Ever since the moment Internet traffic from mobile devices exceeded traditional computers, marketers and analysts noticed a monumental shift toward the “mobile first” world. The time for monolithic desktop PCs were slowly coming to a standstill.
MNCs love profit. And to drive profit, one needs to have a solid understanding of what the masses want.
Now that the masses have shifted to a mobile-first era, both governments and corporations have started to pour enormous amounts of money to (a) analyse and (b) understand the wants and needs of masses.
Terms like “big data”, “big data analytics” and “data science” have become the new direction of IT and business intelligence.
What does all of this have to do with you and me?
Good question. I can assume that you’re someone who’s interested in the various intricacies of this fine and deceptive art form called marketing.
For online businesses and e-commerce stores, it is critical to understand the behaviour of the visitor, in order to best turn him into a customer. In today’s post I am going to introduce you to a brilliant new analytics and data visualization product called Netbiscuits Analytics.
What Netbiscuits does in a nutshell:
Netbiscuits Analytics studies your visitor’s data and applies scientific visualization techniques to convert it into insightful information. Both marketers and developers can gain tremendous insight from that information, and derive conversion optimization techniques which would ultimately soar the company’s sales.
For example, today, your website is visited form a plethora of devices, ranging from desktops, to tablets and multiple generations of smartphones. If you were able to understand how visitors engage with your content, you’d have a critical advantage against your competitors.
- Netbiscuits Analytics helps you visualize how your data should look depending on the visitor’s properties, like screen size, bandwidth, location, CPU speed and many others.
- It also helps you analyse where your visitors bounce, or the regions of the site they interact with the most.
Here’s what you can do with it:
By analysing this information you can figure out where exactly visitors are leaving your site. If your visitors aren’t interacting with the CTA (call to action), then you know you’re not using the optimal placement position.
Go back to your drawing board, cross that place out, and move to the next position.
Rinse and repeat until your see the conversions soar.
The Netbiscuits Mobile Analytics Dashboard
Thanks to the dashboard’s intuitive user interface design, I was quickly able to grasp how each element worked with one another. Here’s what I learnt.
There are three things:
- Tabs or Sections – 4 major factors used to measure a site’s overall performance (viz. Page Views, Sessions, Bounce Rate and Conversions).
- Tiles or Visualization Components – These are metrics used to correlate the data from the abovementioned performance factors Tabs/Sections. Examples of such metrics include Devices Tile, OS Tile, Browser Tile, etc. For instance, you can view the Sessions Tab using the Devices tile. This will give you the approximate number of sessions that were held from each device.
- Filters – Filters simply help you refine the visualized data. You can remove unnecessary information and focus on your required metric.
Netbiscuits Mobile Analytics Tabs
These four tabs comprise the four sections of Netbiscuits Mobile Analytics:
- Page Views
- Sessions
- Bounce rate and
- Conversions
Page Views
The Page Views tab shows the direct number of visitors or simply “traffic” that visit your website via any source. Each page view is considered as a separate entity. Due to its generalized nature, Page Views are considered as high level insights, looking at visitor quantity rather than analysing site activity.
Sessions
Sessions help you visualize how long a user has been active in your site. A session can be made up of several page visits, conversion events and other activity. The Page Views tell you the number of hits, which is a useful metric when looking for trends but to actually look at the individuals that are hitting your site, then sessions is the way to do it.
Bounce Rate
The Bounce rate tab shows the percentage of users that access your website that leave after having only viewing the first page. For example, a bounce rate of 80% means that 80% of users hit the landing page of your website and then leave without further exploring the site.
A site with a higher bounce rate could hinder the conversion rate. In case of a high bounce rate hire a digital marketer to help you optimize your site’s content.
Conversions
A conversion is described a successful click to your call-to-action (CTA). A CTA is an action you want your visitor to perform – for instance, signup for your newsletter or buy your product/service etc.
For instance, you can leverage the Time of Day visualization component to estimate when your visitors are most likely to buy your product. You can use this data to run special discount offers around that period to further boost your conversions.
Tiles or Visualization Components
There are 8 distinct visualization components using with we can monitor our performance factors. In our review, we’ve used the Page Views factor in all the visualization components.
These tiles represent some of the ways Netbiscuits Mobile Analytics can display your data, and give you insights into your current performance, but also opportunities for expansion. For instance, a strong base of page views from a particular region, before initiating a campaign is a great sign that that region is ready for your brand or advertising. Using Netbiscuits Mobile Analytics, you’ve inferred the optimal time and place to launch your campaign.
Devices Tile
This tile displays the top 5 devices that are visiting your site every day, along with their total percentage of page views. Knowing this can help you tailor your site to your biggest demographics. For instance, if you learn that most of your visitors are using an iPhone, then you can optimize your site using the iPhone’s display size in order to better improve conversions.
Selecting Detailed Data from this menu gives an extensive look at the variety of devices hitting your site.
OS Tile
The Operating Systems tile gives you an overview of the various operating systems your visitors use. One of the ways this information can help you is by planning the direction of your next content.
