Creately is an easy to use Online Diagramming software - purpose built for team collaboration. Powerful features and an intuitive interface make Creately ideal for teams working together on everything from Business Diagrams, Strategy Maps, Flowcharts, Web Mockups to UML designs.
Here we share our experiences and lessons learnt building a web-company.
Finally time for the next post in this series. I know its been two months since the first one, and sorry for taking this long! Better late than never, and here we go! If you’ve missed the first one on Visitors Map Overlay, stop right here, and go read it.
We’ve mentioned the importance of Map Overlay in the first post, and this time its all about Goals in Google Analytics! Lets see what Goals are, why they’re important and how we set them.
What are Goals in Google Analytics?
Goals describe the completion of a desired task that you’d like your visitors to do!
By setting up Goals in Google Analytics, you can measure how often the desired tasks are completed, and this is called the conversion rate.
Before implementing Goals, identify what your website’s objectives are, and what visitor actions they correspond to. A goal can be anything from completing a contact form for generating leads to completing a purchase for driving revenue.
There are multiple ways to define goals, and here’s a great article written by Ian Spencer that gives more tips on Goals in Google Analytics.
And now, the Goal Funnel?
Accomplishing a Goal involves a sequence of steps. The sequence that leads up to the completion of a Goal make up the Goal Funnel. For each Goal, you will need to setup a Goal Funnel and like the Goal itself, each of these steps must correspond to a measurable action on a specific page.
For example, Creately visitors go through a sequence of steps before finally performing the desired Sign Up action. Assume that you land on the Creately UML Landing page (the first step towards the Goal), where you might choose to Try Creately Now without signing up, and then from the Creately application you could opt to Sign Up ‘cos you’re convinced.
This would direct you to the Plans & Pricing page, where you’d be expected to choose a preferred plan, then click on Sign Up to make the purchase. Once you complete the purchase, you’d be sent to the Thank you page (this marks the Goal). Now, this means the desired task is performed and the Goal is accomplished.
However, on the other hand if the website visitor only goes up to the plans page, and opts to leave without signing up. Then the Goal is not met and it’s considered to be abandoned! Thus, Goals and Conversion rates are important to measure the performance of a website.
We refer to the whole sequential process as a funnel - many people start at the top and fewer end up coming out to the bottom by accomplishing the Goal.
Check out the flowchart below to see the steps that correspond to a measurable action on different pages -
How to Set up Goals
Setting a goal is very simple. If you have administrative access, you can sign in to your Google Analytics. Then go to Analytics Settings and select a profile, click on edit, choose an unused goal ’slot’, and click on edit again.
You’ll need to then follow the steps and decide what your goal is and how you’ll be declaring a goal, then click to finish and you’ll start measuring the performance for your website.
Check out this video for more details on Setting Up Goals in Google Analytics
Today, I’m writing the first post in a series that will guide small business owners and entrepreneurs in understanding the important customer data that Google Analytics provides. We’ll look at where to find the data in Google Analytics and how this information can be useful to your business.
Google Analytics is a great tool for analyzing the traffic that shows up on your website. This will give you fantastic insights into who is coming to your web site, all the other related pages, and how they’re getting there. It displays so much useful information, and with just a little training, you too will be able to use Google Analytics for your business. We won’t go into the details of how to setup Google Analytics for your site - but here’s a great article on Mahalo that shows you how to set it up for free.
Today, we’ll start with the Visitors Map overlay. With the Visitor Map, you get a World Map graphic that captures website Visitor numbers by region, country and state. The Map Overlay can be accessed by clicking on the Visitors tab, and then the Map Overlay underneath it. You can also select different Detail Levels of the world map in City view, Country/Territory view and so on.
The Map Overlay displays Visits as the metric in the default view with the countries rendered in varying shades of green. Countries with the darkest shade of green indicates the greatest number of visitors in terms of website traffic. While some other countries have no shading at all, this indicates the site has never had a visitor.
The metric displayed on the map can be changed from Visits to Pages/Visit, avg. Time on Site, % New Visits, Bounce Rate, and Goal Conversion Rate. You can also drill down to see more detailed information within specific regions, either by clicking on individual countries on the map or selecting a different Detail Level. Look at the image below for an example of an Overlay Visitor Map drilled down to the Country/Territory detail of Brazil.
Are you wondering how Google knows which country a visitor comes from? Well, the answer is no rocket science, Google simply looks at the IP address of every visitor to determine from country/place in the world they are coming from. In the map of Brazil above, it tells us that Sao Paulo is the largest market in Brazil, followed by Rio de Janiero.
More interestingly, an Advanced Segmentation feature is now available in Google Analytics. This enables you to analyze subsets of your traffic. You can either choose from the pre-defined segments such as “Paid Traffic”, “Visits with Conversions”, “Referral Traffic” or create your own custom segments and then compare up to four segments develop a great understanding of your customer’s behaviour on the site.
