Reporting

Amplitude Reports That Show Frustrating Buttons & Misleading Button Text

As part of my tool agnostic analytics reporting series, I’m showing actionable reports you can build in any analytics tool to immediately improve the customer journey. Today’s report is all about showing you how to identify the buttons that are causing the most friction for your users. Although friction points on your website can present themselves a number of different ways, today I’ll highlight rage clicks. A rage click is a term that describes multiple clicks on an area of your website in a short time frame.

In order to identify these rage clicks, we’ll take important button clicks, like CTA clicks and navigation clicks, and drill down into the specifics of which button was clicked, which page it was clicked on, and the destination of the click. This is best displayed on a segmentation chart within Amplitude. Go to the upper left hand corner of your screen to create a new chart.

Because we want to select two events instead of one, you can start off by selecting the “Any Event” event. Filter by your important button clicks. In my case, I used cta_click and navigation_click.

From there, I’ll use the grouped by functionality to get my specifics. I’ll group by Event Name to see what type of button click. I’ll group by Page Path to see what page the button was clicked on. I’ll group by link_text to see what the text was on the link. Lastly, I’ll click link_url to see the destination of the button.

Since rage clicks imply that a button was clicked multiple times, I’m going to change the measurement from Uniques to Frequency. I’m subsequently going to set my bucket to start at 2 and click apply. This will help filter out the noise from buttons that are only clicked once.

You’ll see your segmentation chart populate the buttons that on average get the highest amount of rage clicks. Each will indicate the frequency at which the button was clicked, so if you notice too much noise from buttons that are only clicked twice, feel free to increase the starting number of your bucket range.

There you have it! Easily spot the rage clicks on your website within Amplitude with just one report. These rage clicks are great candidates for A/B testing and removing them will help remove friction points on your website.

Mixpanel Reports That Show Frustrating Buttons & Misleading Button Text

As part of my tool agnostic analytics reporting series, I’m showing actionable reports you can build in any analytics tool to immediately improve the customer journey. Today’s report is all about showing you how to identify the buttons that are causing the most friction for your users. Although friction points on your website can present themselves a number of different ways, today I’ll highlight rage clicks. A rage click is a term that describes multiple clicks on an area of your website in a short time frame.

In order to identify these rage clicks, we’ll take important button clicks, like CTA clicks and navigation clicks, and drill down into the specifics of which button was clicked, which page it was clicked on, and the destination of the click. This is best displayed on an Insights chart within Mixpanel. Add your important button clicks. In my case, I used cta_click and navigation_click.

From there, I’ll use the Breakdown by functionality to get my specifics. I’ll break down by Current URL to see what page the button was clicked on. I’ll group by link_text to see what the text was on the link. Lastly, I’ll click link_url to see the destination of the button.

Since rage clicks imply that a button was clicked multiple times, you’ll notice that my measurement is Average Frequency Per User instead of Unique Users or Total Events.

You’ll see your Insights chart then populate the buttons that on average get the highest amount of rage clicks.

There you have it! Easily spot the rage clicks on your website within Mixpanel with just one report. These rage clicks are great candidates for A/B testing and removing them will help remove friction points on your website.

Amplitude Reports That Show Ineffective Content (Pt. 2)

As part of my tool agnostic analytics reporting series, I’m showing actionable reports you can build in any analytics tool to immediately improve the customer journey. Today’s report is all about showing whether or not you have the right words on your page. Whether it’s unintuitive text on a button or content that just isn’t robust enough to capture a user, here’s a step by step guide to building your report.

Note: The key to quick, actionable insights for your friction points is thoughtful event tracking and the right event structure. If you’re not sure whether or not you have the right event structure, dive into my event structure blog post. This post gives an actionable list of events you should track and how to update your event naming structure to build reports quicker.

The first indication that the content on your page isn’t resonating with users is finding pages that have a higher than average usage of your global navigation. I’ve demonstrated how to build out the first part of this report with Part 1. Now that you understand which pages have higher than average usage of your global navigation, your next step is to see which global navigation elements your website visitors are using.

Create a segmentation report using your navigation_click event. Group by Page Path and link_text, and count as totals, not uniques.

This should populate the report as such, with your Page Path and link_text are populated as rows. In the columns you’ll see Event Count – the number of times that link text was clicked on that particular page.

