Data & Business Impact with Feras Alhlou

A few months ago I had the opportunity to chat with my friend and work partner Feras Alhlou, Co-Founder and Principal Consultant at E-Nor & Co-Author of Google Analytics Breakthrough. Feras and I have known each other for almost 10 years, and it is…

Google Analytics Stuido

A few months ago I had the opportunity to chat with my friend and work partner Feras Alhlou, Co-Founder and Principal Consultant at E-Nor & Co-Author of Google Analytics Breakthrough. Feras and I have known each other for almost 10 years, and it is always great to hear more about the work that he and his first-class team are doing.

Here are the questions we discussed, checkout the answers in the video below. I have also added some of my favorite highlights from the interview after the video.

  1. [01:05] What's the process that you use to make sense out of data?
  2. [02:41]During this process, what do you actually do when you start working with data?
  3. [04:07]When analyzing data, how can we make sure that we are looking at the context to understand what is happening around us?
  4. [07:24]How can Data Studio and better data visualizations help companies make more data-driven decisions?

We believe analytics is a business process. We start with an audit, both from the business side and the technical side - we want to engage the stakeholders to understand how to measure what matters most to the business. Once we have the data in place, we go to the reporting layer - how do we report on this data? Then, we start to be able to analyze the data and find some actionable insights. Last, we can move to testing and personalization - that's when you really can have an impact on the business. Read more about E-Nor's Optimization Framework

There's a whole lot of data these days, right? Life used to be simple for marketers: one device, a few channels - now there's data everywhere, mobile, social, web, and of course backend data. I think one of the first things we need to do is to understand the context around that data, focusing on the following:

  • The integrity of the data: is it clean, was it collected properly, is it raw or aggregated? Understand the data collection, how the data was put together.
  • Having a set of meta data, information about the data: if you're looking at Google Analytics metrics, knowing more about the user. For example, if you have a subscription based model: Is it a premium user? Is it a standard user? Having that additional data gives a whole lot of context, to the person who's consuming that data.

I would definitely advice to have a data road map. Start with what you own, web and mobile analytics data. Then, start augmenting reports with basic social data, maybe you can get a little bit into the qualitative aspect with that. And last but not least, a great product that was recently introduced by Google as the Surveys product. There are surveys we can do on our own properties to understand the voice of the customer. But also use it to do market research - it used to be expensive and cumbersome to do it, but now you can easily run a Google survey and do a lot targeting.

And here is Feras and me having fun in the Google Analytics studio!

Daniel Waisberg and Feras Alhlou

image 
Daniel Waisberg and Feras Alhlou

Revamping Your App Analytics Workflows

Every mobile app professional today uses mobile app analytics to track their app. Yet there are some key elements in their analytics workflows that are naturally flawed. The solution is out there, and you might have missed it.
The flaw, and a fairly bi…

Revamping Your App Analytics Workflows

Every mobile app professional today uses mobile app analytics to track their app. Yet there are some key elements in their analytics workflows that are naturally flawed. The solution is out there, and you might have missed it.

The flaw, and a fairly big one at that, is in the fact that app analytics pros sometimes focus solely on quantitative analytics to optimize their apps. Don't take this the wrong way – quantitative analytics is a very important part of app optimization. It can tell you if people are leaving your app too soon; if they're not completing the signup process, how often users launch your app, and things like that. However, it won't give you the answer as to why people are doing it, or why certain unwanted things are happening in your app. And that's the general flaw.

The answer lies in expanding your arsenal – adding qualitative analytics to your workflow. Together with quantitative analytics, these tools can help you form a complete picture of your app and its users, identify the main pain points and user experience friction, helping you optimize your app and deliver the ultimate product.

So today, you are going to learn how to totally revamp your analytics workflow using qualitative analytics, and why you should do it in the first place. You'll read about the fundamentals of qualitative analytics, and how it improves one's analysis accuracy, troubleshooting and overall workflows. And finally, you'll find two main ways to use qualitative analytics which can help you turn your app(s) into mobile powerhouse.

Exploring the qualitative

Qualitative analytics can be split into two main features: heatmaps and user session recordings. Let's dig a little deeper to see what they do.