With the Advanced Segmentation features you can also create new segments with the Segment Creator. Simply drag and drop dimensions and metrics into the boxes to create a visit segment. Then, you can apply one or more of these segments to data, and compare the segment performance. By setting up an advanced segment for just “Sign-up from Sao Paulo” for instance, you could drill down and analyse the behaviour of the users who signed-up from Sao Paulo.
Check out this video for more details on how the Advanced Segmentation works.
The geodata collected through Analytics helps to identify lucrative geographic markets and identify new locations for potential marketing campaigns. Targeting specific users geographically will undoubtedly increase the success of your business. I hope you’ve learnt the importance of the Map Overlay and how it can help you reach customers from around the world.
Measuring business metrics is one of the most important yet overlooked aspects of running an early stage Internet startup. As a young startup looking to raise funds, we’re often quizzed on our financial figures and projections. It is often difficult to build out financial projections without a track record. So what should you do?
Although hard financial data is important, I believe we can often find great non-financial metrics that go a long way in assessing the true worth of a startup, for example the rate of user engagement or the satisfaction of the users. This tells us how a company or product is doing right now and can provide a good indication of the quality, passion and promise of the founders of the startup. Remember - An investor is never going to invest in a good idea without quality founders.
Key Performance Indicators
My interest in system performance metrics goes back to 2002 when I was the Performance & Capacity Manager at Lloyds TSB in the UK. I spent my time tracking performance information on Lloyds TSB’s server farms to compare it with the business unit’s future plans. This helped me work out which IT services and servers needed to be upgraded.
After working in Capacity Planning I know how important accurate technology and business metrics can be. Its a thankless job, because no one notices when nothing goes wrong. But all hell breaks loose when something does go wrong. This makes performance metrics one of the most important but under appreciated aspects of your business.
I keep talking about business metrics, when the right term is Key Performance Indicators or KPIs. KPIs are important as they allow us to understand our business and see how well its doing. To help us find the right KPIs, we categorized them into 2 distinct buckets:
Continuously measured - these are the largest group and change without the users directly providing measurable feedback. At Creately for example, we track data related to the total number of diagrams created.
Spot measured - these are recorded by directly asking the user a question or inviting him or her to do something on your site. At Creately we recently introduced the 1-click star rating feedback when a user logs out.
So we know KPIs are important and that we needed to measure them. But where do we find these KPIs? That’s easy. Every RIA and Internet startup has a database (probably many more) - start there. We looked at the data we’re producing and storing about the users and their activities on our site and service. Then we went further and looked into our servers and the data they were generating.
Where to start
I know that’s a lot of data to go through. But you can start small and build as you learn more about your business. Here are 6 questions we asked ourselves when we set out to measure our business performance :
Which data can help us build a better product or business?
What information gave us a better insight into our users’ behavior?
How do we collect information that will help us decide the product’s future feature set,
What is the value proposition of our start-up? If its ease of use, how can we measure that?
When are our systems down? Do we constantly monitor system availability?
What do we need to know to be a success!
Here’s a sneak peek into what we measure at Creately to give you an idea of what I mean:
Number of Private Beta users and their usage patterns
Number of diagrams created
Number of collaborators associated with the diagrams
Star Ratings submitted by users
User traffic
This is just a sample of some of our KPIs at Creately. Think about your own situation to work out the KPIs that are right for you.
Historical Trends
Finally, we were sure to maintain historical records. If you don’t, by the time you want to look back you won’t have anything to look back at. Trends and growth rates are very important for planning the future of your Internet Startup and raising investments. They’re also a great way to track the progress you’re making and help keep everyone on the team motivated. In its simplest form you can setup a cron job with a script to record your KPIs once or twice a day (or whenever) and store them in a database for processing and comparison later.
Do let me know what KPIs you think should be measured for your or any Internet startup?
BTW if you’re interested in web metrics and what Internet search can tell us about ourselves please have a look at Bill Tancer’s book Click. I just finished an Advance Reading Copy and it is quite interesting - although it does drag in the middle. Bill works at Hitwise and knows what he’s talking about.
Goals describe the completion of a desired task that you’d like your visitors to do!
For example, Creately visitors go through a sequence of steps before finally performing the desired Sign Up action. Assume that you land on the Creately UML Landing page (the first step towards the Goal), where you might choose to Try Creately Now without signing up, and then from the Creately application you could opt to Sign Up ‘cos you’re convinced.
Today, we’ll start with the Visitors Map overlay. With the Visitor Map, you get a World Map graphic that captures website Visitor numbers by region, country and state. The Map Overlay can be accessed by clicking on the Visitors tab, and then the Map Overlay underneath it. You can also select different Detail Levels of the world map in City view, Country/Territory view and so on.
