand popularity will skyrocket.

 

Final Thoughts

 

You can’t afford not to have a video marketing plan if you want to generate leads. To maximise the benefits and achieve success, your strategy will help you define your goals, reach the proper target market, and use the right tools and platforms.

 

Try a full-featured video hosting service that provides digital marketers with the resources they need to use video marketing to produce quality leads. Start embedding video content with a robust, secure DAM solution, and track visitor engagement over time to strengthen your content marketing strategy.

 

 

 

Role of Big Data Management and Analytics in Higher Education

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Analytical skills are in high demand today. Every professional has to do some analysis at a certain point of career growth. Globalization and digitalization turn personal lives and work into massive amounts of data.

The world generates information faster than ever. To swim in this torrent of data, people need to embrace everything it offers and use it for their good. To do so, we need collection, systematization, analysis, and predictions based on this analysis. Here the big-data method takes the reins. 

What Is Big Data?

The definition of big data (BD) usually means enormous amounts of information. Its primary quality, besides the scale, is the fact that it is unsystematic. Such data usually resides in some digital medium. Yet, big data is too extensive to use traditional means of structuring and analytics.

Each time a student decides to buy concert tickets online or pay for essay, they leave a digital footprint. These actions and the user information become a part of the worldwide dataset. Search engines study their users to teach AI how to make better predictions. This digital footprint will later help show more relevant suggestions.

So, BD also means technologies for the search and processing of unstructured information. It helps get practical knowledge in all areas of human activity, including education.

Do not mistake data analysis (which is every instance of analysis) for working with BD. The latter is a much more complex structure.

Until 2011, the BD technologies were used just for scientific analysis and had no practical application. Yet, the data avalanche grew exponentially, and the problem of immense amounts of unstructured and heterogeneous information became urgent.

Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/1K6IQsQbizI 

How Does This Technology Work?

To put it simply, imagine a supermarket where all goods are placed in an unusual order. 

For example, you find bread next to the fruit stand, and tomato paste – on the rack with detergents, avocados, and magazines. Big data is the marketing manager who puts everything in its place and helps find the food you have been looking for. Besides, it tells the price and expiration date and also who buys such products and why. The algorithms could suggest some dishes that include the ingredients in your shopping basket as well.

To add the prefix “big,” the dataset must fall under the three “V” rule.

  • Volume – data is measured by physical value and occupied space on a digital medium. When it reaches beyond 150 GB per day, then we can call it big data.
  • Velocity – it implies real-time processing and its high capacity.
  • Variety – information can come in heterogeneous formats and have little or no structure. 

Modern systems add two additional factors to this set.

  • Variability – data streams can have peaks and troughs, seasonality, and periodicity. 
  • Value – this parameter is subjective. To put it short, different types of information need different processing methods and vary by a wide margin. 

For example, messages from social networks represent a basic level of data. But secure transactions of a high-performance online paper writing service are from a much higher level. 

The task of machines is to determine the degree of importance of the incoming information to structure it as quickly as possible.

Impact on Education

Like any other sphere of life, the educational process generates data. There are five main types of data there:

  • forecasts (includes all predictions deriving from the analysis of points 2 through 5);
  • personal info (of all students and staff members);
  • administrative information;
  • data on the use of electronic learning aids like online lectures or digital textbooks;
  • reports analyzing the efficacy of the available learning materials.

Today, BD has become the language of communication for educational organizations that seek to improve their strategic and tactical approaches.

Big data technologies help improve and simplify the quality assessment of the educational environment. If done right, digital technologies simplify the process of tracking students’ grades and identifying issues of the learning process. 

This method of working with information shortens the response time of colleges and universities to the shifts in society. It prompts the scalability of educational processes and their readiness for a quick change. It also tracks changes and trends in the selected sector. BD’s capabilities are not yet sufficiently used to improve the quality of educational activities. 

As we already mentioned, the essential benefit of the big data method is the predictive analysis option. For example, analytics tools can predict the results of strategic decisions. They are essential for improving management efficiency and ensuring a customized approach to all students.

When Theory Meets Practice

In 2013, the University of Nottingham Trent, England, introduced an interactive system displaying students’ performance assessments in the form of a dashboard. It showed info on student engagement in the educational process. The dashboard was designed to reduce student dropout rates, improve attendance, and increase a sense of belonging to the community. 

The dashboard was a panel available to students, teachers, and tutors. The board displayed involvement indicators of each student. So, everyone could come up there and evaluate themselves as compared to their classmates. The dashboard featured the following parameters:

  • library visits frequency;
  • the courses taken by the students;
  • extracurricular activities;
  • volunteer work;
  • classes attendance; 
  • other educational indicators, including grades.

Thus, any student was able to see their activity in comparison with peers. So, they could determine what aspects demand extra effort.

If a student did not show signs of activity within two weeks, the platform automatically sent notifications to tutors. The latter could quickly contact the student and support them. Three years into the project, the results of the university survey showed that 72% of undergraduates used this student dashboard, and it inspired them to invest more time and effort into the educational process.

Advantages of Performance Analysis

A deep multifactor analysis helps educators better understand their students. There are so many cases describing students left behind because of a low grade in one subject. Some of those individuals suffered from depression, others had family issues, and so on. 

A quick analysis of the students’ digital will help avoid aggressive behavior and bullying.

It will be possible to overcome the concept of educational inequality to reduce the barriers to learning for people with disabilities. 

Although not every student is a prodigy, bringing them to the average level will become possible. A key is a personalized approach. A teacher will know what learning aids (visual, audio, or interactive materials) give better results.

Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/eveI7MOcSmw 

Conclusion

The pandemic initiated massive shifts in education and its move online. Hopefully, in a couple of years, it will help optimize the learning process. The main aim now is to make it more suitable for both the C-grade and the A-grade students. There are a lot of dependencies when using big data that are not all discovered and used yet. More improvements are yet to come.

Google Chrome Removes 3rd Party Cookies | Implications for Digital Marketers

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What Are 3rd Party Cookies?

3rd party cookies are cookies that are created by a different website or domain than the current website you’re browsing. Online advertisers commonly use 3rd party cookies to track users’ activity across various websites. This information provides more insight into users’ tendencies and behaviors, which in turn helps advertisers tailor their strategies.  3rd party cookies are only accessible on a domain if that domain allows outside parties’ cookies. 

How Are 3rd Party Cookies Different from 1st Party Cookies?

The main difference is the domain the cookie lives on. A first-party cookie is created by the website you’re currently browsing, while a 3rd party cookie is created by a different site altogether. 

For a 3rd party cookie to load, the website you’re browsing needs to load that 3rd party server’s code. For a 1st party cookie, any code on the domain could potentially read and set the cookie. A 3rd party cookie needs code from the publishing domain in order to read and set the cookie.

Why Are 3rd Party Cookies Important for My Business?

One of the most common uses for 3rd party cookies is targeted advertising. Because these cookies follow you from website to website as you browse, they report back your browsing history and searches. 

Have you ever searched for beach vacations and a few days later started to notice ads about beach trips on your browser? This could have been from a 3rd party cookie tracking your activity. 3rd party cookies can also be used by support chat systems provided by another service. These chat systems are operated by outside companies that need to be loaded on your domain. 

Why Is Google Chrome Removing 3rd Party Cookies?

Chrome is stepping up and offering users more privacy when browsing by removing 3rd cookies. Other browsers, such as Safari and Firefox, have already taken action and removed 3rd party cookies. Most users don’t fully understand how cookie tracking works and what information is collected by 3rd parties. Advertisers could use 3rd party cookies to track your entire browser history which critics would say is surveillance and an invasion of privacy. 

While some would argue that 3rd party cookies offer tailored ads that are helpful, most people feel the cons of invasive web tracking outweigh the pros. Google has been slower to transition, the thought being they’re trying to balance between online advertisers and personal privacy. 

Their solution is called the privacy sandbox.

What Is the Privacy Sandbox?

The privacy sandbox is a series of proposals by Google that will allow users more privacy and will still preserve the ability for advertisers to tailor ads. This initiative will replace 3rd party cookies and keep users’ data private. 

The privacy sandbox will lump users with similar browsing histories together, allowing advertisers to target groups with tailored ads without seeing an individual’s personal data. Google created the privacy sandbox to avoid blocking the user’s browser history altogether, keeping advertisers away from less transparent forms of tracking data. 

Users will still have the ability to change settings and opt-out, but by default, the privacy sandbox will offer more shielding from companies looking to collect personal browser habits.

What Will Replace 3rd Party Cookies?

Despite some of the privacy concerns, 3rd party cookies have value and provide valuable information. So, with Chrome removing 3rd party cookies, what will replace them? Some of the notable options are:

  •  Identity Graphs
  • Conversion Measurement APIs
  • Contextual Advertising
  •  Aggregate Reporting APIs
  • Trust Tokens
  • Capped Privacy Budgets
  • Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoc)

Identity Graphs

An identity graph is a database or table of user-profiles and identifiers that are tied to users. The profiles are generic types of users that could be assigned to a group based on certain qualities. 

Some examples would be a new homeowner profile or a recently retired profile. Identity graphs can also contain personal information such as an address, birthday, mobile phone, and email. All this information can be combined to create an advertising plan specific for a user based on profile and personal information.

Conversion Measurement APIs

A more anonymous way to track the success of an advertising campaign is the conversion measurement API. When a user clicks on an advertisement, an API call is made signaling that the ad was interacted with. The API call can attach information like campaign id, or click id, or the time and date of the interaction. 

When the user gets to the advertiser’s website, the API information can be tracked to see if that visitor makes a purchase. Conversion measurement APIs can track how effective ads are on visitors without using potentially invasive 3rd party cookies

Contextual Advertising

Contextual advertising is an approach based on webpage content instead of user behavior. This is a way of targeting based on website content or mobile applications, not the users who browse them. 

Contextual advertising reads the text of a page and searches for keywords or phrases and loads advertisements based on those search results. Users are kept anonymous since the targets are solely based on the webpage content. 

Aggregate Reporting APIs

When looking to get the big picture of advertising campaigns, aggregate reporting APIs are a great option. These reports would be used for seeing the performance of advertisements across multiple metrics, which will help to give a better sense of overall performance. 

Examples could be reports of which ads perform the best by age group, or what types of ads have the highest level of interaction. Aggregate reporting APIs can vary widely, but when combined, they help give you a good idea of the overall effectiveness of advertisements. 

Trust Tokens

An anonymous way to verify users is by using trust tokens. Trust tokens work by assigning users an encrypted token that is stored in the user’s browser. This trust token can then be used to authenticate a user without requiring any private information. 

The token will stay valid during the session and allow the user to browse the domain securely. The user’s activity can then be tracked and stored for research without requiring any additional personal information. 

