Google Analytics and ClickTale: A Marriage of Qualitative and Quantitative Data

Setting the Bar: Google Analytics

Google Analytics (GA) is arguably one of the best website analytics tools on the market. For starters, it’s completely free and there are lots of training tools (also free!) available for even the least experienced marketers to learn the ins and outs of the system. Avinash Kaushik explains that GA is one of the only free, robust analytics tools available that also has “custom reporting and advanced segmentation built in,” and that companies really don’t need to pay for more advanced systems unless their needs are particularly complex (2010, p. 29). Furthermore, the tool generates enough useful data that other tools may not be necessary if users are looking for simple reports about traffic, user demographics, conversions and referrals. E-Nor.com, a California-based digital analytics and marketing optimization consulting firm recently analyzed the web analytics tool usage among Fortune 500 companies. As of 2013, more than 63% of these companies are using GA as their analytics tools (Farina, 2013).

So if GA can do so much for so many, what else could a company possibly need? What other tools offer alternatives or supplements to GA’s capabilities? While there are dozens and dozens (if not hundreds!) of analytics tools available, one that stands out is Clicktale, a tool devoted to analyzing the customer experience. While GA can tell a marketer where a customer came from, if they were a repeat visitor, if they made a purchase, and what their demographic profile might be, it cannot tell the marketer exactly what someone’s experience was with the website. GA does a great job of tracking the origination and termination of a user’s experience, but it cannot offer much dynamic insight into how the user experienced the site between arriving and leaving. Beyond the amount of time spent on the site and a general click stream, GA doesn’t paint much of a user experience picture. Here’s where a tool like ClickTale can supplement the GA data.

ClickTale: The User Experience Analyst

In a nutshell, ClickTale “enables businesses to maximize revenues by optimizing the way people experience the digital world” (ClickTale, 2014a). The basic products that ClickTale offers provide video session playbacks for individual customers, several types of heat maps to show customers view, scroll and click, and conversion funnels to show exactly what makes successful transactions happen. Digging a little deeper into these features will help explain why ClickTale is a great addition to any marketer’s web analytics toolbox.

Session Playback

This feature of ClickTale’s offerings allows marketers to watch recordings of a visitor’s entire session on a particular site. The tool explains, “see your site through the eyes of your visitors. Understand how they use your site, what they’re trying to achieve and where they encounter errors” (ClickTale, 2014e). A benefit of this tool is that it allows marketers to view complete sessions of people who bounced from the site, didn’t follow through with a purchase or decided to leave during a set process like filling out a form. Seeing exactly where a customer got frustrated, and identifying trends, can help marketers make the user experience better. Problem areas are easily, visually identified using this tool. GA does not have this sort of functionality; it would only report that a user bounced initially, did not convert, or didn’t spend a long time on a particular page.

Heat Maps

ClickTale offers several types of heat map data including mouse move heat maps, click heat maps, attention heat maps and scroll-reach heat maps. This comprehensive toolkit of heat maps, “lets you optimize your websites conversion rates and usability by visualizing your visitors’ every mouse move, click and scroll. Heat maps are aggregated reports that visually display what parts of a webpage are looked at, clicked on, focused on and interacted with by thousands of online visitors” (ClickTale,2014b). Knowing exactly where on a website users are spending time or clicking is incredibly valuable for a marketer. This allows for the adjustment and re-formatting of potential problem areas, and also allows marketers to see what is working well. GA does not have this sort of functionality; it does not report exactly where on a page users are spending time. GA would simply be able to show where a user clicked if there were links to click. It would not be able to show what buttons, content, images or forms a user spent a lot of time looking at.

Conversion Tools

ClickTale’s conversion tools are meant to help marketers understand why website visitors succeed or fail to complete each step of a particular conversion goal (ClickTale, 2014d). The conversion funnel functionality pinpoints exactly where potential customers are leaving the conversion process. This tool, combined with the video playback, gives marketers a unique set of quantitative and qualitative data for each step of the conversion process (ClickTale, 2014d). Addiontally, ClickTale offers a form analytics tool, which helps marketers see what parts of a form might be too lengthy, confusing or frustrating. Finally, link analytics give marketers the ability to see how quickly a user clicks a button or link, if he or she is hovering or hesitating, and which links are being ignored or missed entirely. GA is much more limited when it comes to conversions. The tool only reveals the number of conversions, and how they originated, but the experience of the user to get to that point is not revealed.

