KristaKrista Seiden

All articles by Krista

 

Data Driven Design

Designing a new website is a big task. You must take many things into consideration: ease of use & functionality, mobile responsiveness, content, flow, graphics, etc. On top of that, you need to ensure that all of the analytics tracking is properly setup and collecting the necessary data for you to report on success. With so many considerations, it’s important to look at what your users are already telling you about it’s ease of use and helpfulness before you begin to make decisions about how to redesign and change it. Key metrics to consider when thinking about a website redesign: – number of unique users & sessions in a given time period – top content by pageviews/events/goal conversions/etc – funnel success (newsletter signups, contact form submits, checkouts, etc) – device
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Podcast Guest: Jumpstart with Jeffalytics

A few weeks ago I had the chance to sit down (virtually) with an industry friend, Jeff Sauer, who is an expert in all things Google Analytics & AdWords and who has recently kicked off a podcast series he’s calling ‘Jumpstart with Jeffalytics’. I had the distinct honor of being guest #2 (after the Wizard of Moz, Rand Fishkin) for Jeff’s new podcast and now that it’s live I wanted to share Jeff’s recap of the episode as well as a link to where you can find the podcast. I had a great time chatting with Jeff and recording this session, and am humbled by his kind words of support throughout. I wouldn’t be where I am today without the support and friendship of industry peers such as Jeff and
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Three Google Analytics Features You Should Be Using Today

I run Google Analytics training workshops that take users from ‘never seen it before’ through to ‘grown up GA practitioner’. A key success metric for me is how many people answer ‘Yes’ when I ask if a certain piece of functionality is new to them. If folks are learning new things, this is good! I have certain ‘favourites’ when it comes to the new functionality question. These are not new but they are seldom used so they appear to be new. They’re certainly exciting because they add power to the product and streamline how users use it. They’re golden! Take a look at these three examples. Are these new to you? They’re easy to learn and will add new super-powers to your GA skills.   1: Keyboard Shortcuts You can
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Three Google Analytics Views You Should Use Today

I often get asked for recommendations and best practices for setting up a new Google Analytics property. How many views should we have? What are the best practices for types of views? You can have as many views as you want (ok not really, the cap is 25 views per property unless you have a special exception) and organize them however you want. That’s one of the cool things about GA – it’s super flexible to user needs & design.  BUT, I do recommend that you always have at least 3 views per property, such as the below: 1. RAW view: This is a view that does not have any filters or modifications added to it. You can use the standard ‘All Website Data’ view for this, but I’d suggest
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Three Google Analytics Filters You Should Be Using Today

In Google Analytics, filters provide a flexible way of modifying the data within each view of your analytics account. You can use them to exclude data, include data, or actually change how the data looks in your reports. Filters help you transform the data so it’s better aligned with your business needs. Google Analytics applies the filters from each view to the raw data collected from your website or app at the time of processing. The filtered data is what we then see in the reporting UI for each view. There are three filters that every analytics account should set up right away: spambot filtering, excluding internal IP addresses, and forcing all pages/referral sources to lower case. 1. Spambot Filtering This one is super easy because it’s a simple checkbox
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Custom Funnels – New in Google Analytics Premium

Of all of the reporting features that Google Analytics has launched in the past few years, I think this is, quite possibly, my favorite. Not just because it’s new and pretty, but because it fills a big big need for analysts: Define steps based on any dimension criteria. This means you can build funnels on the fly based on events, page views, etc. You are no longer limited to just using a destination/page URL as a funnel step as you are in regular GA goals. My favorite use case is sending any kind of hit type from an offline system, such as a CRM, to GA via the Measurement Protocol and then adding those as steps into a Custom Funnel (see the below example) They are RETROACTIVE!!!! You can build
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GTM Analytics Academy Course Open Till July 24th!