Touch heatmaps

Touch heatmaps

This tool gathers all of the gestures a user does in every screen of the app, like tapping, double-tapping, or swiping. It then aggregates these interactions to create a visual touch heatmap. This allows app pros to quickly and easily see where the majority of users are actually interacting with the app, as well as which parts of an app are being left out.

Another important advantage of touch heatmaps is the ability to see where users are trying to interact, without the app responding. These are called unresponsive gestures, and they are extremely important because they're very annoying and could severely hurt the user experience.

Unresponsive gestures can be an indication of a bug or a flaw in the design of your user interface. Also, it could show you how your users think they should move through the app. As you might imagine, being bug-free and intuitive are two very important parts of a successful app, which is why tackling unresponsive gestures can make a huge difference in your app analytics workflow.

User session recordings

User session recordings

User session recordings are a fundamental feature of qualitative app analytics. They allow app pros to see just what their users are doing, as they are progressing through the app. That means every interaction, every sequence of events, on every screen in the app, gets recorded. This allows app pros an unbiased, unaltered view of the user experience.

With such a tool, you'll be able to better understand why users sometimes abandon an app too soon, why they decide to use it once and never again, or even why the app crashes on a particular platform or device.

Through video recordings, it becomes much easier to get to the very core of any problem your app might be experiencing. A single recording can shine light on a problem many users are struggling with. Obviously, the tool doesn't just mindlessly record everything – app pros can choose different screens, different demographics, mobile devices or their operating systems to record from. It is also important for this tool to work quietly in the background and not leave a strain on the app's performance.

Standard workflows- totally revamped

App Analytics Workflows

Qualitative analytics is too big of a field to be covered in a single article. Those looking to learn more might as well take a free course via this link. For all others, it's time to discuss two main workflows where they can be used - ‘Data-fueled Optimization' and ‘Proactive Troubleshooting'.

Data-fueled optimization

Both qualitative analytics and quantitative analytics tools are 'attacking' the same problem from different angles. While both are tasked with helping app pros optimize their mobile products, they have different, even opposite approaches to the solution. That makes them an insanely powerful combo, when used together.

Employing inherently opposite systems to tackle the same problem at the same time helps app pros form a complete picture of their app and how it behaves 'in the wild'. While quantitative analytics can be used as an alarm system, notifying app pros to a condition or a problem, qualitative analytics can be used to analyze the problem more thoroughly.

For example, using quantitative analytics tools you are alerted to the fact that a third of your visitors abandon their shopping cart just before making a purchase. You identify it as a problem, but cannot answer the question as to why this is happening.

With tools like user session recordings, you can streamline your optimization workflow and learn exactly where the problem lies. You could try to fix a problem without insights from qualitative data, but you'll essentially be "blindly taking a stab".

By watching a few user session recordings, you realize that the required registration process prior to making a purchase is simply too long. Users come halfway through it and just quit. By shortening the registration process and making checkout faster, you can lower the abandonment rate. Alert, investigate, resolve. This flow can easily become your "lather, rinse, repeat."

Proactive Troubleshooting

Can you truly be proactive in your troubleshooting? Especially when using analytics? Well, if you rely solely on quantitative analytics, probably not. After all, you need a certain amount of users to actually be using the app for some time before you can get any numbers out, like app abandonment rates or crash rates. Only then will you be able to do anything, and at that point – you're only reacting to a problem already present. With qualitative analytics, that's not the case.
By watching real user session recordings and keeping an eye out on touch heatmaps, you can spot issues with your app's usability or user experience long before a bigger issue arises, therefore proactively troubleshooting any problems.

For example, by watching user session recordings you notice that people are trying to log into Twitter through your app and post a tweet. However, as soon as they try to log in, the app crashes. Some users decide to quit the app altogether. Spotting such an issue helps you fix your app before it witnesses a bigger fallout in new user retention.

Not being proactive about looking for bugs and crashes doesn't mean they won't happen – it means they might go longer unattended. By the time you spot them through quantitative analytics, they will have already hurt your user experience and probably pushed a few users your competitor's way.

