This is our fourth post in the ‘Small Business Series‘ which features where we feature industry leaders on how small businesses can better leverage their strengths.  This week we are interviewing Hiten Shah, the founder of three successful startups (Survey.io, Crazy Egg and Kissmetrics) on understanding metrics that a small business should focus on. I have been using Crazy Egg for a while now and its a great tool to understand click patterns, and just yesterday tried out KissInsights (a new product as part of Kissmetrics).  KissInsights is one of the best feedback tools I have seen, I am not a fan of the pop-up technique of inviting people to participate in surveys and love the widget you have to install.

Romy Misra (Pear Analytics): First Hiten, thanks so much for taking out the time to do this. Why is it important to develop metrics for success for small businesses? How does one develop these metrics?

Hiten Shah: I believe that the metrics for success are important in any business, because they can be used to help the whole organization focus on a single goal. If you pick the right metrics for success, you will be able to significantly improve the focus of the whole team and thus improve your business. Developing these metrics should be done first by making hypothesis about your business and validating / invalidating these hypothesis. From there you will have a good base understanding that will allow you to determine what metrics to focus on and how to define success for your business.

Romy Misra (Pear Analytics): Most businesses make the mistake of not evaluating their metrics over time. How should metrics evolve with as a startup/ small business grows?

Hiten Shah: Before a company has reached “product /market” fit, I’d be looking at a qualitative product / market fit metric. One example is the must-have metric, defined by a veteran marketer named Sean Ellis. He recently did an interview where he talks about it: http://venturehacks.com/articles/sean-ellis-interview We also created a product: http://survey.io to help people measure product/market fit by asking the must-have question.

After product/market fit I’d say for most businesses the most important metrics will probably be tied to a/b testing, marketing expenditures and revenue.

Romy Misra (Pear Analytics): One of the other frequent mistakes we have seen is that small business owners see SEO and Web Analytics as separate entities and do not tie them in with  their business goals. How would you tie in various web analytics data (clickstream analysis, heatmaps) with your SEO?

Hiten Shah: At the end of the day you are trying to convert visitors who come to your website, regardless of what “channel” they come from. So I’d say that you have to setup an analytics system to help you track conversions and than determine how various channels are converting.

Search Engine Optimization is just one of these channels.

Romy Misra (Pear Analytics): Most SMB’s I talk to feel overwhelmed by the top positions in Google. Even when the product is remarkable, ranking well in Google can be very  difficult.  In such a scenario which SEO metrics would you recommend a small  business to track?

Hiten Shah: I would focus on the traffic that the business is currently getting and than determine opportunities that the business is missing out on. Many times instead of focusing on keywords that can drive the largest volume, I would focus on long-tail keywords which might be easier to obtain top positions for in Google.

Romy Misra (Pear Analytics): One of the challenges we see with funnel optimization for small  businesses is that there is no benchmark for funnel optimization. How important are benchmarks? Also, how can an SMB use Kissmetrics the best way to optimize their funnels?

Hiten Shah: My recommendation is to always baseline your own funnel and than use that to drive improvement. There is little value in trying to understand benchmarks for an “industry” without understanding your own current conversion rates. KISSmetrics is designed to help companies optimize their funnels, we start by encouraging people to baseline their funnel and then help them make improvements. Funnel optimization not only requires metrics but also requires qualitative feedback from customers as well as creativity.

Romy Misra (Pear Analytics): Lastly, as a founder of three successful startups, please share with us three  important things you have learned along the the way!

Hiten Shah: Here are my top three :

1. Getting an early understanding of customers and thus your market is
critical to long-term success.
2. Great customer service and support creates lasting loyalty.
3. Don’t be afraid to be wrong, in fact you should go into your
business knowing that many of your assumptions will be wrong.

Understanding Metrics that Matter – Interview with Hiten Shah is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

This is the second post in our “Small Business Series” where we are interviewing a few industry experts on how small businesses can better leverage their strengths. Today we are interviewing Ken Hilburn, from Juice Analytics, one of my personal favorite data visualization companies, on how to create awesome surveys. Surveys are traditionally one of the best ways to understand your customers, but at the same time getting your customers to participate and engage in surveys is a huge challenge. I thought of interviewing Ken when I took a survey Juice Analytics sent to me by email, and it was the most engaging survey I had taken in months.