It’s especially important to view this report in conjunction with the first report because it gives context. Using only the above report, you would think that you need to focus your efforts only on the home page. However if you view our first report (screenshotted below), you’ll notice that a greater percentage of people had a difficult time on the Bath page, which is actually where we should be focusing our efforts.

There you have it! These are the pages that need the most content help and which content you should be adding on those pages.

Amplitude Reports That Show Ineffective Content (Pt. 1)

As part of my tool agnostic analytics reporting series, I’m showing actionable reports you can build in any analytics tool to immediately improve the customer journey. Today’s report is all about showing whether or not you have the right words on your page. Whether it’s unintuitive text on a button or content that just isn’t robust enough to capture a user, here’s a step by step guide to building your report.

Note: The key to quick, actionable insights for your friction points is thoughtful event tracking and the right event structure. If you’re not sure whether or not you have the right event structure, dive into my event structure blog post. This post gives an actionable list of events you should track and how to update your event naming structure to build reports quicker.

The first indication that the content on your page isn’t resonating with users is finding pages that have a higher than average usage of your global navigation.

To do that in Amplitude, create a new data table report with the dimensions Page Viewed and navigation_click. Pull your Page Path into the rows column.

Select “Add Event or Metric” in the third column.

Define a new metric:

Your new metric should be a formula using two events, navigation_click and Page Viewed. Your formula should start with “%:” – this indicates that the metric should be formatted as a percentage. Then type in TOTALS(A)/TOTALS(B).

This will show you how many times the navigation was used compared to how many times the page was viewed. The higher the percentage, the more likely your on page content wasn’t resonating with users.

Check out part 2 to see which navigation items are being clicked.

Mixpanel Reports That Show Ineffective Content (Pt. 2)

As part of my tool agnostic analytics reporting series, I’m showing actionable reports you can build in any analytics tool to immediately improve the customer journey. Today’s report is all about showing whether or not you have the right words on your page. Whether it’s the unintuitive text on a button or content that just isn’t robust enough to capture a user, here’s a step by step guide to building your report.

Note: The key to quick, actionable insights for your friction points is thoughtful event tracking and the right event structure. If you’re not sure whether or not you have the right event structure, dive into my event structure blog post. This post gives an actionable list of events you should track and how to update your event naming structure to build reports quicker.

The first indication that the content on your page isn’t resonating with users is finding pages that have a higher than average usage of your global navigation. I’ve demonstrated how to build out the first part of this report with Part 1. Now that you understand which pages have higher than average usage of your global navigation, your next step is to see which global navigation elements your website visitors are using.

For the second part, create a new report using the event navigation_click and breakdown by Current URL and link_text

This should populate the report as such, with your Current URL and link_text are populated as rows.

Since Mixpanel only shows the average usage within their UI, you’ll need to export the report to CSV.

It’s especially important to view this report in conjunction with the first report because it gives context. Using only the above report, you would think that you need to focus your efforts only on the home page. However if you view our first report (screenshotted below), you’ll notice that a greater percentage of people had a difficult time on the Bath page, which is actually where we should be focusing our efforts.

There you have it! These are the pages that need the most content help and which content you should be adding on those pages.

Mixpanel Reports That Show Ineffective Content (Pt. 1)

As part of my tool agnostic analytics reporting series, I’m showing actionable reports you can build in any analytics tool to immediately improve the customer journey. Today’s report is all about showing whether or not you have the right words on your page. Whether it’s the unintuitive text on a button or content that just isn’t robust enough to capture a user, here’s a step by step guide to building your report.

Note: The key to quick, actionable insights for your friction points is thoughtful event tracking and the right event structure. If you’re not sure whether or not you have the right event structure, dive into my event structure blog post. This post gives an actionable list of events you should track and how to update your event naming structure to build reports quicker.

The first indication that the content on your page isn’t resonating with users is finding pages that have a higher than average usage of your global navigation.

To do that in Mixpanel, create a new report with the metrics Page View and navigation click. Your third metric should be a formula – navigation click divided by Page View.

As a Breakdown, you’ll see I’ve selected Current URL. These three metrics and the breakdown will make your report look like this, with Page View, navigation_click, and your custom formula in the column headers, while your Current URLs are broken out by rows.

Now you can see how many times the navigation was used compared to how many times the page was viewed. The higher the percentage, the more likely your on page content wasn’t resonating with users.

Check out part 2 to see which navigation items are being clicked.

