Many times we confuse ourselves thinking that when we talk about conversion rates in digital analytics, or web analytics, we are talking about ecommerce businesses where one party is buying other is selling, and hence digital marketing tools like Adobe Analytics and Google Analytics are not relevant to non-ecommerce businesses like banks, media houses, or even the entire B2B segment. But nothing can be farther than truth.
For one, as a marketeer, no matter whether we are dealing with B2C segment, or B2B segment, fact of the matter is that we are trying to send across our message to a person. The message is simple, we have the solution to your problem. This is the reason why we have Accenture, HCL, Tata Steel putting up their advertisements on television channels, a media platform which is largely presumed to be catering B2C segment.
Though I agree, that if buying/selling is not a part of your business, then may be you can do away with e-commerce tracking in GA, or purchase events in Adobe. But this doesn't mean that we don't have other options to track your non commerce related metrics. Some of the most important non commerce metrics are:
- Subscriptions: This could be newsletter/email subscriptions. It might help you determine whether the white papers, slides and other thought leadership content that you are putting up is being used by your visitors or not?
- Downloads: Every B2B digital platform tries to get contact information of the visitors by providing them downloads of some whitepapers or other content. But Which of this content is most famous for your visitors is something you can determine easily with the help of digital analytics. At the same time you can even utilize the insights from these reports to run business development campaigns for you organizations by targeting people with relevant content.
- Search terms: Especially for banking and media sites, lot of visitors use internal search tool to find specific products, services or stories. But the efficacy of this internal search tool is seldom measured. Adobe Analytics provides the brilliance of merchandising evars to measure the value that your internal search terms is fetching for you. Further you should also track and measure the impact of your search rankings. What are those terms which are showcasing 0 (zero) results? Further you need to know that search by itself has 3 features, recent searches, suggested searches and of course, the search results. How may times user uses suggested search, and how many times they go to the 2nd page of search result can be crucial to boost the usage of your search functionality.
- Forms: Many banking websites also require visitors to fill up online forms to get more information or activate products. Custom dimensions in Google Analytics and list vars of Adobe Analytics can come in real handy to do a form analysis, and see what fields are filled, and which fields are left blank by visitors. You can also determine how many visitors opened the form and how many actually submitted it, in goal flow, and funnel visualizations to understand if form itself is a reason for people to not convert?
- Video Content: In case of media sites it's imperative to understand what content people are interested in, and which content is getting the hits by visitors. Think about a news website for a minute, think about the number of 'breaking news' that they would be having in a day. But which breaking news should replace which stale news? This is something that should be determined by data, rather than hunch. Again tools like GA and Adobe Analytics can come to your rescue.
- Design: How your app or website should be designed again has to be determined by testing your hypothesis against the collected data and then only can you take a strategic decision to implement the change. What background, category placement, banner placement is improving conversion and which design is responsible for increased drop off rate?
- Engagement: How engaged are your visitors with your digital platforms is again a qualitative information that we try to obtain through certain quantitative metrics like time spent on your page an/or website. Even the RF value, or the recency-frequency value can be determined by determining how frequently visitors return on your digital platform, what could be ideal time frame to update your website or blog?
Something that all of us need to understand is that digital is personal, people that we are targeting to target are the same ones who watch videos on youtube, search on Google, shop on Amazon, so whether they are shopping for a shirt, or looking for a solution to their business problem, their expectation is going to be similar. They want customized offerings which can solve their issue and realize their business objective. This won't only help them save time and resources but also would help you to increase your conversion rate, lower your marketing spend, and even decrease your CONE, Cost Of Negative Experience (think of it as a value which keeps on getting accumulated each time you get a call to get a new credit card when you don't want any. At one time his value becomes so high that even when you would want a credit card, you would never go to this bank, because your CONE is just to high).
You can also read the article on linkedin.com here
You can also read the article on linkedin.com here
