Product Management, Agile Delivery, Digital Transformation and Change
Author: Mike Dixon
Mike is a Senior Director with 16 years’ worth of digital experience across data, digital analytics, advertising / marketing technology, product management, project management, leadership, coaching, mentoring and team building.
Mike consults with large companies so that they better understand the opportunities that data and technology can unlock and works with senior executives ensuring that this is at the core of their business and decision making processes.
Mike has also created, developed and delivered award winning propositions across all digital platforms – desktop, mobile, tablet and Digital TV - utilising strong business, technical, analytical, product and project management experience.
Creating value for customers and driving business growth is paramount in product management. However, Product Managers are often burdened with operational tasks that take away valuable time and energy from strategic activities.
This is where Product Operations, or ProductOps, comes into play. In this article, we will explore the concept of Product Operations, its benefits, potential challenges, and how it can empower Product Managers to focus on creating the most value for customers and businesses. By balancing operational efficiency and strategic innovation, organisations can maximise their potential for success.
Are you a Product Operations specialist? Has your organisation implemented ProductOps? If so, I’d love to hear from you and hear your stories on what went well, what didn’t, and what you’d do differently in the future – email me directly at mike@mike-dixon.com.
What is Product Operations?
Product Operations, or ProductOps, is a strategic function that shares similarities with DevOps in its objective and philosophy.
ProductOps encompasses a range of activities, including streamlining workflows, defining processes, driving data-driven decision-making, managing tools and technologies, and ensuring efficient communication and collaboration.
While DevOps focuses on operational challenges to enable software engineers to focus on writing good software, ProductOps aligns people, processes, and technology to optimise product management efforts. It acts as a bridge between product management, development, marketing, and other cross-functional teams.
Not all organisations have a dedicated DevOps team; ProductOps can be approached similarly. Instead of establishing a separate Product Operations team, organisations can empower their Product Managers to streamline their work and share their learnings with their peers, benefiting the entire organisation.
If the conditions are right, establishing Product Operations as a dedicated function within an organisation, much like DevOps in a software development context, companies can unlock the full potential of their Product Managers and drive sustainable growth.
Is Product Operations for Every Organisation?
While the benefits of Product Operations are considerable, it is essential to note that there might be better fits for some organisations.
Like many strategic functions, Product Operations can provide the most value in organisations with mature product practices where specific operational challenges may be inhibiting the performance of Product Managers.
When an organisation is discovering or refining its product management principles, introducing Product Operations might add more complexity than streamline processes. The focus should be on first establishing a strong product management foundation.
However, for organisations with mature product practices, Product Operations can play a pivotal role in operationalising and automating a lot of the busy work that takes away from the core responsibilities of Product Managers.
A mature product organisation often has well-defined processes, clear product strategies, and an established product culture. However, operational tasks can still become time-consuming or unwieldy due to the complexities of scale.
It is in these scenarios where Product Operations can truly shine. By handling the operational burdens and optimising workflows, ProductOps frees Product Managers and technology teams to focus on higher-value activities such as strategic planning, innovation, and customer value.
Therefore, while Product Operations can be a powerful strategic function, organisations should consider their current product maturity level before evaluating the need to establish a ProductOps function.
Regardless of an organisation’s product maturity, the ultimate aim should be to ensure that Product Managers can focus on what they do best – creating outstanding products that deliver value to customers and drive business growth. Stay tuned for Part 2, where we will dive into real-world examples of ProductOps.
In the ever-evolving landscape of product management, aspiring leaders often find themselves caught in a whirlwind of tasks and responsibilities.
The demands of stakeholders, the need to connect with customers, hypothesis creation, engineering team support, and participation in various agile ceremonies can overwhelm even the most dedicated product manager.
The key to success lies in the art of effective prioritisation.
This article aims to guide aspiring UK product leaders in navigating the complexities of their roles, helping them regain control of their time, focus on the right tasks, and achieve impactful outcomes.