For instance, suppose you have a mobile tech blog where you focus on tips and tricks for popular mobile OSes. Using Netbiscuits Mobile Analytics, when you see a higher percentage of Windows Phone OS, it tells you that a majority of your visitors are interested in tips and tricks related to Windows Phone. Increase content on that niche and see your page views grow!
It is also helpful for monitoring and verifying your site’s niche. If you have an iOS only blog, and a majority of your users are from Android, then something’s not right.
Browsers Tile
The Browser tile shows you the 5 most common browsers used by your visitors. Using this data you can ensure that your site works flawlessly in those browsers.
Personas Tile
This is an insightful visualization tool that tells you what type of people your visitors are, depending on time of day they interact with your site. A majority of them work in the evening, while only a few visit your site during lunch breaks. This can be particularly useful when used in conjunction with conversion. Follow this link for more information about Netbiscuits Personas.
Time of Day Tile
The Time of Day tile allows you to see at what times the majority of your traffic is hitting your sites (by default, recorded in their local time).
This can be useful for scheduling posts on social media, publishing posts, planning campaigns and a variety of other factors.
Screen Size Tile
The screen size of devices today vary massively – right from tiny smartwatches to 60” smart TVs. Finding the most popular screen size of your visitors can be a tremendous asset when planning a responsive website and delivering a powerful user experience.
Bandwidth Tile
With the Bandwidth Tile, you get to know the average connection speed of your visitors. This gives you an approximate idea about their page load time. Fine-tune your page size in such a way that your page loads in the fastest possible time in their devices.
This will tremendously help boost conversions.
Screen Orientation Tile
The Screen Orientation tile allows you to see the percentage of devices hitting your site in the portrait or landscape orientation. The way your users view the site can actually have a large effect on conversion and bounce rate, so it’s useful to know what your users prefer.
Pages Tile
This tile helps you gain quintessential data on how your pages are performing. If a page has very high bounce rate, then that implies that page needs a revamp.
Location Tile
This provides the geographical data of your visitors. This is essential in selecting your webhost and your CDN provider. If most of your visitors are located in the US, then you should select a webhost whose datacentre(s) are in the country and a CDN with multiple POPs spread across the country. In our experience we’ve found WPEngine to be the best WordPress host and MaxCDN to be a very reliable CDN provider.
Filter Panel
With the filter panel you can apply various metrics against the standard tiles, thereby refining your data.
Standard metrics include:
- Domain or Page
- Region or Country
- Day of week
- Hour of day (excellent for scheduling tweets as well)
- Persona
- Device
- Operating System
- Browser
- Screen size
What filters can do for you:
Filters allow you to concentrate only on the information you want to see, and avoids you getting swamped with irrelevant data. For instance, you can cross reference the how many people visit your site using an iPhone from the United Kingdom, by simply incorporating the “Device Type” filter with the Location tile.
Two More Useful Tools
The Data Range and Page Views Over Time tabs help you track overall conversions and site performance over a custom period of time.
Data Range
With this, you can select the time period for the data being analysed, and also set the comparison range. The comparison range is used to show improvements or plateaus in your data and thus, your performance.
Page Views Over Time
The Page Views Over Time tile acts as an overview of your website’s general mobile health, showing you page views on your site, segmented into Smartphones, Feature Phones, Tablets and Computers. Knowing the device types hitting your site most often allows you to plan your campaigns, promotions and future development accordingly.
Installing Netbiscuits Analytics in WordPress
The main objective of the plugin is to securely embed the tracking code of Netbiscuits Mobile Analytics in all the pages of your WordPress site. Other than that, it’s paperweight. The real magic takes places in the Netbiscuits dashboard, which we’ve covered at length.
Installing the plugin is easy as pie. Go to:
- WP Dashboard > Plugins > Add New
- In the Search Plugins input box, type “Netbiscuits Analytics”
- Install the plugin and activate it
- Once activated, you can find the plugin’s page under WP Dashboard > Settings > NB Analytics
Now you need to copy-paste the tracking code into the input box and hit Save Changes once done. Make sure that you’re logged into your Netbiscuits account before clicking on the “copy the code from your account” link.
Once done, you can successfully view the “big picture” in your site.
Knowledge Base
Netbiscuits maintains an amazing knowledgebase full of interesting articles. Even if you’re someone who’s totally new to this topic, the knowledgebase has plenty of “non-geeky”, user-friendly articles for you to get up to speed with the latest terms. I recommend you at least skim though the knowledgebase once.
Pricing
Netbiscuits is free for tracking up to 5000 impressions per month. It supports unlimited domains and integration with Google and Adobe analytics as well in the free plan. Paid plans start at $175 per month (excluding VAT/sales tax) for 1,000,000 monthly visitors.
Conclusion:
Big Data is often overwhelming. Netbiscuits Mobile Analytics brings structure and simplicity to your web traffic and offers new ways of interpreting your data. With its free plan, Netbiscuits allows you to experience their service free of charge, until you cross the 5000 impressions per month mark.
This is especially useful for people who are building mobile-first sites from the ground up.
Over to you.
What are your thoughts on Netbiscuits Mobile Analytics platform? Think they’re missing something? What’s their most flattering feature? Let us know in the comments below!
