What Women Want: Web Analytics

What is it that women want!?! Let's face it, one of the greatest mysteries in this life is figuring out what women want. Men sure don’t know and I would dare say that many women don’t either. Some might say that marketers have figured it out, these guys know what sale and what do not sale. But I think marketers have missed the mark. In this post I am going to go out on a limb and suggest that web analytics may actually be a tool to help all business persons male and female, understand what women want in online ecommerce or emergent mobile markets

Before you exit this page, press delete, thumbs down, or label me as some “crazy” feminist, allow me to explain myself. Every day, men and women and boys and girls are exposed to the ideas that are valued by those who control the purse. Unfortunately, it’s not the women who control the purse in the media and business world. Allow me to illustrate this example by sharing one of Colin Stokes’ observations he shared in a Ted video. He points out that seldom will you ever watch a movie where there are two women characters who actually have meaningful roles or even when two women converse about things other than their mutual crush. He adds that in "Argo," the critically acclaimed blockbuster, the major line said by a woman in the movie is "Are you coming to bed Honey?" Need I say more? The dearth of missing dialogue between women to women and men to women is a testament that men and some women don’t know what is important to women or that what is important to women is undervalued. Now where does web analytics fit in all this?

Web analytics, if used properly, can be a powerful tool. It enables website designers, marketers, and managers to have immediate feedback as to what “works” and what does not on a website. Web designers, marketers, and managers can implement A/B and multivariate testing to see what web pages have lower bounce rates, who seem to encourage conversion, and are the most popular among users. Web analytics can even have customer specific information that can be aggregated to show trends among clusters of users. Web analytics presents a great opportunity for designers, marketers, and managers to capitalize on the ability to experiment on their websites to actually understand better what it is that women want in a website. I will now elaborate on this idea by focusing on mobile fitness apps.

In my emergent technologies class the other night we were discussing what makes a fitness app successful. Words and phrases like “tough competition” “intensity” “muscle mass accumulation” echoed throughout the discussion (I think I even heard a few grunts of approval). But I couldn’t help but wonder if these are programmatic attributes that women want in a fitness app. The men in the class also suggested monitoring heart rate and calories burned. These are important to women of course too. But not a single classmate suggested a successful app might allow the user to track other weight-loss indicators such as the following:

- Emotional stability
- Frequency of emotional eating
- Frequency and potency of chocolate cravings caused by unbalanced hormones
- Level of pain caused by menstrual cramps

For women, these issues are inseparable from weight loss. Of course my classmates did not come up with these suggestions. They are men! It is not likely that they would come up with these suggestions...ever...Because men and women experience the world differently. Now, don’t get me wrong. Women are VERY competitive. We just compete in different ways and we are different from men physiologically. These differences need to be taken into account when designing websites.

If competition between participants is magic formula for male fitness app users, what is the female counterpart magic formula? Now is an ideal time to launch emerging market online and mobile apps that experiment and seek for the “magic” formulas that empower women.

We do need to be cautious, however, in our attempt to understand what women want by analyzing web analytics. The website needs to be designed strategically or we may take home the wrong message and find ourselves just as clueless as we were before. Avinash Kaushik explains in his book Web Analytics 2.0 that when taken out of context, the data pulled from your website can be meaningless or completely understood (2010). He also suggests adding context into your analysis by asking your viewers questions. I would dare say that he is asking us to couple quantitative analysis with qualitative research. For example, a manager might choose to A/B test two web pages that look like they came out of Cosmo and airbrushed photos of sixteen-year old girls that look like sex goddesses (Russel 2012). The manager will be able to see which page was more effective at getting conversion rates. However, the manager will be no closer at understanding what women really want then they were before. However, if a manager were to decide to implement a web pages that had more uplifting and empowering messages, followed up by a three to five question survey asking them about their experience, then the manager might have a better understanding.

Now is the time. More women have a college education then men in the United States. More women then men have taken management roles. The wage gap between men and women is decreasing. More men are taking on the role of care-givers. The world as “we” know it is changing (Rosin 2010). Why not design our websites and the tools that we use to evaluate them more strategically. Why design our websites and the KBRs and KPIs we use to judge the websites around what women really want?