I’m INCREDIBLY excited that we launched our newest Analytics Academy course last week (June 23rd). This course is all about Google Tag Manager and is aimed at helping marketers, analysts, and developers quickly get up to speed on GTM, tagging best practices, and using tag management to improve your analytics (and other tags) implementation. And I’m INCREDIBLY excited that I have the opportunity to be the instructor for our newest course! This opportunity allows me to bring my passion for teaching GTM to both a technical and a less technical audience and to help GTM education reach the masses. I couldn’t be more excited! If you’re not familiar with the Analytics Academy, here’s the quick history and relevant links: there are currently 5 courses: Digital Analytics Fundamentals, Platform Principles, Ecommerce
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I’m a Woman in Tech: How it Helps Me and Hurts my Gender

I’m an analytics professional. A teacher. An advocate. An advisor. I work in tech. I work with engineers, developers, marketers, sales, product, and ops. I work with all levels, from analysts to executives. And I am a woman. Until recently, I’ve hadn’t put much thought into what that really meant for me professionally. I attribute that to a couple of reasons: I’ve (almost) always had managers who have treated me with respect and pushed me, advocated for me, and promoted me based on the quality of work and the contribution to the business I’ve delivered. Not based on my gender. And also because I’ve never seen myself as a feminist (I’m not saying this is good or bad or that being a feminist would require me to think about what it
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Step by Step: Adding a Second GA Property via Google Tag Manager

Placing more than one analytics property ID on your website can be very beneficial. This gives you the ability to send analytics data to more than one property in Google Analytics and can be used to analyze different segments of traffic, control access for different groups of stakeholders, link additional features to a particular property, and many many more reasons. Each business will have their own reasoning for sending data to multiple properties – what’s yours? Leave your reasons in the comments section, I’d love to hear! The days of double tagging a website via code on your page are gone… Well, not really, you can still do it, but I wouldn’t recommend it. In fact, it’s never been a highly recommended practice for a many reasons, here are a couple: Multiple instances of
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Step by Step: Setting Up Advanced Google Analytics Goals & Funnel Visualizaitons

I often get asked what my top few tips or must do’s for Google Analytics would be. The first two are always the same: setting up Campaign Tracking, and setting up Goals and Funnel Visualizations. Since I’ve previously written a Step by Step Guide for Campaign Tracking, I’m going to focus on setting up Goals in this post. Why are goals so important? Because they allow you to track specific actions against your traffic, revenue, and conversion data as well as setup experiments to optimize against them. Similarly, enabling a funnel visualization for a goal will allow you to track your users along the path to completing a goal if there are multiple steps so that you can see where there might be holes in your funnel or track the
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Test Design: The Official Doc

If you are running a testing program, then you’ve more than likely had to think about what should go into a test you are running. This could include the problem statement, your hypothesis, how many variants, how different these variants will be, what your measures of success will be, screen captures, and more. It’s important to create a doc or some sort of accessible page/application for your teams to be able to reference this information. This helps to foster and open and collaborative culture of optimization. It will also help you as you look back to understand what your test objectives were and how the test did compared to those objectives. I track all of this via a Google Doc for each test I run. I used the same template for
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Best Practice Solutions Guide: Implementing Google Analytics via Google Tag Manager

Towards the end of last year, I heard feedback from a few of our clients that there wasn’t a lot of good documentation on how to implement Google Analytics via Google Tag Manager. I felt this pain because I’d been in their shoes. For the previous couple of years I’d been on the practitioner side implementing GA via GTM and I knew exactly what they meant. So I decided to write a guide on how to implement a lot of common GA features via GTM from a practitioner viewpoint. I wanted to be sure to call out the gotchas and best practices that I’ve learned from good, ol’ fashion experience of doing this stuff myself. So today I’m really excited to share with you what I’ve been working on. We just
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Digital Analytics is all About Context – Lessons from #TheDress

Over the past couple of weeks I have presented at a few conferences (SummitUp in Dayton, Ohio and UnSummit in Salt Lake City, Utah) on the topic of People, Process, and Platform. Now, before you roll your eyes because you’ve heard it all before, let me let you know that you won’t be getting my whole speech in this blog post. In fact, you won’t be getting any of the core parts. Instead, I want to remind you of the importance of the people you have looking at, analyzing, interpreting, and telling stories about your data, as I did to the audiences at these conferences. Most of you will have seen #TheDress, #DressGate, #WhiteAndGold, or #BlueAndBlack over the past couple of weeks. For those of you who haven’t, let me
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Business vs Marketing Analyst – Roles, Skillsets & Career Paths