Conclusion

While the data the GA provides is incredibly valuable (and free!), it does not necessarily give marketers the whole picture of what it’s like for a visitor to actually experience a website. Beginning and ending data like how a visitor was referred and if he or she converted is certainly important to know, but without really understanding how a customer got from point A to point C, marketers can’t really analyze the user experience. As ClickTale explains, “Most web analytics solutions capture visitors landing on a web page and monitor their movement from page to page within a site. This is great for collecting quantitative information about your website traffic, but can’t tell you much about what visitors do once inside these pages” (ClickTale, 2014c). Using a tool like ClickTale in addition to GA can give a marketer a more robust picture of how visitors are experiencing their websites and processes. Analyzing all of this quantitative AND qualitative data can help guide decision-making processes about layout, design, and functionality that will ultimately help the user and increase profitability.

Social Media: One and Done or the More the Merrier?

Too many eggs in one social media basket? Not a good thing! With so many social possibilities out there, and so many different marketing and communications needs to be met (even within the same company!), there is simply no way adopting one platform as a sole means of social interaction with customers is the best option for a company or organization. In a recent article from Mashable.com, Brian Solis explains that organizations must lay the groundwork for proper social media engagement by first discovering their relevant communities by observing “the choices, challenges, impressions and wants of the people within each network” (2010). The means by which one segment of customers or potential customers interacts with a brand is not necessarily uniform across the entire customer base. Once an organization identifies a relevant consumer, the next step is identifying the best way to reach and converse with that audience – there’s simply no one easy way to do that. Additionally, not engaging on a variety of social networks could, figuratively speaking, leave money on the table, since pockets of target audiences may be found across dozens of digital and offline social networks.

So how does a company decide which social networks to engage with? Michael Greenberg explains that, “very few companies either have the scale to support social properly or the understanding to really make it work (2009). So if resources are tight and skills are lacking, why bother trying to engage on multiple networks? I think the answer boils down to conversations, and where a brand is most likely to have the most meaningful of them. While Greenberg is correct in his assumption that most organizations lac the time and skills to do every social thing well, he does offer an excellent solution: “Developing the content necessary to drive social and other content marketing initiatives is just an extension of that marketing calendar. If you establish a cadence, say, of two new content pieces per month, these can just get inserted into the calendar. It’s a little extra work, but I will bet that most e-commerce marketers, if they compare the time spent in a given month trying to figure out what to tweet or to post on their corporate Facebook page, will find the total time spent would likely be equivalent. And the quality of output and the quality of results would be much better” (2009). Basically, we’re all “doing marketing” anyway, so translating those materials into usable content across a variety of channels shouldn’t be as bad as we might think. So, step one in tackling more than one social media network well is to translate marketing into usable content.

The next vital piece of the social media puzzle then becomes taking the content and instigating conversation with it. What good is content if no one is talking about it? Catherine Novak explains, “Content without conversation is just broadcasting, or just advertising. It goes to the listener/reader/viewer/visitor…and stops there. If the sender is lucky, it may lodge as a piece of information in the receiver’s consciousness, and they may act on it someday. If the sender is luckier, or perhaps more engaging, it may be something that the receiver wants to talk about. And then the message gets a whole new burst of energy. That happens because we humans like to communicate with each other” (2010). Here is where it is vital to have more than one outlet to start the conversation with potential customers, advocates and fans.

Take Special Olympics New Jersey as an example. The organization has hundreds of sports competition events year round, but they also provide free health screenings, leadership opportunities, and advocacy while simultaneously hosting fundraising events and campaigns to support it all. That’s a LOT of potential content and conversation. If SONJ relied completely on Facebook, for example, to carry on the conversations about all of these things all the time, the audience there would become diluted, annoyed and irrelevant: the people who care about the Polar Plunge aren’t necessarily the same people who care about the free medical screenings, who aren’t necessarily the same people who have a child in the program. Conversations with each of these audiences may have more impact and more relevance across very different social media channels.