Capped Privacy Budgets

Capped privacy budgets are a way of limiting the number of private information advertisers can see. Giving advertisers access to some personal information can be helpful for making ads more targeted and relevant. If advertisers exceed the cap amount they could be restricted from advertising on the site.  By limiting the amount of personal information that is collected, users can browse with more privacy and less intrusion.

Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoc)

The federated learning of cohorts (FLoc) is a new approach to track ad performance that uses machine learning to group users. The FLoc approach can gather browser history, the content of webpages or other specific factors to assign a user to a cohort. The code that creates the user cohort would live on the browser, keeping the users’ private information from being uploaded elsewhere. The browser can then expose the cohort so that advertisers can use this to target ads specific to the user. Federated learning of cohorts is an excellent alternative to 3rd party cookies because it gives advertisers the data they are looking to track while keeping users private information safe. 

How Will This Affect My Business?

If your business relies on 3rd party cookies, you’ll need to plan for an alternative moving forward. With support from Chrome ending, businesses will need to adapt to the new system Chrome implements. If your website allows advertisers that use 3rd party cookies, you’ll need to plan with them. Kissmetrics can help your business prepare for Chrome’s replacement to 3rd party cookies. 

How Can My Business Prepare for the Removal of 3rd Party Cookies?

If your business is using 3rd party cookies you’ll need to pivot to a new way of tracking advertisement performance. Kissmetrics has the tools to track user behavior and provide you with the data needed to keep tabs on your performance. With Kissmetrics you’ll be able to analyze your users’ behavior in any browser while keeping their personal data secure. 

Conclusion

Chrome removing its support of 3rd party cookies is a move intended to give users a more secure browsing experience. This can present a challenge to digital marketers who rely on these cookies to target ads to specific users. Ultimately, digital marketers will need to shift to Chrome’s replacement system when it is officially rolled out or implement a behavioral analytics tool like Kissmetrics. 

 

Sources:

Google Effort to Kill Third-Party Cookies in Chrome Rolls Out in April | PCMag.com

ID graphs: The Path to Identity Resolution | Martechtoday.com

Federated Learning of Cohorts | Github

What Is Affiliate Marketing And How Does It Work?

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Exploring Affiliate Marketing

Before a consumer can buy a product or service they need to know it exists, making both business profile and customer attraction key considerations for pretty much every company. Affiliate marketing is one of the most common ways to achieve these ends, but how does it work?

 

What is Affiliate Marketing?

The online world has transformed business practices in many ways, from vastly increasing the potential of working from home through to collaborative business project software. One such area that has been altered substantially by the rise of the internet is advertising, and one new form of it is affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing functions by allowing third parties to make money from companies that benefit from web traffic and sales being generated in the direction of their products or services. A percentage of commission is given to the third party, which provides them with a strong incentive to encourage their readers or viewers to check out the advertising company.

The approach is endorsed and followed by numerous business sectors, from Amazon’s Audible business to online casin. This makes affiliate marketing an appropriate commercial activity for a broad swathe of firms.

Knowing the Audience

A critical aspect of making affiliate marketing work properly for all concerned is to know the audience and to ensure that a marketing message reaches those who might be interested in it. A spa treatment deal focused on a Formula 1 website may not necessarily hit the mark. However, a fantasy videogame that makes a strategic decision to advertise its wares on a blog or Youtube channel that explores subjects such as mythology, fantasy, history, or videogames is much more likely to find a receptive audience.

On a similar note, some bloggers/Youtubers are much better natural salesman than others. This can mean there’s better value with seemingly identical third parties (in terms of viewer/reader figures). Likewise, some audiences can be a lot more engaged. If an individual has a business model based on direct support via superchats (Youtube donations), bits (Twitch), and/or Patreon subscriptions, and PayPal donations then their audience, even if smaller in overall numbers, may be more willing to click through to help that third party out. At the higher end, major newspapers such as the Guardian have also made use of affiliate marketing.

Additional Features

It can also be the case that consumers stand to benefit directly by using affiliate links, typically through a discount. If a reader of a history blog sees a related product and can get a 10% price cut that clearly increases the chances of them clicking through and buying. Another method that can be used for either free-to-play games, educational streaming services, or even the likes of Audible (Amazon’s audiobook wing) are signup codes that offer some sort of bonus content, or free access for a month or two, or a free audiobook.

Sometimes third parties stand to make a little extra if a certain number of click-led sales happen, or codes are redeemed. This can also add some emotional weight to the draw as ardent supporters of the third party who are on the fence might go the extra mile to help out their favorite creator.

Advantages of Affiliate Marketing

Dan Dubey, chief of content and affiliate at Top10casinos.com, mentions that the biggest benefit of this approach is that the initial cost is essentially nothing, provided the third party is only paid for clicks or clicks converted to sales (the latter being better for the advertising firm). Nowadays, the latter is much more common, and clicks alone are rarely used as the metric.

Blogging may seem old hat compared to social media giants but blogs are still very popular and are a prime source of affiliate marketing. From the bloggers’ perspective, income from this source can be as high as six figures for the most successful.

Bloggers are far from the only third parties who can benefit from affiliate marketing, however. Youtube channels catering to specific audiences are also well-placed for this sort of commercial activity, and the same can go for e-mail lists/newsletters. By knowing the audience of a given third party, a business knows it has a far more receptive consumer base than the general population, increasing the chance of clicks leading to sales.

The Disclaimer

It’s important for both legal and moral reasons for the third party to be upfront about sponsorship or affiliate marketing because a key advantage online personalities have is a sense of personal connection with the audience. Being upfront and honest about advertising is completely fine, but if you recommend something, and stand to personally profit from clicks leading to sales, then not being honest about this can cause harm to your reputation.