I was recently chatting with a young women who happens to be a senior at Chapman University in Southern California and is an aspiring analyst. She mentioned she had just been to New York for a school trip where she had learned a lot about financial analytics, and she asked me my thoughts on financial analytics vs web analytics. Were they two different things? Were the skills transferrable? What were the main differences? After chatting with her about this for a good 15 minutes I thought it would useful write it all down in a blog post to share more broadly. What are the main differences between a Business Analyst and a Marketing Analyst? A business analyst is generally someone who sits in a business operations, finance, or marketing operations
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Step by Step: Outbound Link Tracking in Google Tag Manager

Following up on last week’s post on event tracking, I thought it would be a good idea to deep dive on outbound link tracking. Outbound link tracking is super easy to setup using Google Tag Manager and the insights you can gain by understanding the most common paths to leaving your website are definitely worth the minimal effort to implement. So, without further ado, here is a step by step guide to setting up outbound link tracking via Google Tag Manager. Before you being, be sure you’ve enabled the necessary pre-defined variables in Google Tag Manager. Step 1: Create a new tag in Google Tag Manger. – Select ‘Google Analytics’ as the tag and Universal Analytics as the tag type – Choose ‘Click’ for what triggers the tag to fire
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Events: Best Practices for Hierarchies and Naming Conventions

If you are looking to understand the actions that a user takes on your website, one of the best ways to do this is with event tracking. This can include (but not limited to): Link clicks (on site or outbound) Downloads (whitepaper, pdf, etc) Scrolling Load times In Google Analytics, event tracking is made up of 4 elements: Category, Action, Label, and Value. The awesome thing about this is that the hierarchy use cases are highly customizable so events are a very flexible way to report on user action. For larger websites/enterprises, I tend to track events in the following format, utilizing the category as a means of organizing actions based on site structure. Note that the ‘Value’ field is used to set a numerical value for an event, most
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2014 Travel By The Numbers

Happy New Year! Wow, I can’t believe 2014 is already behind us, it really did FLY by…  Ha.. see what I did there? 😉 2014 was a big year in travel for me, both professionally and personally. Given the data nerd that lives in my very core, I thought I’d throw together the numbers and stats for a quick analysis. Thankfully, this year TripIt made pulling all of my flight miles together really easy and they even presented it in some fun infographics (see below). So the 2014 snapshot: Total miles flown: 109,121 miles via 60 flights on 11 different airlines visiting 11 different countries (outside of the airport). Of that, I’d estimate that 75-80% was for business, 20-25% for pleasure – blurry due to a mix of both on some
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Definitions of Common Analytics Terms

If you’re just starting out in analytics, you may find that there are a lot of new, confusing terms to master. Here is a short (but certainly not exhaustive) guide to what many of these mean: Hit: a hit is any server call that corresponds to the javascript firing on a webpage or app and sent to an analytics tool. For example, you can have hits for page, event, ecommerce, and social interactions. Pageview:  the load/view of a page of your website or mobile app Session/Visit: a group of interactions (pageviews, events, etc) that take place on your website within a given time frame. Generally a session has a time-based expiration of 30 minutes of inactivity after the last action. A session also ends at midnight in some analytics tools
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Using a GTM Constant String Variable for GA Property ID

If you use Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics, you’ll know that with every new analytics tag you create, you need to enter in your Google Analytics property ID (what’s a property ID?). If you are creating multiple tags, this can be a pain and can also lead to possible typos/errors that will cause your tags to fail later on since you won’t be sending data to the right GA accounts. There is a very quick and easy way to make this better! And more importantly, scalable. To do so, I’m going to show you how to use a constant string user-defined variable for your Property ID. This is only 2 easy steps. First, you’ll need to create the new user-defined variable. To do so, select variables, new User-Defined Variable,
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Enabling Pre-defined Variables in the New GTM UI

