Analytics, The Easy Way
Your analytics insight is only as good as the data that can be deciphered. We all know how important user insight is, and after all, what’s the point of launching a website without knowing how your users react to it.
For many small companies, having a dedicated analytics person is out of the question, so often times an intern or marketing employee ends up handling important analytic data. This is all fine and is a great way to remain lean at the infancy of a business, but more often than not, employees end up pulling out their hair over deciphering Google Analytic (GA) data.
Now, GA is a great tool and can provide powerful insight into the user activity on a website or app, but it can quickly become useless at the hands of someone who is untrained. Wouldn’t it be nice if any curious employee (marketing personal, UX designer, front-end developer, CEO) could log in to a portal and check out analytic data quickly and easily? Don’t worry folks, it’s 2017 and there is a tool for everything!
At The Collective we like to ship all of our sites with Heap Analytics integration. Heap is a powerful tool that turns conversion funnels, site traffic, user segmentation, and many other fun insight strategies into an easy to use dashboard for everyone. A small e-commerce business owner wants to see which product is selling best? Easy. A lean startup with two employees wants to get deeper insight into where users are dropping off in their sign up flow? Done. We love Heap because it’s easy for our customer, and even easier for us to train them on the platform. Below I’ll outline a quick tutorial in Heap to show just how quick and easy it is to get going.
A Quick Heap Tutorial
Let’s quickly talk about conversion funnels. A conversion funnel is a graphical way of displaying where users drop off your site while in the middle of a process. Below I’ll explain how to target clicks, add them to a conversion funnel, and decipher the data.
Visualizer
First we’ll navigate to the visualizer. Below you’ll see that it takes us to the actual version of the website and allows us to select text or <divs> to add a targeted event. Below you’ll see I’m targeting the ‘Book Now’ button.
We’ll define the event…
We’ll also want to define a view event for those that simply land on the website. This can be done in the ‘Events’ section like so.
Once both events have been defined, we can navigate over to the ‘Funnel’ section on the sidebar.
The first step in our conversion funnel will be our ‘Entered Site’ event.
Next, we’ll add step 2, the ‘Book Now’ event.
Now we’ll simply click the ‘Run Query’ button, and we are given this cool funnel!
And there you have it. Obviously this is a very simple funnel, but steps can be added to as you see fit. For example, after ‘Book Now,’ you could add another event triggered by the ‘Pay for my Stay’ button (just an example, this example site doesn’t have a ‘Pay for my Stay’ button).
Ultimately this would inform you as to how many people landed on your website, engaged enough to click the ‘Book Now’ button, and then loved your website and business so much that they clicked the ‘Pay for my Stay’ button.
Now, this isn’t the only thing Heap can do; there are so many more cool features that they offer. If anyone has any more questions about some of Heaps core functionality, feel free to get in touch! We always happy to sit down and discuss the philosophies and nuances of data analytics…(but really, we genuinely are).
Check out some of our past work below!