How Successful is Affiliate Marketing?

This advertising model accounted for some 7.5% of digital spending among retailers in late 2016. The figures from the United States, in particular, tell the story, with year-on-year rises from 2015 until 2020, going up from $4.21bn in 2015 all the way to $6.82bn in 2020 (a more than 50% increase). As of 2017, 81% of firms were making use of affiliate marketing, showing that it is both productive and popular with businesses.

That brings us to the end of this concise consideration of affiliate marketing, which is an inexpensive and effective means of attracting customers, and one which is rising in popularity year-on-year.

How to Score the Health of Your Users and Accounts

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Scoring user health may sound like medical advice, but it’s actually a vital part of understanding your customer base. As the name implies, users are assigned scores based on their behaviors and interactions with your product. Scoring individual users based on specific criteria for your company and industry may sound granular, but it can help you identify problem accounts before they leave. 

What is a User Health Score?

A user health score is the likelihood a user will achieve your desired result. That desired result could be a purchase, regular usage or upgrading depending on your industry and model.

So if you are scoring users based on the desire to keep them as lifetime users, they would have a higher score if they recently renewed their subscription.

Metrics Associated with User Health Scores

Examples of metrics by which you can score your users:

  • Product usage
  • User feedback
  • Marketing engagement
  • Website activity
  • User support cases
  • Product upgrades and renewals
  • Community participation

The Importance of Scoring

Scoring your users helps account managers and customer success teams monitor your company’s user base. User health scores can provide an early warning system to account managers when users are at risk of churn. High user scores across the board indicate that user needs are met, and your product is working well.

Additionally, high-scoring users are more likely to recommend your product or service to their friends and family, increasing your net promoter score (NPS). They may also recommend your company on social media. 

How to Create a User Health Score

Creating a user health score can be time-intensive so consider these important factors before delaying. The score usually indicates the likelihood of the user ending their account with you and switching to a competitor. 

You’ll want to keep in mind the speed at which a single user can significantly change their score and which metrics make up the score. 

Define User Health

This is a tricky step because user health can be subjective. You can take some of the guesswork out of it by using product engagement metrics, and how often the ideal user purchases your products or services. But understand there are always extenuating circumstances that cause users to behave unexpectedly. 

You can also consider other metrics like user feedback and engagement with social media campaigns, depending on your company and marketing strategies. The important thing is to decide whether the compiled metrics should be given equal weight in a score or if some are more illuminating than others. 

Select Predictive Metrics

Your industry and products or services offered will heavily impact the metrics that you value the most. Many companies include metrics like the ones listed above plus others such as user retention cost, net promoter score, and service renewals. 

Once you have selected your metrics, analytical tools like Kissmetrics allow you to measure user interaction with your website and are ideal for compiling data. 

Create a Scoring System

With your predictive metrics in mind, you’ll need to decide how much weight to assign each metric. For example, knowing that a user called to clarify installation directions and another user left a scathing review on your website shouldn’t be given equal weight during engagement scoring. A support case doesn’t necessarily mean your user will churn, but a nasty review likely does.

Develop a Health Score Scale

Depending on how you define user health, one type of scoring system might stand out as better for your purposes. For example, if you decide that user health is solely defined by whether a user has renewed your service within the past 12 months, a color code system would work perfectly.

We don’t recommend using a single metric to determine user health since it is a complex concept that requires multiple metrics working together to provide an accurate picture. 

Weighting and scoring various metrics will usually leave you with a numerical score for each user. 

Visualize User Health Score/Strategize

Now that you have a method of scoring your users, you should next decide how to present your method in a straightforward, meaningful way. We recommend consulting with your customer success and account management teams to see how they prefer to visualize the data. 

User health scores increase in value as you add more buckets. Increasing specificity makes it easier for account managers to know at a glance how users score. We list some examples of user health scoring systems in the next section.

After you’ve selected appropriate buckets for users, you’ll need to strategize with your teams. Choosing strategies to assuage user dissatisfaction is crucial for retaining users, although individual strategy will depend on your company’s industry. 

This might look like offering unhealthy users another onboarding, discounts, or a free trial for a higher tier of subscription. 

Examples of User Health Scores

There are a variety of ways to score user health. Depending on which is the most meaningful to your company or, if there’s an industry standard, you’ll likely choose one of the following common examples of user health scoring systems. 

Percentage Scale

A percentage scale is the most specific of the examples listed here. For example, an account manager automatically knows that a user who has scored 32% is more dissatisfied than a user with a 45% score. 

This makes prioritization easier, although it provides many buckets of data that might be harder for customer success and account management teams to parse quickly. 

Color Code

Many companies prefer to use the stoplight system, which simplifies user scores into Green, Yellow, and Red. While this system is easy to remember, it might make things too simple. 

A user who has renewed in that timeframe would be “green.” An account manager who had persuaded a client not to cancel would score them “yellow,” and a user whose subscription had lapsed would be coded “red.”

Account managers would know to prioritize users marked Red, but there aren’t degrees of Red, making it difficult to distinguish between levels of dissatisfied users.

Alphabetical Scale

The alphabetical scale works similarly to the American grading system in school. Users are scored with a letter between A and F, with A being the highest score and F being the lowest. 

Like the color code, the alphabetical scale is easy to remember and gives account managers an instant visual of how they should interact with a user’s account. 