Embrace Strategic Vision
To overcome the challenges of prioritisation, aspiring product leaders must adopt a strategic mindset. This begins with setting clear objectives that align with the overarching business goals. Understanding the ‘why’ behind your tasks provides a solid foundation for making informed decisions about where to invest your precious time and energy.
Harness the Eisenhower Matrix
The Eisenhower Matrix, also known as the Urgent-Important Matrix, is a venerable tool for prioritisation. Categorise tasks into four quadrants: Urgent and Important, Important but Not Urgent, Urgent but Not Important, and Neither Urgent nor Important. By concentrating on tasks in the “Important but Not Urgent” quadrant, you can prevent crises and allocate time for strategic planning.
Utilise the RICE Framework
The RICE framework (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort) offers a systematic approach to evaluating potential initiatives. Assign scores to each component and prioritise projects based on their RICE score. This method ensures that your efforts are focused on projects with a high potential for impact while minimising distractions.
Mastery of Delegation
One of the hallmarks of effective leadership is recognising that you don’t have to handle everything yourself. Delegating tasks that can be managed by others frees up your time for high-priority responsibilities. Effective delegation empowers your team and guards against burnout.
Set SMART Goals
The SMART goal-setting technique (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-Bound) provides a structured framework for defining objectives. Break down larger goals into smaller, actionable tasks that are aligned with your strategic vision. This approach enhances clarity and keeps you on the path to success.
Prioritise Customer Insights
While engaging with customers is a crucial aspect of successful product management, it’s important to focus on gathering insights that directly impact your current objectives. Selective customer interactions ensure you remain customer-centric without becoming overwhelmed by excessive feedback.
Adopt Agile Time Management
Just as Agile methodologies drive product development, they can also guide time management. Implement practices like time-boxing and regular retrospectives to continuously refine and optimise your approach to prioritisation.
Mitigate Meeting Fatigue
Meetings are essential for collaboration, but an excess of meetings can drain valuable time and productivity. Evaluate the necessity of each meeting and explore alternatives like concise status updates or asynchronous communication to alleviate the burden.
Embrace the 2-Minute Rule
Tasks that take less than two minutes to complete should be tackled immediately. This rule prevents minor tasks from accumulating and consuming your mental resources.
Regularly Review and Adapt
Prioritisation is an ongoing process. Dedicate time each week to review your goals, tasks, and progress. Adjust your priorities as necessary, considering changing circumstances, emerging opportunities, and new insights.
Seek Feedback and Mentorship
Don’t hesitate to seek feedback from peers, mentors, or seasoned product leaders. Their valuable insights can provide fresh perspectives on your prioritisation strategies and offer suggestions for improvement based on their wealth of experience.
Conclusion
Becoming a successful product leader is a journey filled with challenges, but with effective prioritisation strategies in place, aspiring UK product managers can confidently navigate the complexities of their roles.
By embracing strategic vision, using powerful frameworks, mastering delegation, and staying customer-focused, these managers can rise above the daily chaos and concentrate on tasks that truly matter. Through these strategies, aspiring product leaders can confidently lead their teams towards innovation and success, impacting the products they create and the businesses they serve.
Data Management Platforms (DMP), are certainly a hot topic as companies look to take more control over data generated by their various consumer touchpoints and their offline channels.
DMPs also allow these companies to connect their data to third party sources to help fill gaps, provide deeper insights on their customer base and find new correlations in new markets or new opportunities to improve the customer journey.
In this DMP Buyer’s Guide, I will be outlining the top 12 things to look for when going through a DMP selection process. These are not meant to be easy questions for the vendor. They are designed to give you the best information to make the best decision on which vendor you should choose.
Technology
The DMP is a complex system that does a lot of things. It is therefore important to start to understand how the technology works and some of the underlying processes and methods the system uses.
How many server to server implementations does the DMP have?