Wrap-up

They say new ideas are nothing more than old ideas with a fresh twist, and if that's true, than qualitative analytics are the ‘fresh twist' of mobile app analytics. Combining quantitative and qualitative analytics is a simple process that has incredible potency in terms of your workflows and app optimization. Plus, when you understand the reasons behind the numbers on your app, you are able to make crucial decisions with more confidence.

image 
Touch heatmaps
Online Behavior
App Analytics Workflows

Tracking Forms Effectively in Google Analytics

Tracking Forms Effectively in Google Analytics

Quick wins, low-hanging fruits – we’re all looking for the shortest, most effective route to improve sales. As optimizers, it’s what we do.

Think of the most important actions a customer can take on your website. Registering for a new account, making an inquiry about a product, filling out billing and shipping information – each of these vitally important actions are made through forms, which means: Optimizing those forms can have a big effect on your conversion funnel.

Of course, to optimize these forms, you have to understand how visitors are reacting to them, and what their behaviors indicate. And to do that, you have to measure their activity on your website or app.

Form analytics data is, perhaps, the most important information you can have to understand how your conversion funnel works. When you have access to this type of user data, you can start to see where you’re losing potential customers, determine why they drop off, and create concrete steps towards funnel improvements that will reap huge rewards. All of this begins in Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager with Tracking Forms.

This article will show you how to create events in Google Tag Manager that will allow you to track the behavior of visitors interaction with forms. Having this data will enable you to optimize the forms to fit it with visitor expectations and increase the form conversion rate.

Find your ideal form to fit the purpose

Purpose 1: Simple data collection

Simple data collection forms are just used to gather basic data on visitors, like name and email address – common examples are newsletter subscriptions and short surveys. Data gathered can be used to personalize web and marketing efforts, and contribute to customer research. These types of forms can be considered micro conversions and can give important indicators of visitors’ motivations (like how confident they are in your site, and whether your site looks credible enough to merit their time and attention).

Contact Form

Purpose 2: Lead generation

Lead generation forms are the bread and butter of B2B websites. To be really useful, lead generation forms must enable the sales department to quickly and effectively identify the strongest prospects.

Lead generation form

Lead generation forms ask for more information, and typically offer something of value in return, like a free ebook, study, or e-course. The amount of value offered is directly related to how many form fields you can expect people to fill out.

“According to FormStack’s research, only 6% of users will fill out an average of 19 (!) form fields on an order page, but people entering a contest will go nearly to the ends of the earth to submit, tolerating 10 form fields with a 28% submission rate.” – Crazyegg, Little Known Form Facts That Can Increase Conversion Rates

It’s a delicate balance to strike. Ideally you want only qualified leads to fill out the form, but if you add too many qualifiers, even motivated visitors may drop out or leave the form unfilled.

To avoid this outcome, you can use form analytics to determine the forms effectiveness and eliminate or change the questions that cause visitors to skip or drop out.

Purpose 3: Shipping & billing

Finally and most importantly, you need to track shipping and billing forms. For the most part, the content of these forms is mandatory. However, accurate form analytics can tell us if there are areas we need to improve.

Shipping & billing form

For example, if you realize that many of the visitors drop out at shipping, it may indicate that the shipping options offered are inadequate. Visitors may need more of them, consider them too expensive, or are unpleasantly surprised at the shipping estimate.

Large dropout rates in billing forms often indicate a lack of trust in the security of the site, making customers unwilling to leave their billing information. Think of it this way: hese people want to be your customers, hey wouldn’t reach your billing page if they didn’t, which means that if you can fix these issues, they are sure wins.

Often, form issues are low-hanging fruits that, if fixed, can result in instant (and large) conversion increases. And to solve them, we need to track our forms and see what our users are really up to. We can do this in Google Analytics.

The Nitty-Gritty How-to: Tracking HTML Forms in Google Analytics

Tracking HTML forms is relatively easy. All you need to do is to establish events for every form. You can go through the forms in your code and add the following line at the submission button code:

ga('send', 'event', [eventCategory], [eventAction], [eventLabel], [eventValue], [fieldsObject]);

This will result in reporting an event every time a user clicks the submission button.

However, what we really want to do is to track the completion of each individual field, not just when the entire form is submitted.

To achieve this, we need to insert a custom code into the form code. You can find an excellent solution for this on the LunaMetrics blog. It is easy to implement and you only need to change a few lines, such as the name of the form you use (the formId line).

When you implement this code on your website, it fires an event every time a visitor fills in a form field or skips it. These events enable you to track the completion and abandonment of your forms.

