Month: April 2018

Analyze this: Tips for setting up analytics on your website

This post first appeared on Ueno’s blog here.

Making things pretty is not enough. The things we make also have to work well for their intended purpose — telling a story, selling a product, sharing content. One of the ways we use to tell if what we build achieves its purpose is through analytics. Information is power!

Gathering useful information from a website is more than slapping on some code. Before adding any code snippets, you must first identify what you want to track, and why. Then work with your developers to implement the analytics code, check that all is firing as expected, and BOOM! You’re ready to go. Simple, right? Sort of.

We recently did an analytics audit of the Ueno website to establish objectives and make sure we’re getting the information necessary to make the best decisions. Website changes take time and money, so we needed to prioritize, and data would allow us to do just that. We chose Google Analytics (GA) because it’s a powerful tool, generally easy to use, and one of the most commonly used platforms across industries.

Our first step was to define our objectives. What’s the purpose of Ueno’s website? This is what we came up with:

  1. Attract new business
  2. Attract new talent
  3. Showcase our work

Once we established those objectives, we brainstormed a list questions that would help us measure them.

  • How many people are visiting the site? How many of those are completing the new business inquiry form?
  • How much content are people consuming? How many pages to they visit and how far do they scroll?
  • Where are visitors coming from? Which channels are most likely to result in a new business inquiry or job application?

When we had a broad sense of the information we needed, and it was time to set up the GA account. Here are three key components to the setup:

1. Conversion Goals

Based on the primary objectives, we defined two Conversion Goals to measure how often users complete specific actions.

A conversion goal might seem more obvious on an e-commerce site (a purchase, for example) but depending on your objectives you can always find some action to measure success. Here are ours:

  • Conversion Goal 1 — New business form submission: Fires every time someone completes our new business inquiry form
  • Conversion Goal 2 — Careers application submission: Fires every time someone submits an application

These are the two main actions we want people to take on the site, so at a high-level they can tell us how effective our website is and which traffic channels are performing best.

2. Events

Next, we defined several GA Events to help measure how well the website is achieving its objectives.

  1. New business events
  • New business form form: Number of visits, submits and successes
  • Track what page(s) are driving the most new biz submissions / what content influences people to submit
  • What channels (e.g. social, newsletter, referring sites) drive submissions

2. Career events

  • Job application form: number of visits, submits and successes
  • What channels (e.g. social, newsletter)/websites are driving applications

3. Engagement events

  • Clicks: all clicks to outbound links
  • Expands: expansion of content
  • Scroll tracking: what percent of visitors scroll to 25%, 50%, 75% or 100% of the page

3. Audience Segments

We wanted to view website data through the lense of different audiences to hone in on behaviors — who is doing what and why. Here’s a list of audience segments we set up:

  • Engagers: Users who clicked an outbound link or expanded content
  • Non-Engagers: Users who did not click a link or expand content
  • Converters: Users with at least one goal completion
  • Non-Converters: Users with less than one goal completion
  • Organic Traffic: Users who were referred from a search engine (Google, Bing, etc.)
  • Social Traffic: Users who were referred from a social media channel
  • Email Traffic: Users who were referred by email (our newsletter)
  • Blog traffic: Users who were referred by Ueno blog

Segmenting the audience lets us filter information such as:

  • How does traffic from email channel behave differently from traffic from the blog?
  • What actions from converters are contributing to conversion?
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Are you thinking about setting up analytics for your own company or agency? Here are a few tips based on our experience.

  • Start simple. It might be appealing to gather ALL the information, but it can also be overwhelming. Establish two or three goals to start, and focus on learning as much as you can about what contributes to those goals. Build from there.
  • Enlist help. Even though I had a good sense of what we wanted to achieve, we hired an expert GA consultant to help. It was great to have someone confirm or challenge my ideas, share his experience from working on GA setup for other clients, and help with technical implementation.
  • Keep iterating. Setting up your analytics isn’t a one-and-done process. The first phase will establish a baseline, but you may quickly discover that there’s more you want to know. And as your website grows, make sure new pages are tagged.
  • Don’t forget to block your IP address. You can blacklist visits from your company’s IP address so internal traffic data doesn’t muddy your data.

We’re using the data from GA to establish a performance baseline, so we can measure the impact of any changes to the site.

We’ll keep you posted.

