Marketing Measurement & Optimization

When it comes to analytics, I am a big fan of pan-session analysis. Pan-session analysis provides insights across multiple visits by the same person. For almost every website it is an incredibly, powerful way to understand your visitors better.

Online-behavior.com

By applying the insights you derive from this analysis, you can further optimize your visitor’s experience and conversion rate.

In the following paragraphs I will describe five different pan-session analysis techniques that deliver great insights.

• Frequency and recency analysis
• Time and visits to purchase analysis
• Pan-session funnel analysis
• Multichannel analysis
• Customer analysis

Let’s start with frequency and recency reporting.

1. Frequency And Recency Analysis

Frequency and recency metrics and distributions show you how loyal your audience actually is. Do your visitors only come once and never return? Or do you have a great deal of visitors who come to your website even more than three times a week?

Let’s take a closer look at two reports. First, the ‘count of visits’ report, which shows the frequency of visitors (direct link to report):

Almost 80% of the visitors to this website visit the website just once and don’t come again. That doesn’t look very good. Let’s dive into the recency metric, in the ‘days since last visit’ report (go to this reportand click on ‘days since last visit’ tab).

The recency graph on itself doesn’t look bad. Almost 90% of the visitors visited the website within the last day. But, we have to subtract the new visitors to get a good overview of the returning visitors percentage and how often they visit the site.

With the combined overview of recency and frequency metrics I would conclude that this website really needs to invest in building a stable base of loyal subscribers / visitors.

Posting new content (a blog?) and offers on a more regular base would definitely help to keep the visitors engaged with this website.

2. Visits And Time to Purchase Analysis

In order to find out more about the product buying decision cycle, the visits and time to purchase reports deliver very useful information. You can find these reports in the E-commerce module of Google Analytics (if you have E-commerce implemented, here is a direct link to report). An example of a «Visits to Purchase» report is shown below:

In this case roughly 40% of the visitors convert within the first visit and 70% needs one to four visits to come to a buying decision. Wow, 20% of the conversions on this website take place after seven or more visits. What’s happening here?

A lot of websites contain landing pages that are too much focused on making a direct sale. It is extremely important to segment your visitors and apply different tactics to make them convert. The «time to purchase» data shows a similar distribution as we saw earlier:

Now it’s time to segment your data further and find out which visitors convert the highest (visitors from a geographical region, certain campaign traffic, etc.) and which visitors don’t. You can use different strategies for each visitor segment. Continuar leyendo «Pan-Session Analysis With Google Analytics»