What is the process for on-boarding a new vendor that is not listed?
How does the DMP approach mobile data, tracking and cross device?
How does the DMP approach data matching with other providers?
Do they have a built-in marketplace? If so, which vendors are available?
Do they use mapping tables, server to server or real-time to match data?
What are the current average match rates?
Is real-time really real-time?
Data Ingestion
The main use of a DMP is to collect, store and organise data. Therefore it is of paramount importance for you to understand the types, method and complexity of 1st, 2nd and 3rd party data the platform can ingest.
1st Party Data
First party data being data that your company has generated on their owned platforms.
Analytics
CRM
Offline data – in-store for example
2nd Party Data
Second party data is another company’s 1st party data.
Can the platform facilitate 2nd party data sharing?
Do they have 2nd party data exchanges within their platform?
If so, what could be applicable for this company?
3rd Party Data
Third party data is another company’s data and is generally anonymous or aggregated online only data – such as Experian, MasterCard and Acxiom who can supply information such as demographics, propensity to purchase etc.
How many and which vendors are available within the platform?
Which suppliers are most relevant for the company?
Audience Segmentation
The whole point of a DMP is to collect data about users and to create audience groups based on a series of criteria and rules. So it is really important to understand how easy is it to set these up and how they work.
What tools does the platform have?
Do they offer any professional services in this area?
Any algorithmic segment capabilities?
What predefined taxonomies exist?
Any dynamic / algorithmic taxonomies?
Does the platform employ any machine learning or AI?
If so, what does it do?
Does it only improve my capabilities or does it improve for other clients?
User Experience
Your DMP is not going to be used by only technical people. It is likely to be used by marketing, sales and other teams, so it needs to be easy to use and intuitive.
User management – super users through to read only
Are there video tutorials available on demand? How is the help section formatted and is it easily searchable?
Media Delivery
If you are going to activate your data in the DMP across various media channels, it is important that you know which channels and see which vendors the DMP already has integrations with and for how long.
Matching user IDs between partners is generally automated. If you need the DMP to integrate with a new vendor, this can be challenging, expensive and it can take time for the DMP to create a matching database.
Go in with your eyes open.
Which media channels / vendors does the DMP have integrated already?
Which ones are the most important to the client?
Will the client need to change suppliers?
What is the process to on-board new suppliers if needed?
Costs involved? Timings?
Any limitations?
Reports
Getting the right data into the platform is massively important, but just as important is the insight you get from that data. So make sure that you find out about the analytical tools the platform provides to measure audiences and media performance.
What are the reporting capabilities in the platform? What is available?
Data overlap / lookalike / quality measures (reach, cost, relevancy)
Can the DMP ingest performance data – programmatic, biddable, search?
If so, how easy is it to integrate?
Custom reporting capabilities and any associated costs
Standard Dashboards
Resourcing
Rolling out a DMP can often be a long and drawn out process. It is important that as a client, you have enough time and resources to make sure that the right data is going into the platform.
It is also important that the vendor ensures that they are deploying enough resources to make the partnership a success. Whatever they put in the contract, make sure you question the assumptions and understand any processes in place.
Set-up resource support from vendor
Fully resourced team included in the cost?
Additional service at a cost?
Ongoing resource support
Training approach
How do they service the account?
Level of support?
Privacy
Approach and compliance to industry and legal privacy rules.
What provisions are in place around European Privacy laws and future changes?
SOX compliance?
What processes are in place to avoid any PII issues with CRM for instance?
Can PII make it into the system? What defences are in place?
Commercials
Often, the commercials focus on how many profiles the platform will be storing or how much traffic is hitting their servers from the web site tags or SDKs.
It is also important to understand costs around matching your data to other data sources and for any bespoke work that needs to be completed.
