Measuring success – start small
June 12, 2011 | Persona, customer segmentation
One of the product challenges on the web concerns product optimisation. The value of product optimisation comes when one is able to allow decision making between competing alternatives, or where one is able to discover an error in design that can be rectified.
Product measurement and optimisation can have a wide variety of goals including
- Improvement of navigation sequences
- Improvement of conversions
- Avoiodance of lost users
- Reduced abandonment rate
- Fishing for product improvements without a known reason for the analysis
In general it is best practice to carry out page optimisation activities when there is a clear goal. However there are occasions when fishing around in web measurement tools can turn up useful and unexpected discoveries.
Web measurement tools have developed enormously over the last 10 years and the availability of many free tools including Google analytics have opened up possibilities onkly dreamt of before.
Google analytics tools provide a free method of analyzing the funnel, for example. In the late 1990s and early 2000 this was a technical activity requiring a large investment from IT. Other tools are also available.
These measurement tools are only as good as the data that is fed into them. It is therefore crucial that Product Managers ensure they are correctly instrumented. A common mistake, especially during Agile developments can be a failure to specify in enough detail the measurement requirements for the analytics programme.
For example, in order to use simple “out of the box functinality” to follow user behaviour it is essential that every key decision step a user makes on your web site results in a different url being generated. During the fast pace of Agile this can sometimes be overlooked, and will then need to be added to the backlog for later implementation.
Instrumenting an entire site, and analysing the results can quickly become work for a lifetime. So as with other aspects of introducing new concepts to the business, start small, focus on one area of the site. Demonstrate value in investing time and then develop the discipline.
The metrics collected from on site user behaviour can also be used to enhance your Persona library that you use to develop user story grids, both in terms of user behaviour but also in terms of user segmentation.
