How to iterate based on analytics

5 min readNov 29, 2017

Establish a baseline

1. Design / guess a user lifetime journey

A customer journey map shows the story of the customer’s experience. It not only identifies key interactions that the customer has with the organization, but it also takes into account user’s feelings, motivations and questions for each of the touchpoints. The customer journey map has the objective of teaching organizations more about their customers.

2. Measure improvements

There’s a saying that goes “what can’t be measured can’t be managed.” This is especially true if you’re shooting for specific goals in mind. The best course of action is figuring out your key metrics, and gathering data about a process before and after a change is introduced. Analyzing these metrics provides data that communicates how much the change improved the process, if at all.

4. Focus on existing functionality 80/20

Sticking to the 20/80 rule means prescribing to the idea that most of the results in any situation are determined by a small number of causes. In business terms, this means that 80 percent of your outcomes come from 20 percent of your inputs, or, more specifically, that a small handful of repeat customers account for most of the income.

Take it one step at a time

1. Start with activation

Once your users land on your website, your goal is to ensure they enjoy their first visit. Thoroughly research and define what is necessary for this to come true, and you should get a pretty good idea of what to measure. It could be time spent on the site, page views, clicks etc. Make sure you A/B test a lot of landing pages and content to achieve the optimal experience.

2. Craft a “Happy” user experience for first time users.

A process of crafting a good first-time user experience should focus on the immersion and excitement of the user. A controlled and well designed first-time user experience will give an impression tempting enough to prevent the user from taking off and offer them engaging content that lures them to proceed.

3. Create an onboarding strategy

How you onboard new customers determines whether you will retain them or not, because this stage is your opportunity not only to draw users’ attention to your product but also to make them stay, converting into long-term paying customers. Your strategy needs to have a clear objective that distinguishes this stage from your lead generation and customer retention goals.

4. Remove friction

Friction is the level of difficulty your customers face when browsing through your website. The harder it is for users to reach certain pages, the more friction your website has. Removing friction from your website will help you make sure that all those long hours you’ve spent on preparing your product and creating marketing materials won’t go to waste.

5. Encourage desired behavior

To maximize the revenue you gain from your marketing efforts, make sure the access toyour products and services is easy and engaging, making your customers more likely to perform the actions you want them to perform.Your objective is to develop a strategy that makes it as convenient and pleasant as possible for your target audience to behave in the desired way.

Define an experiment

1. Compare cohort difference

Cohort analysis takes the data from a given dataset and rather than looking at all users as one unit, it breaks them into related groups for analysis. These related groups, usually share common characteristics or experiences within a defined time-span. Cohort analysis allows you to see patterns clearly across the life-cycle of a customer, rather than slicing across all customers without accounting for the natural cycle that a customer undergoes. Once you’ve found patterns within subsets, you can look across cohorts and figure out what kind of changes improve results for a certain cohort.

2. A/B test — Simultaneous

A/B testing , sometimes called split testing, is comparing two versions of a web page to see which one performs better. It works kind of like an experiment where two or more variants of a page are shown to users at random, and statistical analysis is used to determine which variation performs better for a given conversion goal. It allows you to make nuanced decisions about everything from the design to the copy and figure out the details that can lead to a better conversion rate.