In GTM 2.0, macros have gone away. These are now called ‘Variables’. There are many pre-defined variables in GTM 2.0 which make setting up tags & triggers easier than before, however, you must first enable them. This is just a quick post to hopefully save you some time and energy the first time you try to use the new UI to create a new tag or trigger. When you first create a new container, there will be a small subset of pre-defined variables already enabled. You can see them by navigating to the ‘Variables’ section via the left-hand nav. If you are creating any type of click or form event, you’ll want to enable these fields to have them show up as a selection when creating a new trigger. To
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Step by Step: Setting Up a Google Analytics Dashboard

Do you need to look at the same metrics or report on a regular basis? Do you want to share the same report across a broader group of stakeholders? Do you want to have the flexibility to change the date range for the whole report or segment it down to certain demographics or characteristics? Great – you can do all of that with a Google Analytics Dashboard! In this quick post I’ll walk you through the easy step-by-step process of creating a new Google Analytics Dashboard. Step 1: Creating a new dashboard canvas Decide whether you are going to create a new dashboard from scratch, or if you will add reports to a new dashboard from the regular reporting UI. For right now, let’s start from scratch. Later in the
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Update: Setting up GA via GTM’s new UX

This post is essentially an update to the one I posted about a month ago for setting up Google Analytics via Google Tag Manager for WordPress (using Thomas Geiger’s Duracelltomi Google Tag Manager plugin for WordPress). Now that the beautiful new GTM interface has launched, things may look and feel a tad different, so read on for an updated step-by-step. I’d also like to quickly thank my sister, Jilleen, who runs the awesome blog SoCal Field Trips, for unknowingly volunteering as an example for this post… did you think that blog help was free?! Love you sis! Ok, now onto the useful stuff… Step 1: Go to tagmanager.google.com (note that this link takes you directly to the new UX, whereas google.com/tagmanager will take you to the old interface) to create a GTM account.  You’ll get
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A Casual Conversation with Google’s Analytics Advocates

This morning I had the opportunity to do a fun little Hangout On Air for the Google Partners Network with my fellow Analytics Advocate Adam Singer. We chatted casually about some of our favorite analytics resources and tips and also answered several questions from the partner community. Check out the video of this conversation for some of our favorite tips!
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Join the DAA SF Symposium on Nov 13: Getting Data Right with Quant AND Qual!

Originally posted on the official Google Analytics Blog, reposting here: This year the annual Digital Analytics Association (DAA) San Francisco Symposium is taking place on Thursday November 13th and will be hosted at University of San Francisco. The theme is “optimizing performance using quantitative and qualitative practices”. The DAA SF chapter has lined up industry leaders who will be sharing their thoughts and experiences. We are expecting a great afternoon of discussion followed by a networking reception. Following are the event details: Our lineup of wonderful speakers is focused on presenting real-world solutions to the optimization challenges we all face everyday. They will be discussing the principles of qualitative data collection, optimization and the relation to quantitative data they’ve put into practice. This year we are piloting a new, more interactive
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Step by Step: Setting Up a Quick Onsite Survey

We all love hard data. The facts and figures please. BUT those who really love data know that the secret sauce is to combine ‘hard’ data (quantitative) with ‘soft’ data (qualitative) to really understand the whole picture. There are many qualitative survey tools on the market that can help you do just that. For this post, I’ll talk about Google Consumer Surveys (GCS) as it’s the tool I use most frequently, but there are many others that rank high in terms of ease of use, functionality, and data output (Qualaroo, SurveyMonkey, Foresee, and Opinion Lab, to name a few). A couple of use cases are top of mind for me as a practitioner working with teams that are constantly launching new websites and updating offerings: 1. Task completion (tip of
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Step-by-Step: Setting up a Google Content Experiment on Your Website

Setting up a Google Analytics Content Experiment is easy! Follow this four-step process and you’ll be on your way to running your first test. To start, first go to the ‘Experiments’ section of Google Analytics and click on ‘Create Experiment’. Step 1: Setup the test Advanced: if you are working with a high volume page and want to analyze more than one goal at a time, you can set up a ‘fake goal’ so that the test will not optimize towards a single winner. Use a ‘fake goal’ to run the test longer than 2 weeks: Multi-armed bandit: Content Experiments uses a traffic splitting method called Multi-armed bandit (MAB) which essentially weights the traffic towards the variation(s) that appear to be winning, away from losing variations. In theory, this could
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The Alphabet Soup of Common Business Terms – Demystified!