Ranking Scale

As the name implies, the ranking scale compares each user’s score to every other user’s score and creates a ranked list. This can come in handy when you’re looking for the lowest-ranked users to provide some kind of intervention and prevent churn. It might also be an opportunity to reward high-ranking users with a promotional discount. 

The downside to the ranking scale is that, like the percentage scale, it doesn’t inherently provide convenient buckets for customer success and account management teams. Instead, they have to do some reading and sorting to find the valuable information. 

Other Metrics That Indicate Overall Company Health

In addition to the metrics listed above, the following metrics can also give you a good idea of your company’s general wellbeing:

  • Churn Rate – a measurement showing the number of users who stop using your product or service over a specified period.
  • Average Revenue per Account – the total revenue earned during the specified period divided by the number of active accounts.
  • Net Promoter Score – surveying users on how likely they are to recommend your company to a loved one on a scale of one to ten (with one being the lowest and ten the highest score).
  • User Retention Cost – the total needed to persuade a single user to continue purchasing your products.
  • User Satisfaction Score – surveying users on how satisfied they were with their experience with your company or with your company’s product on a scale of one to ten (with one being the lowest and ten the highest score).
  • Customer Lifetime Value – the total amount a single user is expected to spend on your products or services throughout their relationship with your company.
  • Monthly Recurring Revenue – the average revenue per account per month multiplied by the number of accounts in a given month. This is an estimation of how much revenue your company should expect to earn each month. 

Conclusion

User health scores provide essential information for companies to see whether they meet their customers’ needs. By combining a range of metrics to measure how users interact with your company, you can entice dissatisfied users to stay and decrease your churn rate by planning out appropriate strategies with your account managers and customer success teams. 

 

Sources:

How to Score User Health | User Success | Gainsight.com

Why You Need User Health Scoring (& How to Do It Right!) | Wordstream.com

Monthly Recurring Revenue Definition | Zuora.com

Cohort Analysis: Beginners Guide to Improving Retention

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Brand awareness is great, but experienced business owners know that the key to success isn’t about attracting new customers; it’s enticing existing customers to return. Cohort analysis is one way to measure how long users interact with your website or product before leaving and can provide valuable insights into areas where you need to improve features. 

What is a Cohort?

A cohort is a group of users who share common traits based on an event you track. So, for example, you could segment users who visit your website over a period of six months, by which week they visited. 

Why is Cohort Retention Important?

Simply put, cohort retention is important because it’s more expensive to acquire new customers than it is to keep your current ones. To know if you’re retaining specific cohorts, you need to track their behavior. This will give you two types of information: a) it will tell you whether or not you’re retaining users at all or whether new users are masking a major churn issue, and b) it will give you insight into how to keep those cohorts happy. 

What is Churn?

Churn is when a customer decides to stop using your product or services. This might mean they cancel a subscription, cease logging in, or stop buying from your company. A high churn rate is a red flag, even if you continue to reel in plenty of new customers.

What is Cohort Analysis?

Cohort analysis is the process of segmenting your website visitors or users into groups based on their characteristics or interactions within a specified time. Everyone in a cohort has made the same decisions and triggered the same events within the period or they share a trait such as a geographic location or belonging to an age group. To conduct cohort analysis you will put your parameters into your product analytics tool then check the data regularly for trends. 

The purpose of this analysis is to track cohort behavior over time. You’ll see whether you have a high churn rate among existing customers, or perhaps just those that come in on a trial offer. You’ll be able to see whether your consistent MRR reflects a good product or all-star sales and marketing teams (and perhaps a product with problems). 

Cohort Data Types

There are two different types of cohort data: acquisition and behavior. 

Acquisition cohorts are based on when a user initially created an account or first used your product. They provide information about how long a user continues to interact with your product or service after they start. Knowing when your users are leaving your software is essential to see where you need to improve. For example, if users are leaving after a day or two, that could mean they are having difficulty with onboarding or using your software or product. To solve this, you could provide more explicit instructions or offer onboarding assistance. 

Behavioral cohorts are based on behaviors that users have or have not performed within your software. For example, they can be people who visited your website but didn’t sign up for an account or users who signed up for your mailing list but didn’t purchase anything. If you monitor a cohort who visits your website, creates an account, and signs up for the mailing list within a small time frame. You’ll see how long they continue to log in to their account afterward or if customers who create accounts are more likely to purchase your products. 

Cohort Analysis Example

As we noted above, a standard cohort analysis looks at visitors to your website, both new and returning. Over six months, you can measure the number of new visitors who sign up with your website and how many of them returned to the website within that time. 

For example, if you begin measuring on the first day of May, you can see the percentage of new visitors returning in June, July, August, etc. This information can show you how long the average user spends utilizing your product whether it has legs. 

How to Do Cohort Analysis

Performing a cohort analysis requires four steps: 

  • Creating a question – What do you want to know about your users? 
  • Selecting the metrics – Do you measure how many consecutive days they log in to their account? The length of time between creating an account and purchasing a product?
  • Designing cohort identifiers – Are you segmenting your cohorts based on user behaviors or time?
  • Running the analysis – Pulling the data and visualizing it to find the answers to your initial question.

How to Build a Cohort Analysis Report Within Kissmetrics

In Kissmetrics, we offer various parameters to maximize the amount of helpful information in your cohort analysis report. The first step is to specify your date range for people performing the first event. Then you select the events to monitor, like visiting your website, logging into their account, utilizing your software, etc. 

The next option specifies the period of each cell. It lets you narrow the scope of the question, “After doing Event 1, how many hours, days, weeks, or months did it take these people to do Event 2?”. Then, choose whether you want to group people based on time or property. Time looks at when people performed the first event—property groups based on a property you set beforehand.

