What Are Your Analytics Telling You? by Kevin Dwinnell

We announced this week the launch of our interactive browser theme for Sanjeev Kapoor.  We love the fact that he’s a worldwide celebrity chef with an award-winning and record-setting television show.  Even more relevant to us is that this is the first browser theme for one of our top geographic markets.  That point got me thinking about the information about our audience that we look at but don’t monitor as closely as more critical data and what it tells us.

KPI or Just I?

When we look at the traffic to our site and product, there’s a large percentage of it coming from India.  Geography isn’t one of the Key Performance Indicators we track.  (For a good considerations list of KPIs, check out this post by Max Kalehoff.)  Geography is still an indicator of what’s effecting our business.  It’s easily reviewed when we do our occasional exploration of a much broader data set.  Call it an Indicators

The Whole Picture

We’ve all been groomed to look for exit points and keywords that drive traffic, in essence to look at the funnel and see how users are coming into our site and where they leave it.  While we focus on the browser, we’re in the same category of most web sites in determining what’s in the visible space of our user.  We watch monitor resolution of our audience so we know how to optimize the fusion of design, content and functionality featured in our themes.  That includes the width for the theme content and height for the sidebar content.  The trend of browsers going very thin in the chrome will pose interesting design challenges for us, but gives back precious real estate to the web sites.

Data in Aggregate

Having everything laid out in front of you can also help you identify other patterns that might otherwise be missed.  We’re proud of data that shows how users of an interactive browser theme click back to sites more often than their average user — and it can be an exponential difference.  However, putting all the elements side-by-side allowed us to identify an interesting sub-point.  Two commerce placements provided 2.5x the clicks as a single commerce button alone.  That’s a significant difference and great information for our clients to have.

We like finding these little nuggets as we review our data.  What gold do you find when doing your data mining?

Posted in Commentary, News | Tags: browser theme, Data mining, India, Khana Khazana, kpi, Performance indicator, Sanjeev Kapoor | No Comments »