Parents of SONJ athletes may have better interactions with the brand (and each other!) through SONJ’s private “locker room” portal, which allows them to share stories and concerns and receive quick feedback from SONJ leadership. 

Source: www.specialolympics.org/share

Polar Plungers, on the other hand, carry on conversations with event organizers right on the Facebook ads. Not only are the ads being served to a relevant audience, they allow SONJ to talk directly with the people who are planning to take the Plunge. An organic post on the SONJ page might reach a few thousand people at most, but the level of engagement is not nearly as prolific as when the ad is offered as a conversation piece to a more relevant audience. 

 

And what about runners of SONJ’s Lincoln Tunnel Challenge? They converse more readily with the brand on Instagram, where following hashtags and photos of the event is super simple. The #ltc5k hashtag got several hundred tags throughout the event weekend, and SONJ was able to congratulate participants directly, and remind them how important their fundraising dollars would become!

Source: Screenshot from http://iconosquare.com/tag/ltc5k

Finally, general “fans” of SONJ tend to prefer conversing with the brand over powerful images and moments of triumph, organically shared on Facebook and Twitter. The audiences there tend to use the SONJ Facebook page and Twitter feeds as places to see and comment on the core of what Special Olympics is all about. A lot of the “extras” SONJ provides (like the special events and programs) don’t do as well on the organic pages since the audiences tend to be much more general fans of the movement.

Source: www.facebook.com/SONewJersey

At the end of the day, SONJ only has one staff person completely dedicated to social media.  The communications department must therefore gather content from the organization as a whole and then translate it across multiple platforms in order to reach the most relevant audiences for each conversation. Like almost any company, SONJ would not be as successful with their social media strategy – and therefore sales, engagement, participation and registrations – if they were to rely on one network only.

Conversion Rates

Any company or organization with a product to sell, service to offer or event to grow knows that people can’t buy, receive or participate in something they know nothing about. That’s where marketing steps in. However, beyond a creative and strategic approach to marketing comes analyzing when and why a particular action was taken. This is where conversion rate comes in to play. The WebAnalytics Association explains that, “conversions usually represent important business outcomes, such as completing a purchase or requesting a quote. Sometimes they are chosen because they indicate potential for future behavior, such as clicking on an advertisement, registering for more information, or starting a checkout process” (2008).

Special Olympics New Jersey has recently begun tracking conversions through Facebook advertising for special event fundraisers. For the organization’s Battle the Beach 5k event a Facebook campaign was implemented for a period of several weeks. A piece of code generated by Facebook was placed into the check-out screen for the event, so Facebook could report the number of people who saw the ad who actually registered for the event after clicking the ad. The ads were retargeted to people who had visited the Battle the Beach website in the last week before seeing the Facebook ad. At the conclusion of the campaign, 104 people who saw the Facebook ad registered for the event after clicking the ad.

              This conversion metric is extremely valuable because it indicates that people are actually registering for the event after seeing the ad; they aren’t just “wasting” a paid click to find out more information.

              Despite the seemingly successful nature of the paid Facebook campaign for Battle the Beach (at least in the retarget), SONJ also noticed that the vast majority of visitors from the generally-targeted ad set were viewing the Battle the Beach site on their phones and then bouncing from the site immediately. The marketing was working, but the conversion was simply not happening. In fact, that ad set only generated a handful of conversions despite the huge number of clicks and impressions it received. So what was stopping people from the general ad set and what was making people from the retargeted set actually register?

              The culprit appears to be the user experience of the Battle the Beach registration site. People who visited the Battle the Beach site multiple times and were able to figure out the tricky navigation were seeing the Facebook ads a lot more frequently. Ultimately when someone from this ad set decided to actually participate in the run, there was a strong likelihood a Battle the Beach ad would be at the top of the newsfeed. However, for the general ad set targeted at people who very likely had never visited the Battle the Beach website, the initial experience trying to register was a bad one. In an article from Entrepreneur.com, Brett Relander explains that there are several factors related to web design and user experience that weigh heavily on an individual’s ultimate conversion: usability, conversion-centric design features, favorable aesthetics, and ease of navigation (2014).