How to Use Cohort Analysis Data to Improve Retention

Essentially, cohort analysis watches how groups of people interact with your product and how those interactions change over time. Understanding the staying power of your product and how long users interact with it can help you determine where you need to improve it to increase user retention. 

Uncover Friction Points

Acquisition cohort analysis gives you the data to map out a retention curve. So, you can see approximately how many days, weeks, or months your average users stay connected with your product before churning. Typically, the most significant drop-off will be within a few days of starting use since many users may be casual visitors or may not want to continue dedicating time and effort. 

However, suppose the initial drop-off is larger than expected. In that case, it may reveal a friction point where customers may not be getting the information they need to set up the app or to utilize your product’s basic functions and are quitting out of frustration. 

Study Which Actions Drive Retention

Behavioral cohort analysis dives into the “why” of churn. If users who don’t interact with one of your product’s main features are the ones who quit within the first week, that’s an indication that they either need to be prompted to use it, or taught how. 

Alternatively, if users trying to pay with cryptocurrency regularly appear to cancel their subscriptions after the first month, that indicates your payment system may not be working correctly or is not optimized for that type of payment method. 

Benefits of Cohort Analysis For Your Business

Cohort analysis provides a variety of benefits for your business by providing deep insights into your user actions and behaviors. We explore a few of them in the sections below. 

Increase Customer Lifetime Value

Cohort analysis helps to establish your customer lifetime value, or CLV, since it gives you an idea of how many customers continue to engage with your company. Customers often spend the most money during their first month, but you can determine why customers decrease their spending and then take actions to potentially increase their CLV by addressing those issues found in a cohort analysis. 

Identify Loyal Customers

Cohort analysis doesn’t have to focus solely on the users who leave; it also identifies the people who stay. You might find that visitors who spend a week with an active account before purchasing your product are more likely to continue engaging with it for a long time, as opposed to visitors who buy on the same day their account is created. 

Improve Product Testing

When you roll out a new update, cohort analysis can show the percentage of users who decide to leave within a given timeframe after the update was released. Thus, you can test new features, bug fixes, and updates by monitoring when customers leave. 

Conclusion

Cohort analysis allows you to obtain detailed insight into your conversion funnel, how long users interact with your product, and when they start leaving. This information sheds light on actions you should taketo improve your product or website.

 

Visit Kissmetrics for more information about cohort analysis reports and how your business can benefit from them.

 

Sources:

  1. Cohort Analysis: Beginners Guide to Improving Retention
  2. Cohort Analysis: The Key to Improving User Retention for Your App
  3. Cohort Analysis: An Insider Look at Your Customer’s Behavior

The 5 Most Important Onboarding Metrics to Measure

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One thing all businesses have in common is that new users are required for growth and long-term success. But new users don’t often know all the details of your products and services so you have to educate them as to their benefits through a process called onboarding. The onboarding process looks different for every company and industry so you might have to iterate onboarding until you have the process that sits at the nexus of cost-effective and customer satisfaction.  

In order to make your onboarding process as efficient and effective as possible, it’s important to gather data to clarify what needs to change.

What is User Onboarding?

User onboarding is the introduction of users to your business and products. In this early phase, users will learn about your offerings and what value these products can bring to them. 

Onboarding also includes teaching the users how to navigate and implement your products and how to maximize their value. This can include helping them get products or services up and running or helping them transfer over from a competitor’s set of products or services.

Because this is the first phase in which users will start to interact with your business, it’s crucial that your onboarding process is well thought out, as it sets the foundation for their relationship with your business. The user onboarding phase will also consist of answering any questions or concerns your users may have while you guide them through the process of adopting your product or services. 

In a nutshell, user onboarding is the process of taking new users and transforming them into existing users. 

Why is User Onboarding Important?

First impressions are key when introducing users to your product or business. A poorly executed onboarding process is one of the main reasons users leave and move on to competitors. A well-executed user onboarding process will ease the burden of user retention and will increase overall user satisfaction. 

Another reason user onboarding is important is that it is a great opportunity to teach the users about your company’s different offerings and potentially upsell. Potential users may have arrived at your company because of one product or service, but that doesn’t have to be the only product or service they end up choosing. 

During the user onboarding process, you may discover that different products or services fit your users’ needs. Selecting the appropriate products and services for your users will help them get more value from your company. Learning the best fit for your users during the onboarding process will lead to higher satisfaction and consistent growth for your business. 

How Long is the Onboarding Process?

The length of the user onboarding process depends on your industry and business model. For a company selling simple products and services that are somewhat self-explanatory, the onboarding process will be simple and straightforward. Some new users may be looking for a quick and easy order process that will save them time. In that case, your onboarding process should be fast and efficient, providing the most value to the users. 

For companies selling complex products or services, the onboarding process should be detailed enough to give the users all the necessary details. The onboarding process should teach them the proper ways to use your products or services which will increase the likelihood of user retention. 

How is Onboarding Measured?

It’s critical you track the appropriate metrics for your business and situation.  Some of the most important onboarding metrics are:

  • Completion time
  • User progression
  • Product adoption rates
  • Escalation response time
  • User response rate

Completion Time

The length of time it takes your users to complete the onboarding process is measured as the completion time. A good completion time will vary depending on your product and service lineup but a good rule of thumb is the quicker the better. You want to get people using your product or service while they’re still excited about it. 

Additionally, a long completion time could mean a complicated onboarding process that may lead to lower user satisfaction. For example, a long completion time may result in a low completion rate, which in turn leads to a low growth rate. 