Confused by the alphabet soup of business metrics you hear around the office? Here are some of the many business metrics you may hear, defined: KPI: this stands for Key Performance Indicator. A KPI is the outcome of a business objective, i.e. what you measure an objective against. ROI: Return on Investment, or ROI, is a measure of the business value you get out of a particular investment. For example, if you were to invest $500 on a website redesign, and your new website brought in 3x the revenue, after you subtract the costs you could say that the ROI of the website redesign was 200%, or an additional $1000. ROAS: Return on Ad Spend. Similar to ROI, this measures the business value you get out of an advertising investment.
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Three Actionable Analytics Tips to Implement Today

I have the opportunity to speak to a lot of different audiences about analytics & optimization. Many times, I’m asked to leave the audience with a few actionable tips that they can implement in the next week. While there are many things I’d suggest (and it does change based on audience), I often recommend the same three things as I believe they are fundamental to moving past basic analytics and taking a more hands-on, informed approach. Tip #1: Use campaign tracking Campaign tracking is fundamental to getting more granular with your referring/incoming traffic sources. If you do it right, you can get smart about the types of ads/links/emails/social content that work best at driving qualified traffic to your website. And the best part about it – you don’t have to
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Real-Time Analytics: Top Use Cases for Quality Assurance

When real-time analytics first came out in Google Analytics, there were a lot of questions on the usefulness of this report. Yes, it looks cool to put it up on a big screen in the office for people to watch how much traffic is currently on your site… but that may not be super actionable (depending, of course, on your business). Thankfully I’ve found a couple of very useful ways to use real-time analytics for QA to help make me a better marketer: 1. Ensure campaign tracking is setup correctly: Real-time analytics allows me to see that the UTMs I’ve attached to my blog post URLs are working correctly and attributing traffic to the right sources. It’s a nice assurance to quickly check this after posting a new blog post
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How to setup Google Analytics with Google Tag Manager on WordPress

In this post I’ll walk you through setting up Google Tag Manger and installing Google Analytics on your WordPress blog in 5 easy steps. Step 1: Go to http://www.google.com/tagmanager/ to create a GTM account.  You’ll get a GTM account ID, in the format GTM-XXXXXX. Copy this ID, you’ll need it in the next step. Step 2: Install a GTM wordpress plugin. I chose Thomas Geiger’s Duracelltomi Google Tag Manager plugin for WordPress because it has great reviews on WordPress and a dedicated site full of ‘how to’ resources. Once installed, enter your GTM account ID. Step 3: Configure your tags, rules, & macros in GTM. The first thing I installed was a Universal Analytics tag to fire GA on all pages of my site. For basic tracking, it’s pretty easy. Just choose the tag
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I’m Joining the Google Analytics Team to Advocate for Digital Analytics Best Practices

After working as a practitioner of analytics and optimization for the past six years (at Adobe, the Apollo Group, and most recently Google), I’m excited to announce that I’m ‘officially’ making the move to the vendor side of the house! I’m joining the Google Analytics team as a ‘Best Practice Advocate’ for analytics and optimization. Five years ago, I would have said this role was my dream job. Two years ago, when I joined Google, I still would have said that this role was my dream job. And today, now 5 days in, I’m happy to say I’ve actually landed my dream job! 🙂 I say ‘officially’ with quotes for two main reasons: 1. I’ve already been at Google for two years, many might think that I’ve been on the
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Your Optimization Program’s First Hire

Just starting out in web optimization? I recently spoke on a panel at Optimizely’s Opticon and one of the questions that came up was ‘who would be your first hire’ for a new optimization program. There were a few different opinions on the panel, ranging from someone who gets stuff done, to an analytics rockstar, to that rare unicorn who can do it all. While all of these are good places to start, I tend to take the viewpoint of optimization through a solid analytics background as the best place to start. (Of course there are many optimization all-stars who didn’t come from an analytics background.) Why? Here are a few of the reasons why I’d look at hiring an analytics rockstar as your optimization lead: 1. They know data
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Human Analytics – The Quantification of Myself

