Need Measure Summit 2022 notes? We’re happy to share

Maja Petek14.10.202210 minMarketing, Optilife

At Optiweb, attending conferences and trainings is standard practice. But rarely does an event come along that the entire marketing team wants to take part in. Measure Summit 2022 was one such event and all marketing departments – SEO, advertising and copy – attended the talks. For data geeks such as ourselves, this was an ideal opportunity to gather some new ideas on how we could upgrade our processes and services.

Usually, when we attend such conferences, we share our knowledge during our Knowledge Panel meets, but this time, we decided to also share the most important insights with our readers. Read on to find out more about the latest trends in analysing content, optimising customer journey and making the most out of your GA4 account.

Measure Summit 2022

If you’re not familiar with it, Measure Summit is an annual 3-day virtual conference focusing on growing knowledge, skills, and business with data-driven marketing. The talks are held by experts in the field of data science and analytics, who use their skills to get insights for successful marketing campaigns. Here are the notes from the talks we found most interesting, split according to the area of expertise.

Use Data to prepare targeted content

Writing good content is no easy task, especially when copywriters need to think about optimisation and UX needs. The following talk presents a great option on how to analyse website, newsletter or social media content to get better insights into the wishes and needs of the readers.

Peep Laja: How To Measure What Matters The Most: The Words

Peep Laja is a conversion optimisation specialist and entrepreneur who gathered his experience as a software developer, marketing manager and sales expert. In his talk, he focused on how to analyse content to better understand the wishes and expectations of target customers and adapt the copy so it leads to better conversions. To establish themselves as an authority on the market, companies therefore build their brand by creating a story. They do so with either:

Strategic content: story they tell to the world and convinces users that the company matters (on LinkedIn, podcasts …) or
Tactical messaging: high stakes content on the website, in ads or on social media that persuades users to visit the site and take action.

But to know if the story is attracting the target customers and convincing them to buy, marketers need to conduct a qualitative research and survey at least 15 of their potential customers (not existing clients!). To gather the information, they can use specialised tools like Wynter or Facebook and LinkedIn groups. In the survey, they need to ask the potential customers likert-scale questions on 5 components of effective messaging.

Those 5 components are:

Clarity: do customers understand everything that is written or are some aspects unclear?
Relevance: does the message align with their current priorities and challenges?
Value: do the customers want the product/services and does it offer them value?
Differentiation: why is this product/service better than that of the competition?
Brand: Is the company coming across the way it wants to?

What their research on 40K landing pages discovered? Copy is twice as influential as design in why visitors convert!

Data to optimise the customer journey

In SEO, it is sometimes challenging to find the right areas to optimise or to see new opportunities to increase conversions. In the following two talks, experts Naomi Smulders and Julie Brade gave us ideas on how we can upgrade our customer journey research.

Naomi Smulders: Mining the Customer Journey of your Web Users

Naomi Smulders, a data expert with a background in psychology and neuroscience, presented an interesting approach that combines data analysis and psychology to optimise the customer journey and increase conversions.

The goal of customer behaviour analysts is to create the perfect customer journey, but in reality, the individual customer journey is usually much less structured, more erratic and not organised, usually it is also interrupted and picked up after several hours or days. To see room for improvement and areas where users get “stuck”, you need to delve deeper into the journey of thousands of different customers.

If you look just at the funnel data in GA, the data will be too vague, as it only presents averages, not the journey of specific customers. Therefore, you need to find a way to analyse the data and help individual customers, meaning you need a new analysis process. Enter data mining. This process finds the blindspots in the perfect customer journey and lets you see new optimisation opportunities.

The first step is to query a large amount of raw data from the data warehouse.
Then you need to organise the data by creating unique customer IDs, label them with timestamps and create an event log of all their actions on the website.
In the third and most important step, you apply the data mining technique, in which you identify and segment a specific customer group based on their behaviour (e.g. customers of high-end products spend more time on the website, look at more pages, take longer to order etc.). This helps you narrow down the data and create a map of customer journeys for a particular customer type. From this diagram, you can then see what steps are missing in your perfect customer journey or where users get stuck or drop off.
The last and most important step is to validate your insights with A/B testing and look at the effect on conversions.