Note: As a bonus, Ken has generously shared that survey with us.

Romy Misra (Pear Analytics) : First Ken, thanks so much for taking the time to do this. The importance of surveying your customers has been repeatedly talked about. Why do you think it is important to survey your online customers/visitors?

Ken Hilburn: I have to start off by saying that Juice Analytics has an awesome community and we love talking, listening and working with them. But even with such a strong group, it’s critical to talk less and listen more.
It used to be, for the most part, that customers were at the mercy of vendors when it came to communication – it was pretty much a one-way street. However, that’s changing now. With the pervasive use of social media sites, there has been a tremendous shift toward “power to the people.” It’s certainly in a company’s best interest at this point to make sure they’re in touch with their customers and how well their customer’s needs are being met. We get to choose: we can either do that proactively, or we can wait to see it on the twitter “Popular Topics” list and hope it’s positive.

Romy Misra (Pear Analytics) : The existing ways of inviting your customers to take a survey can be interrupting, generally in the form of annoying pop ups. What in your experience have been the best ways for asking your customers to participate in a survey?

Ken Hilburn: At Juice Analytics, we’ve always tried super hard to be as un-intrusive as possible to the user’s experience. It’s baked into the way we interact on every level with our community and clients from mailing lists, to surveys, to our applications. We believe that if you create valuable product (be it information, services, or software) people will proactively engage – Seth Godin has been great at reminding us you shouldn’t have to yell at someone to get their attention.
When it came to our recent survey on the whether or not we were helping our fans be more effective in their companies, we decided to use two primary channels for requesting feedback. The first was to post a link to the survey on our blog, which has a very broad and strong following. The second channel was to send an email to those who had opted in to receiving information from Juice. We didn’t believe using pop-ups on the website for survey participation was warranted. Pop-ups are annoying and should only be used in cases where you need to collect information from an otherwise unreachable audience regarding a very specific, quick turn-around topic.

Romy Misra (Pear Analytics): Avinash Kaushik has talked widely about limiting your survey to 4 important questions using the 4q model. Are there any ‘best survey practices’ one should follow?

Ken Hilburn: We’re big fans of Avinash and what he does. And that’s no different when it comes to his 4Q model. However, our survey objectives are a little different from what the 4Q model was intended to address. For instance, in our most recent case we were more interested in learning about the general information visualization environment in our community’s companies, rather than user experience on the web site. As a result, here are the principles we used when constructing our survey:
* Participants have to have the option to avoid it altogether (see question 2).
* It has to be short enough that someone can complete the whole thing in less that 5 minutes – preferably less than 3… or 1.
* The final results have to not only be useful by Juice, but also useful by the participants. We wanted this criteria since we were going to offer the results back to the community.
* Above all, it has to be fun. Juice believes that many see our domain as dry and boring. So, we try very hard to make our community engagements friendly and entertaining. We saw this survey to be the perfect challenge for us to turn the “ultimate boring” into something people had fun doing. Based on the feedback (and responses) that we received, we achieved our objective.

Romy Misra (Pear Analytics): Can you share with us your ideas of how to keep your customers engaged during a survey?

Ken Hilburn: We’re living in an age where attention spans are getting shorter and shorter. Folks will only do something as long as they want to. We used several concepts to encourage completion:

* We used a personal, friendly tone to try to get our participants comfortable with the survey.
* Attempted to get participants to look forward to the next question by by transforming typically boring questions into interesting ones. For instance, the very first question was about company size. Instead of asking “is your company 1000-5000 employees”, we asked:

In terms of size, which of the following is your company most like?

• A one man band
• The Dirty Dozen
• The University of Rhode Island
• Microsoft

Finally, questions have to be worded in an easy to read, understand and respond to fashion. When people start having to think about their responses, their progress slows and they start to bail on the survey.

Romy Misra (Pear Analytics): Could you share your experience at Juice Analytics of surveying your readers and what you guys did to achieve a success rate?