I recently gave a talk about one of my passions, the quantification of self, to my team. Given the great feedback, I’m turning that preso into a blog post to share with everyone! I’d like to note that this preso and subsequent blog post was inspired by an awesome presentation that Michele Kiss gave at the Digital Analytics Association SF Chapter Symposium last fall in San Francisco. You can see her preso on her blog. The market today is full of tools, apps & wearables and the idea of self-quantification is steadily moving towards the mainstream. A lot of my friends have some type of an activity or fitness tracker (though my groups of friends are divided between the Fuelband, Fitbit, and my favorite, the Jawbone UP – each group
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Building a Culture of Optimization, Part 5: So You’ve Found a Big Win… Now What?

In part 5 of this 5-part blog series about ‘Building a Culture of Optimization’ I’m going to talk about the importance of sharing your wins and bringing your organization along with you. You can see part 1, part 2, part 3 & part 4 here. Part 5: So you’ve found a big win. Now what? Ensure you’ve double triple checked your results! Are they statistically confident? Did you control for external variables? Why is this important? A personal example… I ran a test where we found significant uplift over our control from a couple of test variations, but one version stood out as the clear winner. After closing the test, reviewing and analyzing the data, I communicated the results and recommendation to launch the winner to the rest of my organization. Most people
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Building a Culture of Optimization, Part 4: Evangelize the Process

In part 4 of this 5-part blog series about ‘Building a Culture of Optimization’ I’m going to talk about evangelizing your process within your organization. You can see part 1, part 2, & part 3 here. Part 4: Evangelize the process Process is important. Process leads to consistency, repeatability, and authority in a testing program. Sharing that process and getting others in your organization bought in and supportive is even more important. One source of truth One of the best ways to make your optimization program better known within your organization is to evangelize it via a widely accessible & visible roadmap. Here’s an example roadmap that I use within my organization: I host this roadmap in a Google doc that is accessible to everyone in my organization, from analysts
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Building a Culture of Optimization, Part 3: Know the Math

In part 3 of this 5-part blog series about ‘Building a Culture of Optimization’ I’m going to talk about the importance of bringing your organization up to speed on the math behind the tests. You can look back and see part 1 on the basics and part 2 on good test design. Part 3: Know the Math! Give your peers a short stats lesson (but keep it light)! What does someone running an A/B or MVT test need to know about math? How detailed should they be? Here is what I tell all of my coworkers: Statistical Confidence = confidence in a repeated result The confidence level, or statistical significance indicate how likely it is that a test experience’s success was not due to chance. A higher confidence indicates that: – the
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Building a Culture of Optimization, Part 2: Good Test Designs

In part 2 of this 5-part blog series about ‘Building a Culture of Optimization’ I’m going to talk about the importance of teaching good test designs. You can see part 1 about educating the basics here. Part 2: Good Test Designs You can’t have a good test without a good test design. One of the first things I do when a new test idea surfaces is sit down with the key stakeholders & test proposers to understand the details of what they’d like to test. We’ll talk through the variables that are going to be tested, how best to setup & design the test, and ensure we are on the same page in terms of potential test outcomes and how to ensure we are testing in a clean and consistent manner.
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Building a Culture of Optimization, Part 1 – Educating the Basics

I’ve presented at several conferences, webinars, and meetings recently on the topic of ‘Building a Culture of Optimization.’ It’s a great topic and something our industry as a whole is still in the process of nailing down – most organizations I see haven’t yet reached maturity here. Given the importance of building such a culture in order to drive testing and optimization across our businesses I’m writing a mini-series of posts on some of the most important things I see, do, and recommend. This will be a 5-part blog series on ‘Building a Culture of Optimization’ with parts 1-3 focusing on education, part 4 on process, and part 5 on spreading the word and shifting the culture. Part 1: The Basics – Educate educate educate! Educating your teammates is the
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I’m not a fan of time metrics or bounce rate – here’s why

