Summary of Avinash Kaushik’s Talk at ad:tech
I had the pleasure of seeing one of the best analytics minds in the field give a 1-hour talk at the ad:tech conference. Here are the most interesting take-home’s for me.
Top 3 Insights:
1. Data Presentation is Key
I was struck by the passion Avinash shows towards—not analytics or the data itself—but towards how data is presented to its consumers. He claims that if you spend ½ of that weekly “here’s the web data” meeting explaining what Bounce Rate, Unique Visitor, or Abandonment actually mean, you’re wasting your time. You’re not progressing forward, you’re actually regressing each week since in a major way you’re failing to communicate the real meaning of your numbers to others.
When you hand people crap, they’ll ask stupid questions in an attempt to seek clarity. When you give them well formatted data, they won’t ask you as many stupid questions. It’s a waste of your time, and moreover, the precious time you have on this earth, to be answering the same questions every week. You can’t progress forward if that keeps happening.
This is one of the reasons Avinash see’s Contextual Data is “King” and why the GA folks are putting a huge effort into this idea. Data without context is useless. A good example of that is the Visitors Overview report. It doesn’t just give you the total amount visitors from a certain time period, and spit out the related graph above. No, it shows you–get ready for this good metaphor credited to Avinash—the “boyfriend or girlfriend” metrics that go together with the Visitor number, like Absolute Unique Visitors, Pageviews, Average Pageviews, Time on Site, etc. Sometimes numbers can be useless if they’re not presented next to other relevant information.
For a startling example on how data presentation can change meaning, check out this amazing Hans Rosling TED talk.
2. Web Optimizer is Where it’s at
I was surprised to see Avinash show almost more enthusiasm and interest in the Google Website Optimizer than in GA itself. He thinks everyone should be using it. He even said something like (paraphrasing) “Spend a couple weeks getting familiar with GA, then start using optimizer!”
I asked him what sort of traffic numbers a site needs to be able to see a “signal” (stat. sig results) in a reasonable amount of time. It seems like with the amount of traffic my startup sees, we may be looking at tests that last as long as month before we get results. I’ll have to dig deeper on that but I definitely want to use this free tool soon.
3. His Number One Tip
Little old me forced him to answer the following question:
What’s your number one tip for people just starting out using Google Analytics?
His answer, after mulling that over for a couple of seconds, was: pay attention to Bounce Rate! He writes a great post about Bounce Rate here, that if you haven’t already, I demand you to leave this humble blog in your dust and read now. At its essence, Bounce Rate is a startlingly revealing metric bound to shock the novice user like a sudden bucket of cold water over the head.
Overall, I was also struck by how modest and humble Avinash is, as well as his overwhelming agnostic devoutness to the field of analytics. I also want to thank him for coming out to talk for free, and for answering everyone’s questions so honestly.
Tags: ad:tech, avinash, bounce rate, data presentation, google website optimizer, review, talk, ted talk
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