Aug

11

What happens in the middle is what matters

Filed Under Web Analytics in Business 

Here’s an exercise that will make you a better analyst and a better businessperson.  Even if you’re not the “web analytics guy,” do this anyhow and translate it to how you think about your web site.

Go to the mall and prop yourself down on a bench in front of of a store (how about the Apple store, because it has glass windows and you can usually tell what someone bought. And if you get the hankering to buy something, as a shareholder, I’d appreciate it).  What do you see?  People walk in, mill about inside, and then walk out, some of whom are carrying boxes and bags full of their shiny new toys.

Visiting the Apple Store

If you were to measure the “engagement” of the Apple store, what would it look like? You’d have metrics for entries, metrics for exits, and metrics for conversion rates.  If you had particularly good eyesight, you might even be able to tell how many products people looked at, what those products were, how long they played with them, whether they talked to a salesperson, and infer whether that “touchy-feely” experience influenced (or was indicative of) purchase potential.  If someone was passing out bright orange flyers at the entrance of the mall, you could also see how successful that was at driving traffic to the store (they’d be carrying them).  And if you were to come up with a set of metrics to outline, “Apple Store Performance,” it would probably look like this:

Store Use:

  • Entries
  • Entries with flyers
  • Time in store

Interactions:

  • iPod views, duration
  • Laptop views, duration
  • Desktop views, duration
  • % Talked to salesperson, duration

Conversion:

  • iPod sales
  • Laptop sales
  • Desktop sales
  • Exits

So you get it – we have a bunch of simple metrics that we can start to tie together.  Were people with orange flyers more likely to buy? Were people who talked to a salesperson longer than 4 minutes more likely to buy?  Were people that used the iPod for longer than 1 minute more likely to buy? You get it.  What we’re trying to figure out is what’s happening in the middle, because we know that the middle determines whether people walk out with armfulls of shareholder value.

We also know that handing out those flyers is getting more people in the top of the funnel, which, if we can preserve conversion rates, means more buyers coming out of the bottom of the funnel.  We may even choose to have salespeople treat orange flyer holders differently.

So let’s start translating:

  • Entries = Visits
  • Flyers = Paid Search, Natural Search, Display, Email campaigns
  • Views, durations = Page Views, Product Views, “engagement” (whatever that means)
  • Sales = Conversions

So my question is this: once we do this translation, are we still looking at what happens in the middle? Or more importantly, are we still doing something about what we’re seeing in the middle?  The answer is usually no.

In a retail store, the employees polish the iPods, train employees how to better talk to customers, and physically re-arrange the store in an effort to make the middle more effective.  Online, we watch, objectively, as if we are a third party being.  We measure.  We say that the orange pamphlets aren’t working because they’re not walking out with bags, but we didn’t notice that the salesperson assigned to talk to the orange pamphlet holders has huge pit stans and smells like Taco Bell.  We’re seeing that he’s talking to people for over 3.5 minutes, the magic number that increases conversion rate, but we’re not seeing that for the first minute, he’s talking about how hung over he is.  We’re boiling qualitative things into quantitative metrics in an effort to understand what works, and we’re missing the whole point: we’re getting this information to change it, not just to know it.

In the store, this guy’s hygiene is obvious.  Online, we might not realize the qualitative aspects of a landing page make a keyword with a high click-through-rate a repulsive experience when the same page does great for another keyword.  What I’m talking about is especially true for your marketing efforts – paid search, SEO, display, email, social, etc.  If you’re not thinking of the middle (judging a media by its endpoints, cost and return), you’re not learning anything.  Your lowest performing media could be your best performing media if you changed a few things.  But to know what to change, you have to be looking at the middle.

When Avinash talks about the 90/10 rule, I believe this is where he’s going with it.  We’ve created huge, sophisticaed tools that can tell us wonderful things in the language of numbers, but we need people looking at why, telling the stories, understanding what can be done in the middle to get more bags out the door.




Comments

3 Responses to “What happens in the middle is what matters”

  1. Nicholas Van Winkle on August 14th, 2009 10:41 am

    bravo! great article. (nothing constructive, just praise) I intend to steal a couple lines from this article, esp. “we’re getting this information to change it, not just to know it.”

  2. Rudi Shumpert on August 14th, 2009 10:52 am

    Nice article. I just stumbled across your site and I have enjoyed the posts.

  3. evanlapointe on August 16th, 2009 7:56 pm

    Thank you! It’s been great to see businesses begin to embrace the middle – not just watching it, but changing it. But I’m afraid we have a very long way to go.

    Tell me: in your experience, are you seeing businesses embrace learning about the middle AND changing it? Or better yet, what do you think is standing in the way?

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