How much time do visitors spend on our site? If we make this change, how much more time will people spend looking at our website? Did that change have an impact on bounce rate? As an analyst, do you get these questions a lot? I know I do. And my response is (almost) always the same… I will not report on those metrics and we should look elsewhere for something more meaningful. Why? Well… for many reasons. But first some definitions. Time on page: calculated by the first time stamp of landing on a page subtracted from the next time stamp when going to a new page (alternatively, the time stamp on exit of that page when continuing on to another page tracked within the same analytics account). Time on
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Adobe Summit 2014 Recap

Summary & Key takeaways from Adobe Summit 2014 The Adobe Summit has exploded over the past 3 years as it moved away from the Grand/Little America, where it was still hyper focused on analytics & testing (~2,000 people attending 1-2 years post Omniture acquisition), to a large scale (6,000+ people) pan-digital marketing showcase hosted at the Salt Palace Convention Center. The growth and integration with other tools in their suite has allowed them to shift focus from solely an analytics/optimization product line to a ‘Marketing Cloud’ of tools marketed to the CMO and used across the digital/marketing organization. Here are my top high level takeaways from this year’s Summit: Key themes: Testing, Platform, & Personalization Takeaway #1: Over the past 2 years Adobe has pushed hard on integration & product
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One year, 365 days, 12 months, 1/10th of a decade… Looking back & forward.

This morning I woke up to the following email in my inbox: Dear Krista, Congratulations! You have been at Google for 365 days, 1/10th of a decade, >3.15 x 1010 milliseconds, 20% of a lustrum or 0.001 of a millennium and today is your 1st Google Birthday 🙂 A big Thank You for all your contributions over the past 12 months. Why not take 60 seconds to recall your first Google year and enjoy a swift walk down recent memory lane enjoying all you have achieved in this time. Happy Birthday! So, in that spirit, here are some of my reflections on my first 365 days, 1/10th of a decade, etc at Google. 1. Where did the last year go? The pace of life/work/innovation around here is insane. I find it really hard
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Step by Step: Setting up GA tracking for Marketing Campaigns

Several weeks back I posted a campaign tracking guide on the Official GA blog, now cross-posting it here. See the original post here. As an analytics practitioner, one of the most important things I try to teach marketers is how to properly tag their campaigns so we can report on the success of their efforts. To do this, I’ve created a guide for them to follow to make it easy to choose the proper UTM codes to have consistent campaign tagging across the business. This allows us to begin to assign source and medium values to finance channels and usage metrics to really understand how each campaign performs in terms of our bottom line business metrics. Overview: Setting up tracking and reporting on your marketing campaigns is simple and fun. This guide will
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Guide: A Practitioner’s Tips for Reducing the Impact of Sampling

Do you have large data sets being collected via Google Analytics? If you’ve got more than 250,000 visits within the time period you are analyzing, then you will likely encounter sampling in Google Analytics. Why? Sampling occurs for data sets larger than 250k visits in a single property (or 500k if you maximize the sampling ratio) in order to reduce processing times for data via the interface and allow marketers to view their data and make decisions more quickly. Sampling alert message:     While the speed to insight is great, at times, the sampling ratio can make it more difficult to analyze your data in the most efficient way. In order to get the most out of my data, I’ve invested time and effort in various ways of reducing
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eMetrics Sydney Recap

A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to attend and speak at eMetrics in Sydney, Australia. This was the first conference I had attended or spoke at outside of the US, and a very unique opportunity to see how the digital analytics industry is thriving elsewhere. One thing that stood out to me: the analytics industry in Australia is a tight knit community with a ton of engagement via IAPA which is a similar organization to the Digital Analytics Association (DAA) in the US. It was great to meet and talk with everyone at this event and I walked away very impressed with the level of talent and enthusiasm that I saw. The second thing that stood out to me: Twitter is still an up and coming medium for
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How Social Media Broke the Story of the SFO Plane Crash