Tracking AJAX forms – it’s a li’l more complicated

AJAX is an acronym for Asynchronous Javascript and XML – it’s a way for web applications, like forms, to send and receive data from the server asynchronously, without having to reload the entire page. For example, you might use AJAX forms so that if a user fails to fill out all the necessary fields, the incomplete ones will be marked in red – without erasing all of the other information they did put in.

The problem with AJAX forms is that by dynamically creating content on the same page, it makes tracking harder; the page information is rewritten every time the event happens, deleting the data layer.

So how do we track AJAX events?

For this we’re going to need Google Tag Manager (GTM), and for illustration purposes, we’re also going to use Gravity Forms, a plugin for WordPress (and websites that use Wordpress hosting). Don’t have that exact setup? Don’t worry, this use case will likely also work with minor modifications for other types of AJAX forms and other types of forms that use single page.

First off, you need to ensure that your AJAX pages populate the data layer with variables that enable you to put triggers on your tags. The easiest way to do this is to open the configuration tab of the plugin in Wordpress’ admin panel. There you can set the plugin to send variables to data layers or even directly to Google Analytics.

Gravity forms setting

If you have only one form you care about, this solution may be the easiest way to accomplish basic tracking.

But you might want to put in your own values in those event definition fields so you have more control over reporting. If you want to create your own events in GTM, configure the plugin to populate the data layer with variables. This is the option you can find in the plugin settings in the form of a check box. The checkboxes are located immediately below the fields shown in the previous image. If checked it will create Tag Manager variables you can use as trigger conditions to set up event tracking.

Once you configure the plugin, it is time to open Google Tag Manager. In order to configure the tags correctly, you should go into preview mode. To do this, simply click the ‘Publish’ button in the interface and select ‘preview.’

Go to the page on your website that contains the form you want to track. Once you open it, you should see the bottom part of the page populating with events, such as:

  1. Message
  2. Page View
  3. DOM Ready
  4. Window Loaded

You might see other events too, depending on your individual configuration in Tag Manager.

To determine which variable should be the trigger to your tag, go into the first field of your form. If you have enabled Google Tag Manager tracking correctly in the Admin panel, you should see the following:

Form tracking datalayer

Google Tag Manager for the Wordpress plugin has created the #19 event highlighted in grey. It populates the data layer with following variables:

Form tracking datalayer

To start tracking individual events, such as form fields being filled, you just need to create a new tag, make it an event, and add triggers containing inputID or inputName values. That way, every time the visitor goes from one field to the other, an event hit will be reported to Google Analytics and you will be able to track each field directly.

Of course, you need to give the event definition values so that it is easy for you to understand and track what is happening.

Once Tracking is Enabled on your Forms, the Optimization Fun Begins

Your own users will show you where to focus first in your optimization journey, but while they’ll show you where something has gone wrong, they won’t tell you why – not without further research and A/B testing to verify your hypotheses.

A few form best practices may give you a jumpstart to reaching some of those quick wins.

  1. Use a clean, clear form design that visually stands out, and is consistent with your brand.
  2. Keep it simple – the simpler the form, the better your odds of completion.
  3. Avoid two-column forms – they just don’t get filled out at the rates single-columns do.
  4. Asking for user age reduces conversion rates by 3%, phone numbers reduces it by 5% – avoid too-personal questions.
  5. Don’t label your “submit” button “Submit.” Instead, label it with what the user will get in return for giving you their information, like “Send me my ebook!”

The most common issues that prevent visitors from completing forms are the format requirements themselves (too many or too personal), unclear instructions for how to fill out the form, and unclear expectations for what they will get if they do.

But, by and far, the issue that kills conversions fastest is this: Credibility. Users won’t give you any information if they don’t trust you. This lack of trust must be addressed much further up the conversion funnel, long before the visitor encounters the form. Trust indicators like posting user reviews on product pages and displaying security badges can help.

Of course, there are alternative ways to track data and analyze forms – there are dedicated pieces of software that do an excellent job. These are mostly paid software-as-a-service solutions, but you can’t beat the ROI of tracking through the Google Analytics interface.