-Posted by Elizabeth Donovan-

 

Creating a culture of diversity and inclusion

It’s been quite a while since I posted on this blog, but I hope my excuses are legitimate. Last March after returning from ten months of traveling around the world, I joined digital agency Ueno as a Senior Marketing Strategist. Fast forward one year later, and I just became a mom to my first child! So, things have been busy but wonderful. And I’m here to tell you a bit more about the wonderful lesson Ueno has taught me about creating a culture of diversity and inclusion.

Diversity and inclusion sounds like a cliche HR term we’ve heard all too often, without stopping to think about what it means or have meaningful conversations about how to achieve it. The truth is, I didn’t think much about it until I started working at the most culturally diverse company I’ve ever been a part of… and a light bulb went off.

We represent six nationalities in our office of only ten people. It’s amazing. At any moment I might hear four different languages being spoken, and we spend our team lunches talking about cultural differences, where and how people grew up, and learn all kinds of fascinating tidbits about each other’s home countries. (One of our favorite topics is food because there’s no better source of culture, and we’re all foodies!) Our differences actually unify the team by giving us the shared identity of being international. When we have clients or friends visit our office, I proudly tell them that I am one of only two born-and-raised Americans in the office, naming all of the different countries where my colleagues are from. Impressive, right!?

Our wealth of cultural backgrounds impacts our work more than you might think. We’re all influenced by the things we grew up around, and learning about these different experiences sparks curiosity in one another. It leads us to ask more questions. In one example, I never realized how weird and stupid the American tradition of Groundhog’s Day is until a French colleague asked, perplexed, “So Americans think a little animal can predict the end of winter… for real?” Ummm, yeah, it’s super weird. And I’d never questioned it before.

So, while Trump isn’t making it easy, I would encourage any company to hire international employees. It really does impact the overall flavor of a company and naturally fosters creativity.

In addition to our international employees, Ueno has a culture of sharing ideas. The thought that great ideas can come from anywhere is ingrained in us. A designer can have a great marketing idea. A marketer can offer valuable design input. And, importantly, an employee with two years of experience can have an equally valid idea as the employee with ten years. Some might describe this as a flat culture, but to me it’s common sense. How can people grow professionally if they aren’t encouraged to share and test ideas?

The tricky part is soliciting ideas from people who might otherwise keep their mouths shut for a myriad of reasons… “That’s not my job” or “I’m thinking too differently from everyone else” or “This will probably sound stupid.” One thing I’ve learned from my boss is that you can proactively include people by asking them, specifically by name, what they think during meetings. Rather than inviting general feedback, calling on someone specifically for their ideas–even if it may seem like putting someone on the spot–is much more effective. Over time, people get used to it and can start to feel more comfortable sharing what’s on their mind. It’s not easy to open up to people and put yourself out there, and I personally still need to work on it. But if I’m asked my opinion, I’ll definitely take the opportunity.

It helps to have a socially-conscious and inclusive leadership team. I want to share something one of our company leaders recently shared on Slack:

 

Ok, so I’ve observed that some of our younger and non-english native people sometimes don’t fully understand what people are talking about, and feel too embarrassed and vulnerable about it to call it out.

Communication is the foundation for understanding and our ability to function but more importantly our ability to connect as people.

Two things to keep in mind:

1) If english is not your first language, you shouldn’t be afraid to be vulnerable about your language. You are learning and learning is hard. You should not get blamed for not speaking perfect English, or for not understanding the native english speakers (or anyone really). You are here because we want you here, we love that you have a different background and you add value in so many different types of ways.

2) To native speakers: english is the company language, but Ueno is an international company: you need to be aware that not everybody shares your cultural and language context. You are responsible for making yourself understood, not the other way around.

If you don’t understand something, just ask. And if you still don’t understand that’s ok, just ask again. And keep asking until you understand.


A simple observation with encouragement like this could make all the difference. Even if it seems like it should go without saying, it needs to be said.

Our diversity track record isn’t perfect. We’re mostly white, and our tech/development team is overwhelmingly male. But diversity is a common theme and one of our core values. It’s a crucial area of focus for our leadership team as we grow.

This may not be a marketing-specific topic, but I hope it sparks some thinking about diversity and inclusion, and why it’s so important to any business. Thinking and talking about it is a great first step to creating a stronger, more inclusive culture.

 

-Posted by Elizabeth Donovan-