Yesterday I had the unfortunate experience of watching the Asiana Airlines flight 214 Boeing 777 crash land at SFO (San Francisco International Airport). While viewing the crash landing, I had my phone out. My first instinct, before all else, was to snap a photo. Then, as I yelled out “Holy shit! A plane just crashed” I began tweeting about the crash. The first tweet and photo of the crash went out to the world before anyone had even finished comprehending what had just happened, within 20-30 seconds of the plane hitting ground. Omg a plane just crashed at SFO on landing as I’m boarding my plane pic.twitter.com/hsVEcVZ2VS — Krista Seiden (@kristaseiden) July 6, 2013 The incredible thing about social media is how instant it is. Within seconds twitter was exploding with
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#eMetrics SF 2013 wrap-up

Last month I had the opportunity to attend and speak at the 2013 eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit in SF. What is always a good conference seemed even better this time around. The sessions I attended were high quality (as always), but the biggest (personal) take away was how close this industry is and how talented a group of people I fairly regularly (via the conference cirucit and a few other random get togethers) get the pleasure of hanging out with. I couldn’t imagine another industry with cooler more talented people. What makes it even better is that we all have the opportunity (and a lot of us do!) to interact on a daily basis via twitter and other social channels which helps foster the awesome relationships you make at these
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Congrats to the DAA 2013 Awards for Excellence Winners!!

The other week I had the privilege of attending the DAA 2013 Awards for Excellence along with 180 of some of the brightest minds in the analytics industry. The talent in the room was unparalleled! A quick recap of the nominees, finalists, and winners: Digital Analytics Rising Star (individual) Nominees (** indicates finalist): Eduardo Cereto Carvalho** (Google) Chauncy Cay Ford (Dell) Rachael Gerson (SEER Interactive) George Lee (AOL) Abbe Lefkowitz (MaassMedia) Mathieu Llorens (AT Internet) Tim Patten (Localytics) Mike Pedicino (Catherine Plus Sizes) Krista Seiden (Google) Himanshu Sharma (SEO Takeaways) Elizabeth Smalls (Abercrombie & Fitch)** Pradeep SV (Cognizant) Jared Vestal** (BrightTag) Tiffany Zimmermann** (MillerCoors) Randy Zwitch** (Keystone Solutions) And the winner is: Liz Smalls (@SmallsMeasures)                 Most Influential Agency/Vendor (group) Nominees (** indicates
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Google Analytics Blog Guest Post – 3 Tips for In-house Practitioners

Working as a practitioner in-house at a technology company, one of my jobs is to teach my team members how to fish with Google Analytics. What should they be looking for in GA? Where do they start? What is meaningful? Are the campaigns being measured? Are the microsites tagged? These are the types of questions I get everyday, and very likely, you do too. In this guest post, I detail how I teach my internal practitioners to use the following 3 features: 1. Event Tracking 2. Advanced Segments 3. Shortcuts Visit the official Google Analytics Blog to see the full post!
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Google: 6 Months In – What I’ve Learned

I received an email the other week congratulating me for moving out of my Noogler (new Googler) faze, which I guess is defined as your first 6 months at Google. It’s hard to believe I’ve already been here for 6 months. So what have I learned? A lot! 1). I’m surrounded by a lot of really smart people which constantly pushes me to try harder and work smarter It’s not that I haven’t worked with a lot of smart people before. I definitely have. But it’s really a whole new level which is both exciting and scary. I’m constantly aware that I’m not the smartest (or second, or third) in the room. It’s a challenge every day to keep up (and I’m loving the challenge). 2). Likely a consequence (more
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#unSummitSLC 2013 Recap

Two weeks ago in Salt Lake City I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to attend and speak at unSummitSLC (I spoke about mobile & cross-channel analytics). unSummit is a half-day, intimate gathering of digital marketers from all over the country and local university students that takes place the day before Adobe Summit each year (this was it’s 3rd year). The idea is to share content/presos about relevant topics in the industry without the pitchiness of many of the presentations at larger conferences. It’s also a great learning platform for students who are interested in analytics (I wish something like this had been around when I was in college!). This was my first unSummit, and I walked away very impressed and inspired by the day. Some of the biggest
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