IMC 2010 Session Recap: Data Meets Design
Presented by: Anil Batra
This is a recap of Anil Batra’s presentation at IMC Vancouver 2010 titled Data Meets Design. Anil is a frequent speaker, UBC tutor, and VP of Search & Analytics at POP.
Anil asks us who matters: The only person that matters is your customer and what are they looking for. They tell you by their clicks and feedback.
He tells us the purpose of the presentation is to teach us how to collect this data.
Customers leave trails:
- How did they get to you? Search, social media, campaigns…
- Every click they are telling you what they are looking for: they can tell you if they are confused; if they are comparing products.They can tell you if they are confused. If they are comparing products.
- Take a look at your users behaviour.
Anil says he is not a fan of reviewing analytics such as “time spent on site” or “time spent on page” metrics. “So what, who cares whether it is 5 minutes or 3 minutes. Your customers are not there to spend time, they are there to do something.”
He tell us to look at their actions and then think, how do I need to modify the site? What banners are they clicking, what email addresses are working? All this information is golden.
Anil cautions us about not forgetting about the bigger picture: “What are your customers looking for and how can I drive business for that?”
To find out what people are searching for he suggests tools like Adwords Keyword Tool. He tell us to find out what they are looking for and structure your sites architecture, urls, content to speak to them.
Review your on-site search; people often forget this. This will also usually expose internal navigation issues – and display visually appealing.
He suggests we review who are we competing against and what they are doing? Anil tells us not copy but learn so you can leverage this knowledge. This will also help you determine how you we positioned in the marketplace? Tools to do this include Compete.
Also make sure you listen to hat are our customers saying via feedback and qualitative tools.
Listen. Collect information that is not just websites data. Programs he suggests include Google trends, Raidan6 and SM2.
Anil runs down the list of Analytics tools: Google Analytics. Yahoo Analytics. Omniture. Webtrends. An interesting note, Yahoo provides demographic information, which Google does not because of privacy reasons.
Anil says he starts the analytics process with getting the company to show them their goals and KPI’s. He then displays these KPI’s on a dashboard (no more then 6 KPI’s on dashboard).
For a preview of the session see the video below.
Excerpt from the presentation courtesy of IIMA and IMC