Conversion Matters

As I said before I’ve been reading Avinash Kaushik’s Web Analytics - An Hour A Day and I can’t quite believe how good it is. It’s packed full of useful insights and strategies. I feel I have picked up so much already and I must try and share some with you.

The ‘three layers of so what’ test

This is a test you can use to help find actionable insights from your web analytics metrics. The idea is that if you have to ask ’so what?’ three times the metric is not helping.

Take page views as an example. The report shows that page views have increased month by month for the last six months. So what? This is great because it shows we have become more sticky. So what? We should do more of x to leverage this trend. So what?

If you can’t answer that final so what Kaushik says it is an unhelpful metric. If on the other hand you have a metric such as conversion rate for keyword x is 5% higher than the average. Ask the question ’so what?’ and you come up with an actionable insight: we should target this keyword more aggressively as it converts better and increases our revenue.

The power of the so what test is to cut through the mass of useless data and find data that can drive positive actions.