              In the case of the Battle the Beach site, none of these criteria were actually met. Visitors made it to the website but then had to pinch and zoom on a phone (no responsive design), decipher a web of menu options and look at a rather blah design. The site certainly did not set itself up to foster an environment of conversions. The fact that the retargeted ads performed so much better indicates that visitors had to go back to the website multiple times before figuring out exactly how to register. 

 Retrieved from www.btb5k.org.

              

 Tracking conversions will ultimately help SONJ assess the entire user experience. Even with a creative and strategic marketing campaign, if the experience for a potential event participant is a negative or difficult one, the conversion rates will indicate the need for some serious adjustments.

Referral Sites

Consider the marketing process. A client approaches an ad agency to help them sell more products. The agency works for weeks coming up with an integrated marketing plan to achieve the client’s goals. Everyone agrees the creative elements of the campaign are brilliant; the ads are eye-catching, the slogans are spot on and the brand is well represented. Ads, promotional materials, social strategy and email marketing calendars are all in place across a wide variety of channels. The campaign launches and sales start soaring. Obviously the client is happy, but what happens next? Does the client shake the hands with the agency and just say, “see you next time?” No! Creating the campaign is only half the battle. Sure, the results may be obvious, but now the question becomes: why?

An integrated marketing campaign is really only as good as the analytics – and subsequent analysis - that comes out of it. A concept and strategy may seem brilliant, but the data simply don’t lie. Of all the strategic places an ad was placed, which worked the best? Why did one place generate more traffic than another? This is where referral analytics come into play.

The Web Analytics Association defines a referrer as “the source of traffic to a page or visit” (2008). Essentially, this is any digital source that compels someone to visit a particular site. This can be anything from a search engine, Facebook ad, email client, or miscellaneous hyperlink hosted on another website like a blog or review. The web of potential referral sites can be huge, so it’s important for advertisers to know what’s working so they can measure and evaluate ROI across all channels.

Special Olympics New Jersey has only recently started experimenting with Google Analytics to collect data for its fundraising event websites. Without a dedicated data person on staff this has been difficult to analyze to its fullest potential, but the results so far have been interesting. Most recently, Google Analytics were installed on the organization’s Dodgetoberfest dodgeball tournament site. Event organizers only had budget for a very limited online advertising – links on SONJ’s main website, a Facebook campaign, email blasts and listings on local event websites.  

A recent article from Mashable.com explains that online advertising must meet three criteria in order to have a chance at being successful: it must be clean and simple to use, offer a clear call to action and robust incentives and include attractive, click-ready creative (Stanley, 2013). In the case of Dodgetoberfest, the online marketing pieces varied in how successfully they met these criteria. According to the Google Analytics, other than direct visitors to the Dodgetoberfest site (hosted on Kintera.org), Facebook generated the most traffic, followed by the main Special Olympics New Jersey website and finally a local township website. 

   

These referral rates indicate that the Facebook campaign did indeed generate significantly more traffic than any other source, suggesting the ads were simple, had a clear call to action, were creatively eye-catching and were appropriate for the channel/target audience.  

 

Compare that ad to the information found on the Robbinsville Township website:  

Intuition says that the Facebook ad is easier to comprehend – the Robbinsville Township ad has a lot more going on with a less clear call to action. Of course the sources themselves vary in terms of potential traffic they could generate (Facebook obviously has much more sophisticated audience targeting than a local township website), but the bottom line is that the data supports intuition.

                So why does all of this matter? For next year’s Dodgetoberfest event SONJ can look back at the data and decide exactly what sorts of places are worth investing advertising dollars online. Facebook appears to be a clear winner, but what could paid search generate? Tracking referral traffic turns intuition into hard, measurable, interpretable data that ultimately helps guide decision-making. Not only can SONJ evaluate the best sites to place their advertising, they can also adjust the creative elements to suit each channel in the most appropriate way.