Ken Hilburn: Since our readers are engaged because they’re interested in how to look at data in innovative ways, we promised to display results using alternative charting styles. To do this, we had to break the #1 survey rule: stay away from text based answers. In this survey, about half of our questions were text based (as opposed to multiple choice). This required more effort on the back end from us, but think the benefit we got was better participation.
As I mentioned earlier, we posted the survey on our blog first and then did an email invitation to participate. With respect to the email, we had an over 35% open rate, a 45% click rate and a 60+% completion rate. The overall result was that we had over 500 respondents. Again, we have an awesome community that really supports us and the work we do. As a result we treat them with a great deal of respect and try to make our communications feel very personal. People like this.

Romy Misra (Pear Analytics): There are so many survey tools out there. Which one(s) would you recommend using?

Ken Hilburn: There are a lot. There’s even some good ones (ha!). I think selecting a tool has to be based on what you’re trying to accomplish. Here’s the criteria we used:
* Had to support a wide variety of question types (like rating, ranking, and conditional sequencing)
* Questions had to be easy to enter into the system (spend your time _creating_ a great survey, not administering it)
* The presentation of questions to the participants had to be in format that achieves our very high standard of aesthetic quality.
* The final results had to be easily exportable in their entirety since we wanted to perform some in depth analysis and visualization.
* We preferred that it integrate with our email marketing tool.
We’ve tried several different methods of collecting user information. The first and most flexible is Google Apps forms. We like this because the results get populated directly into a Google spreadsheet which is then easy to manipulate results. We also like Survey Monkey because it’s super simple and quick to set up. For our most important surveys, we have used Constant Contact’s offering because it allows us to target and track our audience more effectively.

Romy Misra (Pear Analytics): What is your recommended ideal number of participants in a survey which should enable a company takes action on the feedback gained (eg: make changes to a site, add features to a product etc) ?

Ken Hilburn: Being the engineer that I am, I’d love to say: “100% of your user base, of course.” But we all know that’s not really a reasonable expectation. I’d have to say that it has to be a high enough percentage of your user base that you feel there’s a justification for change. However, I’d also say that when it comes to changing the way your customers engage with your site or product, proceeding based solely on a survey should be done cautiously. Once a survey indicates that a change might be warranted, try some A/B testing or more focussed user group sessions to confirm your assumptions. These days both of these options are becoming much more affordable. In the long run, you’ll see a much more positive improvement.

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Ken works with the Juice community and customers to help them better understand how to incorporate information presentation best practices into their world. He’s known for applying his structured approach and deep customer experiences to enable clients to implement targeted information solutions.

Once again, check out the totally awesome survey that Juice Analytics created to engage customers. We’ll definitely be trying some of these tactics out with our customer surveys in the near future.

The Art of Creating Super Awesome Surveys is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

Sniffing out the next Google algorithm

It’s been my first week of work (already!) and I am still learning the ropes of web analytics. Here are my first words of wisdom:

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is another fancy way of saying you are trying to beat Google. Yes, that’s what everyone tries to do constantly: Guess what the Google algorithm is.
2. There is no real expert out there, some people just make better guesses and use a lot of jargon.
3. All SEO self declared experts are self educated. To learn SEO all you have to do is stop being lazy and read a lot.
4. Google’s problem: Trying to beat all these people and get people the best content irrespective of those people who do SEO magic and get their site structure right.
5. Granted the people at Google are smarter than us, but they have a lot of people to try and beat with a search tool that crawls over pages. Can’t be easy work, although we make it easy for them by constantly telling them what we are doing.

Would love to hear your take on SEO as well.

Decoding SEO is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

That’s right – you can’t measure everything online that you might think.  Analyzing click traffic on websites has become much more difficult to get anything close to accurate.

One of the most difficult problems to solve is the issue with giving proper credit to the “original source” of the lead or sale.  Some of the PPC systems refer to this as the “assist” and they pass special tracking cookies to the user that will help indicate in the click stream data future visits from this user.  This typically helps credit PPC campaigns and reduces the cost per acquisition (CPA) for that channel.