Even though it initially requires some effort, Google provides these insights free of charge. Not to mention that implementing form tracking this way has the advantage of everything being in one place.

image 
Contact Form
Lead generation form
Shipping & billing form
Gravity forms setting
Form tracking datalayer
Form tracking datalayer

Tracking Forms Effectively in Google Analytics

Quick wins, low-hanging fruits - we're all looking for the shortest, most effective route to improve sales. As optimizers, it's what we do.

Think of the most important actions a customer can take on your website. Registering for a new account, making an inquiry about a product, filling out billing and shipping information - each of these vitally important actions are made through forms, which means: Optimizing those forms can have a big effect on your conversion funnel.

Of course, to optimize these forms, you have to understand how visitors are reacting to them, and what their behaviors indicate. And to do that, you have to measure their activity on your website or app.

Form analytics data is, perhaps, the most important information you can have to understand how your conversion funnel works. When you have access to this type of user data, you can start to see where you're losing potential customers, determine why they drop off, and create concrete steps towards funnel improvements that will reap huge rewards. All of this begins in Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager with Tracking Forms.

This article will show you how to create events in Google Tag Manager that will allow you to track the behavior of visitors interaction with forms. Having this data will enable you to optimize the forms to fit it with visitor expectations and increase the form conversion rate.

Find your ideal form to fit the purpose

Purpose 1: Simple data collection

Simple data collection forms are just used to gather basic data on visitors, like name and email address - common examples are newsletter subscriptions and short surveys. Data gathered can be used to personalize web and marketing efforts, and contribute to customer research. These types of forms can be considered micro conversions and can give important indicators of visitors' motivations (like how confident they are in your site, and whether your site looks credible enough to merit their time and attention).

Contact Form

Purpose 2: Lead generation

Lead generation forms are the bread and butter of B2B websites. To be really useful, lead generation forms must enable the sales department to quickly and effectively identify the strongest prospects.

Lead generation form

Lead generation forms ask for more information, and typically offer something of value in return, like a free ebook, study, or e-course. The amount of value offered is directly related to how many form fields you can expect people to fill out.

"According to FormStack's research, only 6% of users will fill out an average of 19 (!) form fields on an order page, but people entering a contest will go nearly to the ends of the earth to submit, tolerating 10 form fields with a 28% submission rate." - Crazyegg, Little Known Form Facts That Can Increase Conversion Rates

It's a delicate balance to strike. Ideally you want only qualified leads to fill out the form, but if you add too many qualifiers, even motivated visitors may drop out or leave the form unfilled.

To avoid this outcome, you can use form analytics to determine the forms effectiveness and eliminate or change the questions that cause visitors to skip or drop out.

Purpose 3: Shipping & billing

Finally and most importantly, you need to track shipping and billing forms. For the most part, the content of these forms is mandatory. However, accurate form analytics can tell us if there are areas we need to improve.

Shipping & billing form

For example, if you realize that many of the visitors drop out at shipping, it may indicate that the shipping options offered are inadequate. Visitors may need more of them, consider them too expensive, or are unpleasantly surprised at the shipping estimate.

Large dropout rates in billing forms often indicate a lack of trust in the security of the site, making customers unwilling to leave their billing information. Think of it this way: hese people want to be your customers, hey wouldn't reach your billing page if they didn't, which means that if you can fix these issues, they are sure wins.

Often, form issues are low-hanging fruits that, if fixed, can result in instant (and large) conversion increases. And to solve them, we need to track our forms and see what our users are really up to. We can do this in Google Analytics.

The Nitty-Gritty How-to: Tracking HTML Forms in Google Analytics

Tracking HTML forms is relatively easy. All you need to do is to establish events for every form. You can go through the forms in your code and add the following line at the submission button code:

ga('send', 'event', [eventCategory], [eventAction], [eventLabel], [eventValue], [fieldsObject]);

This will result in reporting an event every time a user clicks the submission button.

However, what we really want to do is to track the completion of each individual field, not just when the entire form is submitted.

To achieve this, we need to insert a custom code into the form code. You can find an excellent solution for this on the LunaMetrics blog. It is easy to implement and you only need to change a few lines, such as the name of the form you use (the formId line).

When you implement this code on your website, it fires an event every time a visitor fills in a form field or skips it. These events enable you to track the completion and abandonment of your forms.

