….The two satellite companies, DISH Network and DIRECTV, trail the fiber-optic providers, but continue to beat cable in customer satisfaction. DISH Network moved ahead of DIRECTV for the first time since 2005 on the strength of an 11% ACSI surge, to a score of 71, matching its all-time high, while DIRECTV fell 4% to 68. In part, this seems to be due to pricing strategies: DIRECTV raised rates in February 2010, while DISH held them steady for most subscribers and reduced price for others, creating better value for money in the eyes of DISH’s customers. The company added more subscribers than any other pay television provider in 2009, and has also seen its stock price increase more than competition.
So is Dish Network Lying?
NO! They are just fudging the facts a bit thinking that this is good PR.
How are they doing it then?
The graphic is showing Dish to be so much better than chosen rivals, but that is all due to scaling! If you start the scale at 66 points out of a hundred and end it at 75 out of hundred, the above graphic will come out
However, if you were being completely honest then you would do away with this partial scaling and get the following graph
Dish doesn’t look so much better now, does it?
If Dish wanted to be compared to the entire competition in the home entertainment business, then they would show this graph.
Now, on pure numbers, they are the third worst in this category of non-cable TV programming providers!!
However, as an analyst, are these numbers really significantly different from each other. I would guess, no!
The long and short of it is, if you want programming, choose from anyone of the top three and you will be fine. No one is significantly better than the other. Dish is CERTAINLY NOT THE BEST of the bunch!!!
So your web site has X million page views! Wow! Great! So what?
We have to move away from the usual page views, visits and visitors grand troika of not quite so useful analysis. Here are the five most important things to look out for if you are a site interested in conversions and your records for daily data go beyond 5000 visits.
Are people coming back to visit your site?
Where are the customers coming from?
What are the top single visit pages on your site?
Which are the pages driving customers to convert most?
How much conversation are you having with customers?
Let us go through this list of pointed questions one more time and in some detail.
1. Are people coming back to visit your site?
Those who come back to your site are the most important people for you. They have made a conscious effort to come back and obviously like the experience. Make it easy for them to navigate the site and, if possible personalize their experience for them. As this metric rises, so will every other measure like page views per visitor.
2. What are the top single visit pages on your site?
If a visitor comes to your house, takes a step in the door and then leaves, either there is something wrong with them or your pad is just not inviting enough. We can dwell on other people’s problems later, why don’t you take a peek at the clutter that exists on your top landing pages. That’s probably why they are rushing to the exits.
It is important to reduce the attrition of hard-earned traffic coming to your site. There is no set Bounce Rate for any type of site but if you can push it below 50% , then you are doing something good. Be aware that you don’t want to focus entirely on this metric. Some people will not like you, ever! Deal with it and move on! It’s alright!
3. Where are the customers coming from?
For all of us bloggers Google is “Mai-Baap” but for bigger sites with lots of links, you need to segment your traffic by different referral sources. You want to know how many people came to your site from organic search; those visiting as paid visitors; and those who strolled in on their own steam.
Each traffic source will have a unique profile. Sometimes organic traffic will stay on your site for longer. If you focus on good paid campaigns, then you will see more productive traffic to the site through optimized keywords.
4. Which are the pages driving customers to convert most?
We talked about how Bounce rates are important. However, every landing page has a purpose. Most are made as basic information and transition pages to other areas
5. How much conversation are you having with customers?
Do you tweet? Do you have a Facebook account that you use to talk to interested users? Do you have a regular newsletter to send out to a mailing list of people?
All these are ways where you and your customers can connect! In this era of so much anonymity, it is comforting for some users to be able to connect with a human being rather than only a web server.
Oh, and one more thing, look at all the above measure over the course of time. NOTHING improves tomorrow, but the day after hold a lot of promise.
If you have any questions or comments or want some more help. Do write to me and I will personally respond.
We can rarely associate our planet with such vertiginous depths and heights. Play this Flash file and keep looking for the information on atmospheric pressure wonderfully equated with how long it would take to boil an egg.
You will also find the depth up to which Deepwater Horizon(BP) actually drilled.
It’s world cup time people!
This great info graphic is so well designed that it leaves one open-mouthed in admiration!
Click on a date and it will tell you the games and the results for the day. If you click on a team, you can find out their whole playing schedule.