This is great, but it is flawed.  This generally assumes that the visitor used one computer, and few of us use one computer.  We usually have an office computer, a home computer (we have 2), plus mobile devices.

Consider this situation (which is probably quite typical):

1.  Husband is searching for vacation spots for his family during his lunch at work.  He does several searches, including hitting a few paid ads.
2.  He runs out of time and has to get back to work, so he emails himself the links to the pages of the sites he liked to his home email account so he can show his wife later that evening.
3.  He gets on email at home and pulls up the pages on his home computer to show his wife and kids what he found.
4.  They continue to do more research and even bookmark a few sites/pages and will revisit in a couple of weeks so they can think about it.
5.  They revisit the site a few weeks later by hitting the saved bookmark and from there, decide to purchase.

Now in this case, it’s going to be virtually impossible for the marketer to track this sale all the way back to the paid search ad because he lost him as soon as he switched computers (if he is even using cookie and campaign tracking in the analytics software).  And if this happens often enough, he will think his paid search campaign is ineffective because it is not driving any sales.

Newsflash: most people don’t buy anything on the first visit!

There is likely going to be multiple interactions, extensive research, bookmarking, etc. before any purchase is made over a several-week (depending on the product) sales cycle.

Secondly, consumers are not going to be as compulsive in a down economy and are going to be looking around for deals, so we can’t possibly expect them to purchase on the first visit from a Google ad.

So what can we do about this?

Well, not too much, unfortunately.  However, if you have an e-commerce site selling any sort of products, you can reduce this phnomenon by simply having a “Favorites” or “Wish List” area of the site where a user can quickly and easily open a free account and save what they like straight on your site. This would eliminate the need to bookmark and email and cookie track everything.  You would have all of the data on your site, and now you could even do session tracking by username and get other interesting information (beware that session tracking has additional privacy issues that you will want to look at closely).

Many of the large sites like Amazon, eBay and others have this feature, but even for small or medium sized business, most of the 3rd party off-the-shelf e-commerce applications (like X-Cart, Magento) have Wish List capabilities.

Happy tracking!

You Can’t Measure Everything Online is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

Below is a video tutorial of an example of how you can correlate offline media efforts to web traffic, and essentially understand the effectiveness of your offline media.

I use Clicky Web Analytics to help measure the the effectiveness of offline media because it can track visitors down to the street level. All of the other analytics tools I have used only go to the city level. (caveat: this isn’t exact, so don’t knocking on people’s doors or anything! Use this for relative measure of density in areas of a city).

How can marketers use this data? Well, I can drop a direct mail piece and a few days later see if I have a concentration of visitors in the neighborhoods the piece was dropped. You can do the same thing with billboards as well, although it may be more beneficial to place the boards in the areas with the most concentration (or least if you are after brand awareness). This could even work great for a nation-wide television campaign, to where you could follow-up with direct response marketing to the areas with the highest concentration of visitors.

Anyway, watch this short video and if you’re not already using this tool, get Clicky!

How To Track The Effectiveness of Your Offline Media is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

So often we are concerned with the “big conversion” on the website, like purchasing something, for example.  We call this a macro conversion – it’s your ultimate goal.  But what about other activities, maybe not as valuable, but still worth something.

We forget that marketing is basically broken down into these 3 pieces:

Everyone, including upper management, is zoning in on purchase.  But what about awareness?  Remember the circles of trust graphic?  It’s highly unlikely that many will purchase from you when they don’t know you.

My point:  create micro conversions in the Awareness and Consideration stages and measure them!

Things like entering a zip code, joining a mailing list, or subscribing to your RSS feed.  Now you have a chance to converse with some highly potential, future customers on a permission-based marketing system, versus a interruption marketing system.

Now, assign a value to these micro conversions.  A zip code might be worth $1 to you.  Asking for a zip code is great because it further refines what geo-tracking in Google Analytics can’t do.  Now you know what zip code your visitors are from, so it takes some of the guesswork out of your next direct mail piece.

Use this value to compare to the costs you’ve put into the activity, such as SEO, PPC or even web analytics.  Before long, you will be able to see which activity is driving the most value.

Conversion Value – You Need to Know This is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.