Citations:

Kaushik, Avinash (2009). Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability and Science of Customer Centricity (p. 148). John Wiley and Sons. Kindle Edition.

Rosen, Hannah (2010). The End of Men: And the Rise of Women. Penguin Press. NYNY.

Russel, Cameron (2012). Looks Arent’ Everything, Believe Me, I am a Model. http://www.ted.com/talks/cameron_russell_looks_aren_t_everything_believe_me_i_m_a_model.html

Smith, Dorothy (1987) The Everyday World As Problematic: A Feminist Sociology. Northeastern University Press

Stokes, Colin (2012) How movies teach manhood. Ted: Ideas Worth Spreading.http://www.ted.com/talks/colin_stokes_how_movies_teach_manhood.html. .

5 Key Mobile App Metrics

My company, 1-800 CONTACTS, recently released its first mobile app. So I’ve been curious as to what KPIs are the most important to track with mobile apps and why. If you’re an iPhone user and wear contact lenses, feel free to download the app here. It’s free and totally awesome.

Mobile apps are becoming more and more popular. It’s very important to understand not only the need to collect accurate metrics but which ones you should be caring the most about. Until now, many methods used to measure mobile applications are taken from web analytics similar to that of a website. But mobile apps are not websites. I know most people understand this basic concept. But if we understand that it’s a different channel, we need to understand which KPIs are the most suitable for mobile apps as well.

So how do we go about pulling data on these ever-so-important metrics? Well, first I believe it’s important to grasp this concept: the most important insight is that which will make your app more effective. You can track KPIs like number of downloads, types of devices and operating systems, frequency of use, and any other traditional metric that’s been dragged from the wonderful world of web analytics. Yes, these are important to know, but they are all output metrics. They give you insight into the design, interaction, and service levels. What they do not tell you is what to change in order to achieve business goals.

So, to make your app more effective we need inputs! Here are 5 key input metrics I believe to be the most important:

1. Funnel analysis: This tells us why users fail to complete our desired user-actions, such as in-app purchases, ad clicks, or even a transaction. 
2. Social sharing: This tells us what aspects of our app are capturing not only the minds of our users, but their hearts as well.
3.  Demographics and user behavior: Correlating these two things will tell us why our user base does what it does. 
4. Time and location: These, together, give us insight into the contexts in which our app is used. 
5. Screen hierarchy: App interfaces are very hierarchical in nature and users have to navigate through it all. There’s simply not enough screen space to display everything.

So there you have it. I’m not going into further detail on these metrics as this post is more to educate you and open your mind to how mobile apps should be tracked. If you have any questions leave a comment and I can elaborate. Thanks for reading!

If this sparked some interest and you want to learn more, click on the below link to listen to an excellent presentation by Greg Hrebek on how to drive your app to success.

 
Mobile App Video

Personal Analytics - Metrics closer to home.

We regularly see articles and blogs discussing steps to improve all aspects of your life; each one touting the true secret to being more productive, using your time better, finding peace and balance, becoming a better leader, and more. All of those posts are really quite appealing because they describe things that we all want to find. Many of them have some excellent suggestions about how to do this, usually in the form of “Be more productive with these 3 simple steps.” Most of those steps find their way into New Year’s resolutions or goals, all with good intentions. This will be the year! But how do you know you have successfully implemented those resolutions and goals? To quote Jon Soldan, “what does success look like?”

Mobile Analytics – “We aren’t in Kansas anymore Toto”

Mobile devices (specifically smart phones and tablets) in the past few years have radically changed, and continue to change, many aspects of the computer industry and business world today. New markets have appeared from selling the devices themselves to virtual markets and app stores that have created a new content delivery system for the devices. Additionally businesses and start-ups have grown based entirely around the “new” mobile industry. Analytics, which once seemed solely focused on measuring page hits, is now on the front lines of this new market. With the growth in the mobile industry, analytics are not simply a tool that only a few of the players use; they have become a critical aspect of success in the fast paced arena of mobile device and app development.