Aggregation of Marginal Gains – Big Wins with Small Changes!
I’ve asked Avinash Kaushik, our keynote speaker at SIM-TECH 2010 and world-renowned analytics expert, to give us some solid advice on some key areas where he tends to see room for improvement which don’t take a huge amount of time to implement. The following are his thoughts on the topic.
We are constantly on a quest to conquer the next big thing. Mountain. Ocean. Planet. “Conversion Buster.” The next million-dollar opportunity.
Not that there’s anything fundamentally wrong with that quest.
The challenge is that frequently in that quest we ignore the immediately achievable. And that tradeoff is a crime. This post is all about the low hanging fruits. Small and medium sized ideas for finding opportunities that collectively should add up to something remarkable for your website.
So before your go boiling the ocean, here are a few things you can and should do today to ensure your company is benefiting from immediately fixable things:
1) Figure out where you are making money, where you ain’t.
I have covered this in the past: Pick One, Just One Web Analytics Report, Go! This will help you focus in your advertising, sales, and marketing spend. You will be able to identify valuable sources that might have been below the radar so far.
2) Cover all the bases in your e-mail campaigns.
Here are just a few thoughts: fix the Hard Bounce Rate by using e-mail repair software, or Soft Bounce Rate by identifying spam blocks, or Open Rate by testing subject fields (or, my fav, optimizing for the Preview Pane), or creating illusions of personalization for Click Thru Rates, or continuing the “scent” to landing pages to improving conversion.
3) Funnels baby!
For structured experiences funnels can be awesomely actionable. They can identify problems quickly, is 73% abandonment on step one of your funnel acceptable (seems a bit harsh I think) or how about 75% on step two of your funnel?
And talk about low hanging fruit. At the end of the day you are dealing with one page. One. Uno. Ek.
You know why that page exists. You know where people come to it from (look at the box on the left). You know where people exit to (look on the right). Not that hard to come up with two or three simple fixes to put in place (or A/B tests to get going with the Google Website Optimizer!).
4) Stop The “Puking”: Fix Your Top Landing / Entry Pages.
Another eternal favorite of mine when I want to get some quick wins under my belt. It is one of the first things I look at when I analyze any website.
Most web analytics tools have a standard report that shows the Top Landing Pages by Bounce Rate. Go get it. If you want to go one step deeper, go to your internal site search report and look for keywords people search for in your internal search engine on that page.
5) Identify Paid Search Keyword Opportunities.
If you find keywords that perform better when they bring Organic Search traffic, then investigate the landing pages and see what is better/different about them then the Paid Search landing pages for that traffic.
Compare the organic listing in Google (ok, ok, or in Live or Yahoo! 
) with the Paid Search ad. Is there anything different (better) about the text and call to action in the organic listing?
Your turn now.
Please share your own ideas for “aggregation of marginal gains.” Is there a report/piece of analysis that always works for you? When you crack open Omniture or WebTrends or Google Analytics for a new site what do you look at first? Have a to-die-for KPI or Metric? What is one completely flawed assumption I have made in this post?
I would love to hear from you.
Thanks.
Read more: http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2009/03/aggregation-marginal-gains-recession-busting-analytics.html
Learn more about my upcoming keynote speech at SIM-Tech 2010 in Las Vegas this year.
Photo from: quieroclicks