GA4 Reports That Show Ineffective Content (Pt. 2)

As part of my tool agnostic analytics reporting series, I’m showing actionable reports you can build in any analytics tool to immediately improve the customer journey. Today’s report is all about showing whether or not you have the right words on your page. Whether it’s unintuitive text on a button or content that just isn’t robust enough to capture a user, here’s a step by step guide to building your report.

Note: The key to quick, actionable insights for your friction points is thoughtful event tracking and the right event structure. If you’re not sure whether or not you have the right event structure, dive into my event structure blog post. This post gives an actionable list of events you should track and how to update your event naming structure to build reports quicker.

The first indication that the content on your page isn’t resonating with users is finding pages that have a higher than average usage of your global navigation. I’ve demonstrated how to build out the first part of this report with Part 1. Now that you understand which pages have higher than average usage of your global navigation, your next step is to see which global navigation elements your website visitors are using.

If you’ve already created the first part of the report, you should be seeing the dimensions event name, page path and screen class, and link text. Create a new tab and pull in the rows page path and screen class and link text. Make sure you have set the “Nested Rows” setting to yes.

Add a filter to only include navigation_click.

This should populate the report as such, with your page path and screen class are populated as rows. Nested beneath them is the different link text that was clicked on that page. In your third column you’ll see Event Count – the number of times that link text was clicked.

It’s especially important to view this report in conjunction with the first report because it gives context. Using only the above report, you would think that you need to focus your efforts only on the home page. However if you view our first report (screenshotted below), you’ll notice that a greater percentage of people had a difficult time on the Bath page, which is actually where we should be focusing our efforts.

There you have it! These are the pages that need the most content help and which content you should be adding on those pages.

GA4 Reports That Show Ineffective Content (Pt. 1)

As part of my tool agnostic analytics reporting series, I’m showing actionable reports you can build in any analytics tool to immediately improve the customer journey. Today’s report is all about showing whether or not you have the right words on your page. Whether it’s the unintuitive text on a button or content that just isn’t robust enough to capture a user, here’s a step by step guide to building your report.

Note: The key to quick, actionable insights for your friction points is thoughtful event tracking and the right event structure. If you’re not sure whether or not you have the right event structure, dive into my event structure blog post. This post gives an actionable list of events you should track and how to update your event naming structure to build reports quicker.

The first indication that the content on your page isn’t resonating with users is finding pages that have a higher than average usage of your global navigation.

To do that in GA4, create a new freeform report with the dimensions event name, page path and screen class, and link text. Pull your page path and screen class into the rows column. We’ll use link text in part 2.

In your column, put in the event name.

Add a filter to only include two specific event names, page_view and navigation_click. You’ll notice I used regular expressions here. If you need a refresher on how to use regular expressions, check out this blog post.

This should populate the report as such, with your page_view and navigation_click events in the two column headers, while your page path and screen class are broken out by rows.

Use the download button to export this data into a CSV. Remove the totals column and add the formula “=SUM(navigation_click/page_view).” This will show you how many times the navigation was used compared to how many times the page was viewed. The higher the percentage, the more likely your on page content wasn’t resonating with users.

Check out part 2 to see which navigation items are being clicked.

Why You Need Call Tracking for a Full View of the Customer Journey

More and more interactions are shifting online, but for businesses with a longer sales cycle or have high dollar goods and services, phone calls are still an essential part of business. The source of these calls remained a huge blind spot for many marketers until the invention of call tracking. Read below for four reasons why you need call tracking to get a full view of the customer journey.

Get Granular Insights on Paid Media Efforts

Many people understand the benefits of using call tracking numbers on your website to understand how many people called from desktop, as opposed to click to call tracking, which as a general rule of thumb, will only capture mobile phone calls. But what you may not realize is that call tracking software can capture more than just the number of calls you get. 

A call tracking software can capture your full URL, including UTM codes. Which means if you’ve put the name of your ad creative or copy in the utm_content field and the keyword in the utm_term field, you can now tell not only which campaigns drove the highest number of calls, but you can also drill down into which specific ads resonated most with your users. Feel free to get creative with your UTM fields for more granular insights on targeting options, ad placements, and ad size (remember that competitors can see your UTM codes, though). The best part a call tracking software that uses UTMs though? They’re platform agnostic, so even if you’re not using Google Analytics, you don’t have to miss out on insights.

