Adobe Analytics with SiteCatalyst: Acquisition Analytics
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Note: This excerpt does not include the lesson files. The lesson files are available with purchase of the book.
The goals of this section are:
- Understanding what to measure to evaluate your success in acquiring customers
- Determining which Adobe SiteCatalyst reports to run based on your analysis needs
- Identifying issues that impact the data and the implementation details that affect the data quality
This lesson will take 30 minutes to complete.
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A visitor’s first impression of your site is critical. Landing pages that virtually read the visitor’s mind and anticipate the intent of his visit are almost expected. The acquisition stage of the marketing funnel is about optimizing landing pages to meet the visitor’s needs based on demographic and geographic location.
Task: Define KPIs
First, let us revisit how we set goals and key performance indicators (KPIs). With the focus on acquisition analytics in this session, your business goal may be to increase revenue by 25% for the financial year. Your KPIs will need to correlate to this goal in terms of acquisition metrics. Think backwards—to increase conversion by 25%, how much do you need to increase the traffic to your site by. So when we talk about traffic, you, of course, think in terms of visits, visitors and their traffic sources, and geolocation. Examples of KPIs for acquisition could be:
- Average visits per visitor
Average visits per visitor = Total number of visits ÷ Total number of visitors
Assume your business is like Amazon’s, which means you want to optimize this KPI since a visitor will keep coming back to your site and converting.
- Unique visitor ratio
Unique visitor ratio = Unique visitor ÷ Total number of visitors
If your website conversion goal is to get visitors to sign up for a newsletter, then your business is very visitor centric. In that case, multiple visits may not be important to you. You would need to optimize for the visitor in this KPI.
- New to return visitor ratio
New visitor ratio = Total number of new visitors ÷ Total number of visitors
Return visitor ratio = Total number of return visitors ÷ Total number of visitors
Find out which visitors are the first-time visitors versus those who have been to your site before. If your site has a lot of return customers, you could personalize the content based on the preferences you noted about them earlier.
- Average visits from geolocation
Average visits from geolocation = Total number of visits from <North America> ÷ Total number of visits
If you are running a campaign in a specific geolocation, you may look at the ratio of visits your site received before the campaign and after the campaign. Trending this over time will help you evaluate the geolocation of your audience.
Table 4.1 presents a suggested approach to understand which report(s) in SiteCatalyst can help you understand that. Deepen your analysis by looking at the data with multiple metrics and sharpen your insights by segmenting the data. Segments can include any custom traffic variable, any custom conversion variable, and any SiteCatalyst Attribute Importing and Naming Tool (SAINT) classification.
Here are a few suggestions that you can use to segment the conversion; the list is not meant to be exhaustive.
- By geosegmentation
- By channel
- By campaign
- By new or repeat cisitor
- By first-time or return customer
- By referrer
- By mobile devices
- By nonmobile devices
Table 4.1. Acquisition reports and metrics
|
FOCUS |
MEASURES |
SITECATALYST REPORT |
METRICS |
|
Site Visits |
Total visits to the site |
Site metrics > Visits |
Visits |
|
Visitor |
Visitor trends |
Site metrics > Visitors > Unique visitors |
Unique visitors |
|
|
|
Site metrics > Visitors > Hourly unique visitors |
Hourly unique visitors |
|
|
|
Site metrics > Visitors > Daily unique visitors |
Daily unique Visitors |
|
|
|
Site metrics > Visitors > Weekly unique visitors |
Weekly unique visitors |
|
|
|
Site metrics > Visitors > Quarterly unique visitors |
Quarterly unique visitors |
|
|
|
Site metrics > Visitors > Yearly unique visitors |
Yearly unique visitors |
|
Visitor Geolocation |
Geotargets |
Visitor profile > Geosegmentation > Countries |
Visits Unique visitors |
|
|
|
Visitor profile > Geosegmentation > Regions |
Visits Unique visitors |
|
|
|
Visitor profile > Geosegmentation > Cities |
Visits Unique visitors |
|
|
|
Visitor profile > Geosegmentation > US states |
Visits Unique visitors |
|
|
|
Visitor profile > Geosegmentation > US designated marketing area (DMA) |
Visits Unique visitors |
|
Converted Visitor Geoprofile |
Visitor demographics |
Visitor profile > Visitor state |
Visits Unique visitors |
|
|
|
Visitor profile > Visitor zip/postal code |
Visits Unique visitors |