Tracking AJAX forms - it's a li'l more complicated

AJAX is an acronym for Asynchronous Javascript and XML - it's a way for web applications, like forms, to send and receive data from the server asynchronously, without having to reload the entire page. For example, you might use AJAX forms so that if a user fails to fill out all the necessary fields, the incomplete ones will be marked in red - without erasing all of the other information they did put in.

The problem with AJAX forms is that by dynamically creating content on the same page, it makes tracking harder; the page information is rewritten every time the event happens, deleting the data layer.

So how do we track AJAX events?

For this we're going to need Google Tag Manager (GTM), and for illustration purposes, we're also going to use Gravity Forms, a plugin for WordPress (and websites that use Wordpress hosting). Don't have that exact setup? Don't worry, this use case will likely also work with minor modifications for other types of AJAX forms and other types of forms that use single page.

First off, you need to ensure that your AJAX pages populate the data layer with variables that enable you to put triggers on your tags. The easiest way to do this is to open the configuration tab of the plugin in Wordpress' admin panel. There you can set the plugin to send variables to data layers or even directly to Google Analytics.

Gravity forms setting

If you have only one form you care about, this solution may be the easiest way to accomplish basic tracking.

But you might want to put in your own values in those event definition fields so you have more control over reporting. If you want to create your own events in GTM, configure the plugin to populate the data layer with variables. This is the option you can find in the plugin settings in the form of a check box. The checkboxes are located immediately below the fields shown in the previous image. If checked it will create Tag Manager variables you can use as trigger conditions to set up event tracking.

Once you configure the plugin, it is time to open Google Tag Manager. In order to configure the tags correctly, you should go into preview mode. To do this, simply click the ‘Publish' button in the interface and select ‘preview.'

Go to the page on your website that contains the form you want to track. Once you open it, you should see the bottom part of the page populating with events, such as:

  1. Message
  2. Page View
  3. DOM Ready
  4. Window Loaded

You might see other events too, depending on your individual configuration in Tag Manager.

To determine which variable should be the trigger to your tag, go into the first field of your form. If you have enabled Google Tag Manager tracking correctly in the Admin panel, you should see the following:

Form tracking datalayer

Google Tag Manager for the Wordpress plugin has created the #19 event highlighted in grey. It populates the data layer with following variables:

Form tracking datalayer

To start tracking individual events, such as form fields being filled, you just need to create a new tag, make it an event, and add triggers containing inputID or inputName values. That way, every time the visitor goes from one field to the other, an event hit will be reported to Google Analytics and you will be able to track each field directly.

Of course, you need to give the event definition values so that it is easy for you to understand and track what is happening.

Once Tracking is Enabled on your Forms, the Optimization Fun Begins

Your own users will show you where to focus first in your optimization journey, but while they'll show you where something has gone wrong, they won't tell you why - not without further research and A/B testing to verify your hypotheses.

A few form best practices may give you a jumpstart to reaching some of those quick wins.

  1. Use a clean, clear form design that visually stands out, and is consistent with your brand.
  2. Keep it simple - the simpler the form, the better your odds of completion.
  3. Avoid two-column forms - they just don't get filled out at the rates single-columns do.
  4. Asking for user age reduces conversion rates by 3%, phone numbers reduces it by 5% - avoid too-personal questions.
  5. Don't label your "submit" button "Submit." Instead, label it with what the user will get in return for giving you their information, like "Send me my ebook!"

The most common issues that prevent visitors from completing forms are the format requirements themselves (too many or too personal), unclear instructions for how to fill out the form, and unclear expectations for what they will get if they do.

But, by and far, the issue that kills conversions fastest is this: Credibility. Users won't give you any information if they don't trust you. This lack of trust must be addressed much further up the conversion funnel, long before the visitor encounters the form. Trust indicators like posting user reviews on product pages and displaying security badges can help.

Of course, there are alternative ways to track data and analyze forms - there are dedicated pieces of software that do an excellent job. These are mostly paid software-as-a-service solutions, but you can't beat the ROI of tracking through the Google Analytics interface.

Even though it initially requires some effort, Google provides these insights free of charge. Not to mention that implementing form tracking this way has the advantage of everything being in one place.

image 
Contact Form
Lead generation form
Shipping & billing form
Gravity forms setting
Form tracking datalayer
Form tracking datalayer