Clancy Childs, Senior Sale Engineer at Google, sees the increasing use of Google Analytics (GA) for business insights as a sign of maturity in the online market. When eMarketing first became an option for business, there was naturally a focus on setting up Web properties. When the importance of SEO and positioning in search engine results was realised, marketing budgets were focused largely on keyword research. Now, Clancy feels that the next step is to increase “the effectiveness of campaigns”. Tools are developed to focus on refining and optimising any efforts a business might make to reach people online. It’s not just about doing it – it’s about doing it all better.
Clancy Childs, Senior Sales Engineer, Google.
Google Analytics is essentially a tool to help you look at what you are doing online and how you can do it better. Clancy’s team gets businesses on the road to using the tool in a more meaningful way. "We see ourselves as a catalyst” and then refer businesses to the global third party network of Google Analytics Authorised Consultants (GAAC) - consultants that are increasingly accredited, with the highest growth rate being in areas like Europe, The Middle East and Africa.
He listed Cottages 4 You as a case study example. Essentially, what Clancy’s team could do was to focus in on the points where customers weren’t converting for the business. “We looked at the sales funnel and discovered a page where users had already agreed to pay for a booking, but that the next step was muddled and unclear.” Improving the copy on that page to be clearer led to a 26% increase in conversion rate.
Clancy suggests that any business start with identifying its main goals, list the questions they want answers to, much like you would with a bricks and mortar store. “Why are customers not coming in on certain days of the week? Why do products on one side of a store sell better than those on another side of the store?” He also suggests that you encourage whoever you have working on Analytics to spend some time looking at broken usability on your site.
The problems Clancy and his team most often see involve the under-utilisation of the Google Analytics platform. “I call it the 90/10 rule” - 10% of the effort is implementing the platform and 90% is investing in using it. The more common ways in which the platform is under-utilised are when people only use the dashboard for reporting – focusing on one aspect that the tool can be used for, like traffic sources and keywords. What Clancy suggests is that businesses look at executive dashboards, website usability and conversion optimisation as well. “Companies should have a holistic view” rather than focusing on just one aspect of Google Analytics, to better understand how all of their tactics are working together.
This move towards valuing all insights and how they can be integrated is very much in line with where Clancy sees marketing and measurement analysis going. “The next step is focusing on online and Social Media, and really pulling together a conversion attribution model that means something to your business”. If companies begin to pull all the data they can - whether offline or not - into an analysis, a conversion attribution model can be built for each business which should really result from a universal view.
While Clancy didn’t share that Analytics would necessarily develop into a tool that could import offline data, he did point out that Google has always placed a focus on making products agile. That’s why the Analytics API is available. If other tools were to work with existing online ones then Google would encourage that.
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