Data Visualization
In a world of information overflow, Data Visualization is getting more and more important. Excel sheets tend to grow to a “wall of numbers” quickly. The information within its data is hard to recognize and understand. As David McCandless phrased it “Data is the new (s)oil”. It can be considered to be “a fertile, creative medium”. It allows us to “grow” visualizations from it or dig into it. We have to use smart tools and methods to make information easy to identify and understand for other humans. A lot of creativity is required to come up with insightful visualizations. They can even be considered a kind of art.
We learned about the following best practices of data visualization:
- Trends can be identified by timeline analysis
- Ratios are well represented by space/area (people have no perception of ratios using numbers)
- Storytelling is driving attention
- Interactivity is driving engagement
- Data Visualization can be beautiful
As you can see, we did not follow all best practices with our first Tableau dashboard, But it’s a start! If you want to dig deeper into dashboard design, we recommend “Information Dashboard Design” by Stephen Few, one of the classic publications in this field.
In a galaxy far far away a long time ago...
So, fancy line charts, bar charts and bubble graphs are innovative ideas never seen before? WRONG! Most of the charts we use today in data visualization are from the 19th century! Lets thank modern IT, that we don't have to draw them by hand anymore and move on!
Web and Google Analytics - The Theory
The Web Analytics Association defines web analytics as...
“The measurement, collection, analysis, and reporting of internet data for the purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage”
Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics will help you to efficiently monitor and measure interactions with your website. This is possible by adding a tiny piece of javascript code to the website, which allows to track IP address, timestamp, location and other information of the visiting user. This enables you to investigate why people don’t spent much time on your website or abandon their shopping carts. Of course, this is external data. Google allows you to use its service for free (or kind of free), but analyses your website visits similar to yourself to maximize advertising revenue.
To gain better understanding of metrics used in website optimization see these definitions:
Page - Definable unit of content
Page Views - # of times a page was viewed
Visits/Sessions - Interaction by an individual with a website
Unique Visitors - # of individual people in a specified reporting period
Entry Page - First page of a visit
Landing Page - A page intended to be the beginning of a user experience
Exit Page - Last page accessed during a visit
Visit Duration - Length of time in a session
Page Views per Visit - # of page views divided by # of total visits
Single-Page Visits - Visits that consists of a single page, regardless of refreshes of the page
Single Page View Visits (Bounces) - Visits that consists of a single page view
Bounce Rate - # of single page view visits divided by # of entry page visits
Exit Rate - Fraction of visitors who leave from a specific webpage
Stickiness of a webpage - Time spent on the webpage
Conversion - A visitor completing a target action
Conversion Rate - # of users completing the required action / total # of users
More definitions can be found on Wikipedia. For details on digital advertising metrics we recommend Interactive Advertising Bureau - IAB.
To better understand who your audience is, look at the traffic sources:
Direct Traffic - User types the name of website into browser
Search Engine - A search engine direct the user to the website
Referral Site - User is redirected by a link, eg. on Facebook or Twitter
Other - User is redirected by a link from an email newsletter
…here comes the action
With those tools and information at hand we can start our first website optimization right now! A decline in traffic to our website is quickly identified. But what is the reason for it?
Since a couple of weeks the key words fail to direct users to the correct, English website. Nobody wants to be second on google! We have to do Search Engine Optimization.
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“Only second on Google, seriously?!”
When you start optimizing your website, consider the following:
- A/B Testing - Testing how minor changes on your website influences changes in your users behavior (clicks, exit rate, bounce etc.). We do this with a small amount of traffic to confirm our assumptions
- Understand your metrics - A high bounce rate can be fine for a blog entry, but bad for an e-commerce page. The context is important.
- Define a target group and optimize for it - No website is perfect. Focus on making it most attractive for your customers by improving look-and-feel, naming of items or translation into another language
- Conversation rate is more important than Stickiness
- Analyze the conversion funnel - Find out at what step most customers drop off and make them stay. It may be the sele
SEO is an important topic for every company today. If your service or product cannot be found, it does not exist.
But hey, SEO should be done for the right reasons, with high considerations for the value it brings and for the budget that is invested in it. As managers we cannot simply want SEO and be driven by our EGO...for that we will discuss in our next post about something called EGO Networks.
Porter's 4 Forces, OUT.
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