To effectively clean up the data and show customer paths, you can use specialised tools such as Disco and other process mining tools. To extract the data from Big Query, you can use simple SQL or other tools for data warehousing.

Julie Brade: Measuring Your User Journey to Know Exactly Where to Optimise

As a spreadsheet enthusiast and GTM and GA expert, Julie Brade presented a new take on how to analyse the customer journey on the page level.

When analysing the customer journey, you will sometimes see a huge user drop-off between one page and the next. Without an in-depth analysis of the pages and the data, the optimisation steps will be based on your assumptions, not actual user expectations. So, what’s the solution? Improve the analysis!

You need to start by identifying the pages in the customer journey. For e-commerce sites, those are usually the product page, cart, checkout page and purchase page.

The next step is then to look at the scroll depth of each page and identify the intent behind user behaviour. Basically, you need to create a funnel for each page in the purchase funnel. This is followed by a measurement system that tracks where on the specific pages users fall off and looks at reasons behind why they don’t proceed to the next page.

For this, Julie recommends the 5 I system:

Impression = page view
Introduced = minimum of 5 seconds on the page
Interested = at least 45 seconds on page with a minimum scroll depth of 50%
Investigated = read the offer copy for at least 5 secondsInitiated = click on the CTA button

To start the analysis, you need to define the first and last step. The first is usually the page view. The last is proceeding to the next page (click on the CTA button).

In the next step, it is necessary to see whether users remain on the page (the benchmark for this can be 5 or 10 seconds). This is followed by investigating whether users then read the content, as this indicates their interest.

To see where users get stuck and why they don’t click on the CTA button, you need to determine how deep on the page the CTA button is located and find reasons why users don’t see it or why they look at it, but don’t click on it.

This page analysis clearly shows where on the page the drop-off occurs and where the message, structure or design needs to be optimised to convince users to proceed to the next stage. With this approach, you know exactly where and what to optimise and thus take the guesswork out of the optimisation process.

Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics tips and tricks

Last, but certainly not least, are the talks concerning the use of GTM and GA4. As most companies are planning a switch to GA4 in the coming months, it is essential to correctly configure the analytics account and to quickly get familiar with the new event tracking model. We are already using some of the tricks when analysing our client data or setting up their accounts.

Simo Ahava: 10 Years Of Google Tag Manager – Looking Back And Forward

As a Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager expert, Simo Ahava is the go-to person when marketers need tips on how to set up tracking in their Google Analytics account. In his talk, he shared some important advice on what to do and not to do in the coming months and years.

Do not implement Data Studio via GA4 API but via Big Querry.
Do the implementation of events via GTM, not the GA4 implementation options.
Use the potential of GTM Server Side implementation.
GA4 is/will be the standard for data collection in SSGTM.
Do expect new Google Cloud APIs.
Expect Google to move even more into cookieless data collection.

Charles Farina: Google Analytics 4 Tips & Tricks

Who better to talk about using GA4 than Charles Farina, a Google Marketing Platform expert. His talk was full of tricks that can help you gain even more insights from Google Analytics 4. Here are some of the ones we found most useful.

If using Google Signals inside GA4, the recommended approach is to use the device-based reporting identity, since this ensures visibility of important data.
In standard reports, GA4 uses statistical estimates instead of the exact numbers. Specific metrics can differ slightly between standard reports and explorations. To get the exact data, Charles recommends using Big Query.
The default retention setting in GA4 is 2 months, which means that the data used in explorations and in standard reports is available only for two months. It is advisable to change the period to 14 months in the settings.
Be aware that it is common in GA4 that the same metric or dimension can only be found in explorations or in standard reports, not necessarily in both.

The notes are done. Now to the next step

With this extremely insightful conference finished, it is now time for some hard work. We are already busy implementing what we’ve learned to help our clients even better. If you would also like our support in any area of digital marketing, don’t hesitate to contact us and we’ll be happy to discuss your needs over a cup of coffee or virtually. ;)

Maja Petek

SEO and Content Marketing Strategist

I have several skills but only one mission: to help Optiweb’s clients reach the top of search results.