Track All Calls from Your Google Listing (Google Business Profile)

Your website isn’t the only place online where people can find your phone number. If you have local businesses, you likely have local online listings, such as with Yelp, Facebook, and especially Google Business Profiles (FKA Google My Business). With its prominence on the search engine results page, your Google listing is the online listing likely to get the most traffic, but did you know their call reporting only reports on mobile calls? Enter your static call tracking number. 

By accurately capturing the amount of calls you receive from your Google listings, you can help better understand the ROI of your online profiles. From there, you may decide it’s worth it to engage with a listing management partner to ensure your listing is always up to date and can take advantage of the latest feature releases. Or you may decide that you need to venture into paid search for your local listings.

Take Credit for Offline Conversions

Understanding how traditional mediums impact your bottom line is just as important as understanding how digital mediums impact your bottom line. If you’re running any form of direct mail, billboard advertising (OOH), or even partnering with another company for a sponsorship opportunity, I highly recommend you invest in call tracking.  

Without call tracking, you are forced to rely on modeling and third-party attribution tools to help you understand what impact your offline advertising might have had. Instead, take a small part of that budget so you understand definitively what impact you had. Now, here I want to address an elephant in the room – this idea isn’t new, but not many people do it because they assume there is a high cost associated with call tracking. I’m personally partnered with Call Rail, which has plans starting at $45 for 250 minutes. With such a low cost to entry, this is a no-brainer on how to measure the effectiveness of your traditional mediums. 

Understand the Full Impact of A/B Testing

Call tracking with A/B testing isn’t new, but most times it’s not used to its fullest extent. If you’re thinking that you should only use call tracking when you’re testing out the placement or color of a phone number, think again. I recommend you implement call tracking whenever you’re testing out any on page element and get the full story of user interactions on the page. 

For example, when you changed the color of your button from red to blue, did you really lose any leads, or were people just more inclined to call? When they called, did they convert at a higher percentage? When you implement call tracking with all your A/B tests, you can answer these questions and so many more. 

Summary

Getting a holistic view of the customer journey requires you to collect data points about online and offline behavior of potential customers. A call tracking software gives never before seen insight into the ROI of your traditional and digital advertising. By providing insights on how to better allocate your media spend and optimize your creative assets, call tracking software is the one tool in your toolbox that will pay for itself. I’ve used Call Rail for over five years now, and I’m happy to now be a Call Rail affiliate. To sign up for a trial, visit their website here. Please note, by clicking this link, I may get a small commission at no cost to you.

3 Ways to Use First Party Data in Paid Social

With the deprecation of 3rd party cookies and other tracking technologies, marketers are looking more toward their first party data to optimize ads and create more efficient spend. When it comes to Facebook, here are three ways you can leverage your first party data.

Please consult your legal counsel before you use any first party data in marketing. This is not an article recommending how you should use first party data, rather it is an article outlining the ways that you could use first party data.

Offline Conversions

Offline Conversions for Facebook was a feature released in 2016 as ‘Offline Events’ that allows you to better measure the impact of your Facebook campaigns by importing – you guessed it – offline conversions. 

There are two ways to take advantage of offline conversions. First, you can manually upload your first party data as a new data source in the Events Manager section of Facebook. 

The second way to employ Offline Conversions is to automate your Offline Conversions through the use of an API or by using a partner integration, such as Square, LiveRamp, Marketo, and Segment/Twilio, among many others. Originally the Offline Conversions API was recommended, however now Facebook recommends using the Conversions API.

Facebook provides slightly more transparency than Google’s Offline Conversions in that Facebook allows you to see the split between online and offline conversions generated by your campaign. In contrast, Google groups both sets of conversions into one bucket.

First Party Data You Can Use: 

  • Email
  • Phone
  • First Name
  • Last Name
  • External ID
  • Gender
  • Birthdate
  • Geo Information (City, State, Zip Code) 

Examples of How to Use This Data: 

  • Understand Offline ROAS
  • Use data with audience targeting to expand your reach
  • Use data with audience targeting to exclude existing customers from your campaigns
  • Use data with audience targeting to upsell or cross-sell existing customers
  • Optimize ads and campaigns

Source: https://www.facebook.com/business/learn/facebook-offline-conversions

Advanced Matching

In 2016 Facebook released Advanced Matching, a new way to better understand the customers you’re reaching with your Facebook ads. Facebook’s Advanced Matching has some overlap with Offline Conversions in that they both work off first party data to better identify which users converted from your ads, but it’s important to note that they’re not dependent on each other. Whereas offline conversions are additional events you send to Facebook, advanced matching simply augments the events you already send with first party data. 

