Feel like your marketing team is drowning in analytics reports? You’re not alone. Data surrounds today’s marketers, making it difficult to understand how to connect business problems to the data that offers a solution.
One use case for web analytics data is reducing customer friction points.
In a presentation at the Fall MarTech Conference, Julie Jones, product manager at Baylor Scott & White Health, demonstrated for marketers how to create an actionable list of events they need to track and the reports they need to create to eliminate customer friction points.
The key to quick, actionable insights about friction points, Jones said, is thoughtful event tracking and the right event structure.
Dig deeper: Understanding customer entry and exit in event-based journeys
Don’t try to track everything
Thoughtful event tracking doesn’t mean tracking everything, because that’s not the key to identifying friction points.
“Tracking everything creates a number of problems,” Jones said, “including too much data. If you’re on a free platform like Google Analytics 4 (GA4), you’ll hit platform limitations if you try to track too much. You also risk having a lack of data structure if you decide to enable auto-tracking in order to track everything.”
This often leads to high cardinality if you have similar functionality throughout your website.
Finally, tracking everything increases your risk of having personally identifiable data (PII) link into your analytics platform, which is against Google Analytics terms of service. So what should marketers track? Track page views, which is done by default on most platforms. Next, track the important clicks, including:
- Navigation.
- CTAs.
- Any outbound clicks.
- Downloads
- Contact clicks.
You should also track form submissions. You’ll want to do a lot of QA with forms because auto tracking for forms is unreliable on some platforms.
Lastly, track your site search, either within your platform UI or by configuring it within Google Tag Manager.
“Once you have the events you want to track,” Jones said, “it’s time to think about event structure. This wasn’t an issue with Universal Analytics because, regardless of the custom event tracking you did, you always had our category, our action and our label.”
With GA 4, event-based data models became front and center. And that means easier reporting with custom event descriptors, but it requires a little bit more planning upfront.
The examples in this article use GA4, but for users who aren’t on GA4 or who prefer session-based data, Jones recommends looking at tools like Mixpanel, Amplitude and Pivot Pro. Remember, each platform uses its own terms and nomenclature.
Dig deeper: How to grow your organic reach with behavioral analytics insights
Report No. 1: Do you have the right words on your page?
Within the reports Jones recommends, you’re not going to see any mention of bounce rate. And that’s because bounce rate is not going to give you quick, actionable insights.
Bounce rate tells you where people are abandoning your website, but it’s not going to tell you why.
The first report looks to see if you have the right words on your page. This includes your content, but it also includes your CTAs.
You want to understand which pages have the highest use of the site’s global navigation, which indicates a visitor looked at your page, didn’t find what they were looking for, didn’t find the right CTA and immediately went up to the global navigation.
Here’s how Jones builds the first part of the report:
The second part of the report looks at which global navigation elements are being clicked. Here’s how Jones puts that together:
Report No. 2: Unsatisfactory search experiences
The next report Jones suggests is unsatisfactory search results. Ideally, you want people to use search on your website only once, because they find what they’re looking for immediately. You don’t want them to have to search two times.
Here’s how you create a report for unsatisfactory searches and the search term they use on their second search:
Report No. 3: Frustrating buttons and misleading button text
When you can determine which buttons your users are clicking more than once, you can identify and solve a number of friction points.
Here’s how Jones builds that report:
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