Web Analytics | Digital Deepak

How to Use Data from Heat-Maps to Improve User Experience & Conversions

July 31, 2015 by Deepak Kanakaraju

Marketing is all about traffic and conversions. Traffic can be generated by targeting the right people at the right place & time. Conversion depends on effective communication & trust.

To get more sales, you can either work on increasing your traffic or your conversions. More traffic costs more money. But, conversions can be achieved with a few tweaks and doesn’t always cost money. There are different ways to improve conversion ratio, but the most common methods are split testing and heat-maps.

A conversion doesn’t mean a sale as most people assume. There are different types of conversions in the marketing funnel. An ad impression to an ad click is a conversion. An ad click to a free trial registration is also a conversion. A free trial user making a payment to become a customer is another conversion point.

How to Setup Campaigns and Track Different Traffic Sources in Google Analytics

June 30, 2013 by Deepak Kanakaraju

I have always been an advocate of data driven marketing decisions. Intuition is great but only when the data is unavailable. With data, decisions are always better than emotional guess work. Marketers never had this kind of data even 20 years back. Now with so much data around testing, tracking and optimizing is no longer optional.

In this article you will find out how to setup Campaigns for different promotions and track those traffic sources using UTM tracking codes in Google Analytics. All websites installed with Google analytics has the capability to track individual campaigns. A campaign is nothing but a particular promotion that you are running and it may be a free one or a paid one. For example, you can run a campaign for the promotion of the sales of your latest eBook. The traffic may come from your blog, newsletter, paid ads on Google, Facebook, other websites and so on.

To track the traffic from a particular source you need to build a new URL for it and then use that URL in the campaign that you are setting up. This URL will lead back to your original page but it will have tracking parameters in the URL which Google Analytics will pickup. To build a URL for a specific campaign, you should use the Google URL builder.

What can the Crime Rate in New York teach us about Predictive Web Analytics?

May 30, 2013 by Deepak Kanakaraju

In a world of logic, mathematics and numbers; predicting the future is a concept that may seem out of place and something that has to be left to the superstitious and emotionally driven group of the human kind. But even in a world of logic and precision, LLN (Law of large numbers) does a very good job of helping us predict the seemingly random events in the future and it has a very good reputation of being right most of the time.

predicting web events

To explain this, let me take the example of a particular crime in New York. I know what you are thinking – Crime in New York and Web Analytics? They are two different worlds! But I promise you that I will link the two with a common theory.

So what is common in New York and your website? Random events happen. Crime in New York is a random event with too many variables involved, but so are events on your web page such as subscriptions, clicks, downloads and sales. There is no website in the world where 100% of the visitors convert. How do we predict random events?

Magic happens when one deals with large numbers… and the magic is predictability and the “guarantee” of seemingly random events in the near future.

According to the law of large numbers – random events over a period of time and with large numbers always form a pattern.

“In probability theory, the law of large numbers (LLN) is a theorem that describes the result of performing the same experiment a large number of times. According to the law, the average of the results obtained from a large number of trials should be close to the expected value, and will tend to become closer as more trials are performed.” – Wikipedia

That pattern helps us predict random events, something as random as crimes in New York. Let us have a look at some facts. New York has a population of a little over 8 million. The number of times a particular crime was committed happened 542.5 times on average per year in the past 10 years ranging from 2002 to 2011.