There are two ways to implement Advanced Matching. The first option is manual. This doesn’t require you to adjust any settings in Facebook, rather you modify the pixel itself. When you modify the pixel, you can include any one of Facebook’s first party fields, such as email or phone number, and map user inputs from forms to automatically populate these fields with those values. Manual Advanced Matching is appealing to some marketers because it doesn’t come with the same industry restrictions as Automatic Advanced Matching.

Much like Offline Conversions, you’ll control Automatic Advanced Matching by going into Facebook’s Events Manager. Since you’re not adding additional data sources, you’ll click on the name and ID of your existing data sources. Name and ID often refer to the Name and ID of your pixel, since that’s the primary data source your Facebook business account has. From there, visit the settings tab (again, because this is just an additional feature of already collected events) and turn on Automatic Advanced Matching.

Automatic Advanced Matching is appealing to some advertisers because it doesn’t require any code modification. Instead, Facebook automatically detects form fields on your website, such as those associated with log-in, registration, or purchase activity. From there, Facebook collects the field inputs and includes them with the events you’re already sending to Facebook. Facebook promises to not collect sensitive information, such as passwords or health data.

Ultimately Facebook recommends utilizing both methods of advanced matching, as Automatic Advanced Matching can collect more data, but Manual Advanced Matching doesn’t encounter the same limitations with technology (pixels deployed in an iframe or via an IMG pixel) or industries.

First Party Data You Can Use: 

  • Email
  • Phone
  • First Name
  • Last Name
  • External ID
  • Gender
  • Birthdate
  • Geo Information (City, State, Zip Code) 

Examples of How to Use This Data: 

  • Better understand cross-device conversions (if someone sees your ad on one device and fills out a form from another)
  • Better understand user behavior even when said user is logged out on Facebook.
  • Optimize ads and campaigns
  • More accurate targeting – increase your Custom Audience size by matching website visitors to Meta users

Source: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/611774685654668?id=1205376682832142

Audiences

In order to improve targeting, since 2012 Facebook has allowed advertisers to create audiences. Facebook offers three types of audiences: Custom Audiences, Lookalike Audiences, and a Saved Audience. 

Custom Audiences include people who have previously interacted with your business in one of many ways. The most common sources of Custom Audiences are below:

  1. Website: People who have interacted with your website, as determined by the Meta pixel installed on your website.
  2. Customer List: A list of your existing customers; this can include first party data as listed below.
  3. Offline Activity: A list of people who have interacted with your business through offline channels (this was mentioned in the above section).
  4. App Activity: People who have interacted with your app
  5. Meta Activity: People who have interacted with your assets on Meta, such as videos, Facebook or Instagram pages, or lead forms.

From any of those Custom Audiences, you can build a Lookalike Audience. Unlike Custom Audiences, Lookalike Audiences include people who aren’t yet your customer, but you want them to be. By mirroring the interests, demographics, and behaviors of people uploaded with your Custom Audience, Facebook can find you people who are more likely to convert. This feature can be amplified with Facebook’s new “Advantage Custom Audience,” “Advantage Lookalikes,” and “Advantage Detailed Targeting.”

Please note, Facebook has contradictory information on which Custom Audiences can be used as source audiences for Lookalike Audiences. In the instructions for creating a Lookalike Audience in Ads Manager, they mention that a Lookalike Audience cannot be created with pixel, app, or Meta engagement data: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/465262276878947?id=401668390442328. In their article detailing what a Source Audience is, they list no such limitation: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/475669712534537.

As with any advertising platform, the more first party data you upload, the better your targeting will be. Facebook mentions that the source audience must contain at least 100 people, but 1,000 to 50,000 is recommended. People in these lists are excluded from being targeted in your Lookalike Audiences.

First Party Data You Can Use: 

  • Email
  • Phone
  • Mobile App Identifier (IDFA, AAID)
  • First Name
  • Last Name
  • External ID
  • Gender
  • Birthdate
  • Geo Information (City, State, Zip Code) 

Examples of How to Use This Data: 

  • Expand your reach with Lookalike Audiences
  • Exclude existing customers from your campaigns
  • Upsell or cross-sell existing customers

Summary

If you’re considering using first party data with Facebook Ads, you can take advantage of Facebook’s Advanced Matching, Offline Conversions, and Audience features.