By contrast, a low completion time may mean users are not getting enough information during the onboarding process. This could also lead to lower user satisfaction and poor user relations. 

User Progression

User progression is a metric used for tracking a user’s progress during the onboarding process. If your company’s onboarding process is complicated or your user retention rate is low, user progression would be useful to track. 

Understanding where users are in the onboarding progress can help identify bottlenecks in your process. Keeping your onboarding process as efficient and easy for your users as possible is a smart approach to grow your business. 

By monitoring your user progression metric, you get a clear sense of how smooth your onboarding process is. 

Product Adoption Rates

When analyzing the number of users who successfully adopt your product, you are looking at the product adoption rate metric. This metric is a calculation of the percent of users who go from being one-time users to repeat users of your product. 

While one-time users may provide some quick wins for your company, they are usually not the users that will lead to the long-term success of your company.  Product adoption rate is critical for subscription-based businesses looking to convert users after free trial periods. Subscription-based companies need active users in order to maintain their user base and product adoption rates measure how many users are being converted to active users. 

Escalation Response Time

When your users are having an issue and open a case or ticket with customer success, it’s critical that their problem is resolved quickly. Escalation response time is a measure of how long it takes customer success to resolve or close tickets that have been escalated (typically beyond the first level of support). 

The first level of support could be a FAQ page or automated chat support, while the second level of support usually includes some type of human interaction (either chat or phone). 

Escalation response time is a useful metric to track if you have concerns about your customer success performance and how it affects onboarding and user adoption. This measure will be different for each company because it hinges on how well your customer support system is set up.

User Response Rate

User response rate can give you a real look at the percentage of users invested in your products. 

When sending out surveys or feedback forms, the user response rate is the percent of users that respond to your inquiries. While it’s essential to track metrics about your user’s behavior, it’s also important to get real feedback from users about how your company is performing. 

The user response rate indicates how many users are currently active and how much they value your product. If users are not responsive to your company’s attempts to reach out for feedback, they may not be invested enough in your products or services. 

How Do I Track User Onboarding Metrics?

There are many options when looking to track user onboarding metrics. Gathering data and understanding how to set up metrics that align with your business model is key.  

It’s important to monitor your onboarding performance to grow your company and increase user satisfaction. Kissmetrics has excellent solutions for tracking onboarding metrics for your online business. 

Why Do User Onboarding Metrics Matter?

User onboarding metrics provide insight into what it’s like to become a new user of your products or services. Maybe user onboarding is a strong performance area for your company, and you’re looking to maintain its positive impact, or perhaps user onboarding may be an area your business is struggling so you need to understand where the process can be improved. 

User onboarding can be a complicated process to track depending on your business model. Despite the difficulties, user onboarding is a critical process for any company looking for long-term success. The new user onboarding process sets the tone for what the experience of being an active user for your company will be. 

Having the right metrics in place is critical to make sure that the first impression your business makes is the right one. 

Conclusion

User onboarding metrics provide essential information on how your company first greets its users. Onboarding can be a long process depending on your products and services, making it vital that the process is smooth and valuable for your users. Ensuring your user onboarding process sets a good tone and creates a positive experience is a key to growing your business and creating positive user feedback. 

 

Sources:

Customer Onboarding | Gitlab

User Onboarding: Not Just for HR and Growth Hackers | Huffpost.com

Growth Hacking: Creating a Wow Moment | For Entrepreneurs

The Importance of Understanding Qualitative Data

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Qualitative data is a non-numeric measure of data best used for describing characteristics or qualities. Qualitative data is most frequently obtained from surveys, feedback forms, focus groups, or other forms of personal feedback. This data can also be recorded from a third-person perspective, such as recording someone’s reaction to a new product. 

Qualitative data is important for ecommerce and SaaS because it’s a way to measure customer feedback and product reviews. Kissmetrics can help you organize your data collection and break down your data types.

What Is the Difference Between Qualitative and Quantitative Data?

Quantitative data is a numeric measure of data. A good example of quantitative data would be the number of sales recorded over a specific period of time, the number of new customers over a period of time, or the churn rate. This type of data is objective, meaning it is not based on opinion and is a fact that can be measured in quantity. 

The main difference between qualitative and quantitative data is that qualitative data is non-numeric. 

Both types of data are important when measuring the performance of your company or a specific product. For example, solid quantitative data is important for measuring financial data or sales data, which are good indications of company growth. 

On the other hand, measuring qualitative data such as product feedback or customer satisfaction is needed to make sure your products are successful in your customer’s eyes.

How Can I Collect Qualitative Data?

Collecting qualitative data can be more of a challenge than collecting quantitative data, but qualitative data is essential for businesses hoping to gather customer feedback. If you’re struggling to collect qualitative data, Kissmetrics has the experience to help you. Some of the different options for collecting qualitative data include:

  • One-on-one interviews
  • Focus groups
  • Observation
  • Longitudinal studies
  • Case studies

One-on-One Interviews

Conducting personal one-on-one interviews is a proven way to get good qualitative data.  Interviewing a current or potential customer can provide honest feedback about your products or company’s perception. 

While one-on-one interviews may seem more time-consuming, virtual interviews are common and much easier to arrange than in-person interviews. It’s good to have a mix of your typical users interviewed for feedback on your product performance in order to gain information about a variety of demographic groups. 

It may also be helpful to interview potential customers to understand their current product choices and why your product hasn’t been used. If possible, one-on-one interviews with former users can provide valuable feedback on why your product did not work for that user. 

