Hello there, I'm George Hall and welcome back to one of our analytics anonymous sessions
where we take a bite-sized look at data, insight, analytics and more. I'm joined today by Ed
Jackson, one of Good Growth's analytical managers. Ed, how are you?
Good to be back George, I completely forgot about my new job title change until you just
said it there.
Always a nice surprise to be reminded, isn't it? Look Ed, great to have you back. We're
here today to talk about what I think is quite an interesting topic really, this idea of
where does data, where does insight come from when customers stop engaging with businesses
online, be it websites, online stores, whatever it might be. Would you mind giving an introduction
as to one, why that might happen and two, why would it be a concern for businesses?
It's definitely a difficult challenge to get ahead around and understand that there are
obviously macro and micro factors at play here. We could be talking about a whole industry
downturn which is quite common to see, but as a brand you can always do things to protect
yourself from that and be the brand that survives it. You look at the holiday industry, how
we saw Thomas Kirk first choice all go under and two, we essentially absorb them all. But
when customers aren't engaging with your brand in particular, what can you do? Why are they
not engaging with your brand? Is it the proposition? Is it how easy it is to use your site? Really
understanding what the problem is. I think the biggest problem for businesses in understanding
this is it's quite easy when you're in the weeds of it and when you're in your data every
day to know, I've had a bad month and the next month is slightly better. But how real
is that? If you've had a bad October and November is slightly better, is November actually slightly
better or year on year are you still further down? Is the delta a greater difference? So
you might see it as a positive month, but in October say you were down 10% year on year
and in November you're down 20% year on year, but your numbers are still better than October.
You've not recovered actually and you're still on that downward trend. And I think that's
the thing we see in businesses is very difficult for them to understand and for them to really
get a grasp of until quite often it's too late.
Now you mentioned getting a grasp there. If businesses are concerned about a lack of engagement,
are there key data points that they should be looking at that will sort of be the telltale
signs that there's a disengagement?
Yeah. So like I discussed then, zooming out, I think is something that's very, very useful
in these cases rather than looking at a week on week, month on month, look at year on year,
look at the past 24, 36 months and see how you're performing. Looking at not only conversion
rate to transaction of the site, but add to cart rate, views of PDPs, PLPs, the amount
of time users are spending on your site as well. If you're spending a lot of money acquiring
customers from social media, typically they're on the site for a lot less time. So as you
end up in this sort of death spiral situation where engagement is lower, so you start investing
more in social media marketing, you start investing more in TikTok, Instagram, wherever
you're going, you get those clicks, you get those sessions up, but actually your page
views per session, your session duration is just going down and down and down because
you're buying customers, you're buying eyes from a less valuable resource.
I guess when those traditional metrics in your classic clicks, those sort of engagements,
when they start dipping, it makes sense to look elsewhere just to be sure and to get
a better understanding.
Yeah, absolutely. I think that's when it becomes, if you do start to see yourself in that sort
of situation, look at what you're presenting to your customers in your marketing information.
There are a few companies we work with where what they thought was their USP and their
key selling point actually wasn't resonating with customers. And it's something entirely
different that really is resonating. And that's where we can put our insight.
And then would you say that there's early warning signs for businesses, sort of moments
when the alarm bells start ringing or it might be a bit of a silence alarm. What should businesses
be looking out for that would trigger kind of an awareness or a pre-warning of disengagement
from consumers?
It's a very difficult one. It's certainly a case by case basis. I would say looking
at your acquisition channels and how that shifts over time. If you see a shift away
from direct customers and more into your paid search, branded search, things like that,
if there is a slow shift in those acquisition channels. But then also, like I said, if you're
seeing a consistent decrease in session duration and the number of pages per session, that
would also be getting alarm bells ringing for me.
Sure. And then obviously, good growth, as you're well aware, we pride ourselves on the
data, the insight and the tech as sort of a triumvirate of approaches. I'm interested
in that tech part and how the tech can be used, I guess, one, to preempt this happening
and two, to rectify it.
It's quite an interesting one that we're actually currently working on building out schema for
and understanding it. Obviously, Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics are very, very good at understanding
user purchase journeys, understanding that user who's got to a transaction, what have
they gone through, how have they got there. But that ends up in a situation where we could
have a bit of survivorship bias. We're only seeing the users that are successful. So we
fail to see users that fail. And you can do things around segmentation to try and mitigate
the risk of that. But understanding how user behavior is fundamentally different in users
who are succeeding versus users that are failing is something that's very difficult to do in
traditional analytics platforms.
And then to start wrapping things up, there obviously might be people listening, thinking,
I'm experiencing this right now, or I'm starting to see it, or maybe it's not happened yet,
but I want to be aware of this and I want to take those steps. What actionable step
could a business take to either prevent customers from disengaging or to sort of stop the issue
in its tracks?
I think a really interesting one is, so to say you don't know whether it's a whole industry
downturn or whether it's you specifically that are struggling. You obviously can't go
and look at your competitors' internal data. You can't see how they're transacting. Depending
on the size of your business, you might be able to go look at earnings calls and things
like that on Stock Exchange to see how they're performing there. But a really nice, simple
indicator is something like Google Trends. So let's say, for example, we're working with
Microsoft and they're saying, well, Xbox sales are down, but we think it's an industry-wide
thing. It's really easy to see how the industry-wide engagement is. Go on Google Trends, put in
Xbox, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch. If you see there is the trend that all of those engagement
with them is going down, maybe you've got something there. But if you see that PlayStation
and Nintendo Switch are performing better than ever before while you're still struggling
at Xbox, I think there's something to look at there.
We do seem to love a video game analogy on the Good Growth podcast, don't we? I know
David Watkins has often mentioned his Google Stadia, which sadly is no more. Ed, it's
been great to talk to you, great to get your thoughts on this topic. You've been listening
to Analysts Anonymous on the Good Growth podcast. And if we've piqued your interest or you
want to know more, please do get in touch. Thanks for listening.