A seemingly irresistible compulsion in analytics is to gather data only on your “Top 10,” such as the 10 most popular pages, keywords or downloads. It’s as if marketers believe Top 10s are the all-important indicator of performance and campaign status – many want this data in their monthly reports, or even as a dashboard within their analytics tool.
Smart web analytics is about trends, not about hard numbers.
The problem is, nine times out of, well, 10, this type of data doesn’t change much over time and therefore isn’t actionable. Remember, smart web analytics is about trends, not about hard numbers. For every site I’ve worked on, the pages in the Top 10 list have rarely changed: there’s the homepage, there’s the internal search results, and (sigh) there’s the 404 page—right where they were last month, and the month before that.
A far more telling report is your “biggest movers” list: the pages, products and keywords that have experienced the greatest change since the previous month. Calculating your biggest movers essentially unearths trending information – such as the products with the greatest percentage increases in sales and revenue – and its value cannot be overlooked.
For example, if I look only at my branded keywords, I’ll see that they’re all converting well, just as they normally do. But if I switch to my biggest movers, I discover things I never knew before, including seasonality, new buzzwords and irrelevant keywords that suddenly became popular, possibly due to unrelated news items.
There are a number of ways to calculate biggest movers, and you can choose the method that makes the most sense for you – there really isn’t a right or wrong way to crunch these numbers.
For instance, say you’re interested in determining which products have had the greatest percentage increase in sales or revenue. Looking at sales may uncover some low price items that are selling like hotcakes at $1.00 a pop, while looking at revenue might guide you towards big ticket items that are sold only a few times each week. Both views are helpful and actionable; it just depends on what you’re looking for. In any case, both reports are a lot more insightful than a report that shows you’re still selling a whole lot of guitar strings week after week.
Another question to consider is the criteria you use to evaluate change: hard numbers (such as page views, sales), change in rank, or change in percent of the total? For instance, do you want to know which product fell from being your 10th best seller to being your 15th, or which keyword went from driving 4% of your sales to driving 7%? Again, there a lot of different ways you can look at this data, and depending on what you’re trying to discover, there may be multiple ways to answer your questions.
You can use biggest movers to glean actionable insights – and the results can be outstanding.
Once you’ve identified what you want to look for and what criteria to use, you can utilize biggest movers to glean actionable keyword and customer insights from your websites and campaigns. And the results can be outstanding.
Here’s an example: For one particular e-commerce Client, we took a look at month-over-month trends in revenue from individual products. We wanted to identify which products had the highest percentage increase in revenue—in other words, the ones whose sales had increased the most. We made sure our timeframe didn’t include any big holidays (to prevent skewed data from huge seasonal swings), and we also took out products that had been introduced within the past two months.
We discovered a number of products with increases in the 25%-75% ranges, but more importantly, we found one product that had experienced a whopping 400%+ increase in revenue! After doing a little digging, we discovered that this product had received some glowing reviews on a couple of popular blogs, and that these posts had also made their way onto Digg.
Looking to capitalize on this insight, the Client began advertising the product on their homepage, and also featured it prominently in their upcoming catalog. Meanwhile, we added related keywords to our PPC campaigns and did some on-page SEO tweaks. These SEO improvements not only resulted in the product appearing #1 at major search engines, and but also led to the product page showing up in internal search results for a number of related terms that had previously returned nothing.
More importantly, within three months, this product went from producing less than half a percent of overall revenue to providing nearly 5% — and the overall revenue increased proportionally. By monitoring the right metrics and responding quickly, the Client reaped the benefits from a great opportunity that could have easily been overlooked.
Stories like this make it clear why it’s time to leave the shallow end of Top 10 lists and dive in after the underlying stories your data is waiting to tell you. Going after your biggest movers can deliver unexpected and meaningful insights – including key customer information you never knew before – and with that intelligence in hand, you’ll be better equipped to optimize your campaigns and user experiences to deliver even better results.
David Sprinkle is the Director of Analytics and Insight at Acronym Media.