If you were so inclined, you could look at the cities and the games to be played at each stadium. You can also click on the Groups and see the standings within each one. Really rich in information and easy to understand! Oh, I wish we could all design such things!
They say, a picture is worth a thousand words. We were tooling around at the JPL open house and mine eyes caught this picture!
So, big deal one might say! What’s so cool abut this?
On the contrary it’s depressing, as it shows the amount of increase in CO2 emissions over time.
The cool part is that while the trend line (Excel users know this) is rising, there is an obvious cyclicity in the dataset. What causes this, think you, dear smart analyst?
You may have seen this in your web analytics tools, in daily traffic trends perhaps..think a little..
Want a hint?
They are breathing…..
When it is spring the forests of the world come alive, and breathe in a lot more CO2 than the winter.
The cyclicity seen is simply a breathing chart of our earth.
Most of the readers are very smart and would say, hold on a minute! Most of the forests of the world are in the tropics! So this is something else instead!
Not true! Just look!
Temperate and boreal forests (hence the spring-winter cycle) dominate our earth. It is quite disturbing how the decimation of tropical and temperate forests is adding to this increase in cyclicity over time.
Depressing but interesting, eh? Science is so cool!
This blog exists to exchange ideas about all the new analytical tools, tips and tricks that we use.
This is also a means to air new ideas about how we design sites so that they can be quickly changed based on the customer feedback.
Look upon this amazing pictorial depiction of Napoleon’s march to Moscow and back. Very quickly, it gives you a sense of the fiasco that it turned out to be.
Minard's depiction of Napoleon's March to Russia and back.
This page is for those who are interested in the new technology around analytics and the vendors that were showcasing their wares. Let me take you to some vendor descriptions and the cool things that they do. Some common points among vendors.
All the smaller vendors were willing and able to integrate with each other’s products assuring me that I did not have to disengage with our current tool.
The conversion conference was mixed in with this conference so there was a lot of focus on converting and retaining customers.
A few of these vendors, realizing that tagging has become quite a pain to ensure, have devised methods to do away with it entirely.
This is a software that captures every session in its entirety going through the website as a video available to be re-played. If you identify pain points, the software can tell you how many sessions balked there or what they did after that point. A quick two minute demo is attached.
These folks can link to Omniture data and can also be of great help as Front End QA and Data QA resources. You don’t have to re-create a problem for developers on specific browsers, they can just watch the video of sessions that are experiencing problems.
They can provide aggregate data via Omniture/Google Analytics within their own tool.
This product prides itself as being a true tagless web analytics software.
How then do they capture data, one may ask?
The software sits in a position just before an HTTP ( other protocols can be handles too) call is sent back to a customer requesting a page. It can capture details from Omniture or custom tags if present, or it capture URL and scrape content that we program it to capture.
The interesting things with this type of technology is that they can capture any kind of browser so we can actually get real numbers on all mobile traffic. They also bill themselves as capable of real-time data processing.
The Optimost tool is built by people who worked on the Amazon.com recommendation engine so they focus on what they call “Meaning based Marketing“. What I really liked was their idea of navigation designed on the fly, based on user behavior on the site. They can build custom site maps based on particular segments of users, right out of the box( so they say).
This company had the most complex algorithms all of the concepts are based on data mining models applied to a website.
These folks are the market leader in online satisfaction surveys and are positioning themselves as leader in measuring customer satisfaction. I do think any website will benefit from some qualitative feedback by consumers but we cannot say how much of an overhead will adding their code entail. Here is a video from the CEO.
Interview with ForeSee Results CEO, Larry Freed about receiving MEDC (Michigan Economic Development Corporation) MEGA award and its impact on Michigan’s Economy.
OnResearch
These folks are totally focused on providing analytics around areas where tools don’t go yet. They have focus groups, brand management, survey tools and A/B Testing and Optimization. This business wants to merge the quantitative and qualitative elements of research and analysis. I was impressed by their people skills but not so much their products, which seem to be designed for offline retailers monitoring their online presence.
Now this was a vendor that I did not see coming! Just go to their site and you will see how they are trying to address issue of customers balking at key decision points on a website. I think this is a very interesting and innovative product. For some implementation, see this link.
Everyday that Google collects data, it pushes this FREE tool ever forward into the realm of some very large player. It is still a tool that small business owners should use when starting out but it is getting better all the time.Watch out Omniture et al.