The qualitative data from interviews is important to get a view of the perception individuals have of your products.

Focus Groups

Focus groups have been used in several different fields to collect qualitative data from small groups of people. For marketing purposes, focus groups will be guided by a proctor who asks questions about companies and products in your field of interest. This format promotes free and open discussion about topics concerning your company and products. 

Focus groups can be used in the early phases of product development when companies are trying to get feedback on a new product or concept. You can also use focus groups to test product usability. Having a focus group test a website’s usability can get valuable qualitative data feedback for your developers.

Observation

Observing your customers as they use your products is another way to get qualitative data.  This method requires the observer to collect data and record interactions between the user and the product. Observing users without any dialog provides a realistic view of what users struggle to accomplish when using your product. 

Some companies will go so far as to not give the customer any instructions and simply set the product in front of them to see what they do. Do they read the instructions insert? Do they navigate to the “Help” section? Do they immediately start using the product? This helps companies see how new users react to a product the first time they encounter it. 

Your products must be simple and intuitive for new customers unfamiliar with their layout. Observing where the user’s eyes go and how they handle confusing situations can help designers create friendlier layouts. Qualitative data from observation can transform your products into well-thought-out solutions.

Longitudinal Studies

Another way of observing user behavior on a larger scale is a longitudinal study. Often, longitudinal studies involve following the same people or users over an extended period of time to track their behavior. 

These types of studies are often used in the medical field to track the long-term success of medication or surgeries. For tech companies, a long-term study of their users and their habits can help organizations to understand the impacts their products have on users. 

Longitudinal studies can reveal the habits of users, which could help developers shape new features. By knowing the patterns users tend to follow, developers are able to create software that is designed with these habits in mind. If you’re looking to understand what frustrates users, longitudinal studies can also be insightful. Perhaps a situation users didn’t put much thought into at first glance can become a real headache after long periods of use. 

Longitudinal studies may require the most effort but can yield beneficial results.

Case Studies

When looking to do a deep dive on a particular topic or situation, a case study may be the best option. Case studies for websites may be a detailed look at an issue that doesn’t have an immediately obvious solution. 

It may involve observing a small group or a large segment of your user base, but it’s best to have the scope of the issue narrow. A case study on why new customers aren’t using a particular feature may help understand how you can improve the product. 

At the end of a case study, you may only have a theory or hypothesis because case studies do not always lead to a concrete solution, but your team is likely to be headed in the right direction. 

Case studies can also provide a good platform for advertising your product. By showing potential users a real-world problem and how your product solved it, users can see the firsthand value of your product. 

The qualitative data gathered from case studies can provide a detailed look at a specific situation you need to be analyzed.

How Can I Analyze My Qualitative Data?

Once you’ve collected your qualitative data, it needs to be properly analyzed in order to be usable. Two ways you can analyze your data are deductive analysis and inductive analysis.

Deductive Analysis

When performing deductive analysis, you start with a theory and try to prove it. An example could be “new users are having trouble completing a setup wizard.” From that theory, you would form a hypothesis about why the problem is occurring, such as “the final questions on the wizard are confusing to new users.” 

From that hypothesis, you could then collect data around the issue that your users are experiencing. The first step would be to gather feedback from new users completing the setup process. Once you have the data relevant to the hypothesis, you can then analyze and evaluate the results in order to improve your product. 

Perhaps you find that new users don’t understand the wording of the final questions in your setup process. Based on this information, you could reword your final questions to make them clearer 

While deductive analysis can be helpful, you must start with a theory in order to use this method. If you don’t have a theory, then Inductive analysis is the proper way to analyze your data.

Inductive Analysis

When you have little to no idea regarding an issue you want to analyze, using inductive analysis is more practical. Inductive analysis is the process by which you would form a theory regarding a situation. 

The first step is to start with an observation such as “a new user did not complete our setup process.” From this observation, you could look for patterns. For example, you might observe that half of the users in that focus group did not complete the setup process, which would indicate a pattern. After a pattern is established, you can then form a theory like “the users did not understand the questions in the setup process.” 

This form of analysis is limited because you can form theories, but you need more data to prove or disprove that theory. After using inductive analysis to form your theory, you could then begin to solve the issue using deductive analysis.  

Why Is It Important to Understand Qualitative Research?

When dealing with issues in your business, a numerically based report cannot always tell you the root issues in your products. The voice of your customers will be represented in qualitative data, so it’s important to understand what is being said. 

 

Researching issues is a process that takes time, so understanding the best route for your business is key to being efficient. Kissmetrics can make it easy for you to collect and understand your qualitative research.  

How Can Qualitative Research Help My Business?

Qualitative research is needed to track and resolve real issues your customers may face when using your product. Customer issues need to be tracked and analyzed, and that data is often collected through qualitative research. 

It’s also important to research how to grow your product and reach out to new customers. Gathering feedback from people not using your product will help you see ways to expand your footprint in the market. Researching the voice of users and non-users is a great way to get their perception of your products.

Conclusion

Understanding qualitative data is necessary for companies looking to see what their customers think of their products. This non-numeric form of data goes beyond sales numbers and conversion rates to look at what customers say and feel about your products. Make sure it’s something you take the time to collect and analyze to improve your product delivery. 

 

Sources:

  1. All Guides: Data Module #1: What is Research Data?: Qualitative vs. Quantitative | Libguides.com.
  2. Qualitative vs Quantitative Research | Simplypsychology.org
  3. Case Study Method in Psychology | Simplypyschology.org