Need to think about 2nd / 3rd party data matching
Integrating new partners
Custom work with 1st party data requirements
Client base
As a potential new vendor relationship, it is important to understand if the vendor has worked in your industry before and with similar businesses. Will this be a voyage of discovery for the vendor? How likely will they be to make mistakes?
Any similar clients?
Typical use cases that the DMP has already fulfilled?
Non-typical – things that clients have learned that they weren’t expecting or found surprising
Existing relationship
Sometimes these technology suppliers are owned by a larger company – Krux is owned by Salesforce for example. Sometimes, if you already have a large engagement with a specific vendor, your rates could be reduced as a result.
Has the vendor already got technology or products within your business?
Roadmap
It is important to understand how the product will be improved over time and in which areas the vendor is focusing. Is it in line with your own plans? What are the main challenges they are responding to?
What is planned for future releases?
Access to Alphas and Betas?
Mobile plans?
What influence could client have on the product roadmap?
How often does the company release? How are clients notified?
I have always prided myself on my management and leadership skills throughout my career.
I have always tried to be extremely conscious of leading by example, giving colleagues freedom to make their own decisions and to foster trust, self organisation and ownership within teams that I have managed.
In hindsight, I feel that this has been the illusion of leadership dressed up as good management and I have only had my first real experience of myself as a leader very recently.
One of the teams that I am responsible for is recruiting for a new team member. I had left the team’s director and team leader to run the recruitment process and I would only be involved at second interview stage to sense check and offer a second opinion.
The two people that I met with were very different and I had quite strong opinions on whom we should hire.
Being relatively new to my role, I have already built up a strong relationship with the team’s director and I know how long it has taken him to build up his team and to build a great level of trust, self organisation and ownership – much like how I have prided my teams in the past.
There I was, sat with him and his Team Lead trying to convince him that my opinion was right. I caught myself doing this and very quickly realised that I had been on the other side of the table on the receiving end of such a conversation in the past and how I had felt.
I’m meant to be helping, coaching, and mentoring; not dictating, persuading and influencing like other managers had done to me.
Very quickly I stopped what I was saying mid-conversation and apologised. I explained that I was letting my passion for doing what I felt right for the team, cloud what I should have been doing… Trusting my team to self organise and own the process. Going against the very principles that I had prided myself on.
This has been a very important lesson for me and this is definitely a moment where I can see my leadership qualities starting to come out.
Being self conscious and striving to lead is important, but it really needs to come from within and be a part of you. It also takes time to learn and for it to be a natural part of your everyday being.
I have read many books and blog posts on leadership so I know the theory. Even though I have been putting these things I have learned into practise, it’s only now that I feel that I am taking that important first step into being a great leader.
Digital Analytics is becoming more and more core to a business’ strategy. Without a good Digital Analytics team and implementation in place, a business cannot measure its performance, set KPIs, test new functionality and spot opportunities for new product development.
After working with different analytics platofrms and more recently running the Digital Analytics team at IPC Media, I am highlighting some of the challenges that companies and teams face on a daily basis to help better prepare you to make more informed decisions.
Finding the right analytics tool for the job
How do you decide which analytics platform to choose? If you want a traditional analytics product for free, then Google Analytics is the first port of call for most people – but there are limitations.
The free version is extremely fully featured and initially very simple to implement. Just past the code into your site and away you go. Some issues are that you only get 5 custom variables and is limited to 10million hits. Anything above 10million may not be collected.
This is is generally fine for a lot of smaller web sites, but isn’t really scalable for larger organisation. For that, Google has a premium version of Google Analytics that massively increases the number of custom variables and hits.
Some limitations that I find with Google Analytics are:
Data sampling – when looking at segmented data and longer time frames, Google Analytics samples the data to ensure the speed of the interface. This causes issues because the advertising and business want to see the raw numbers.
Unsampeld data – to get the raw data is cumbersome. Also, the GA APIs can contain sampled data as well. They do have an integration with Google Big Query, but again, this is not very straight forward
Limited dashboards – the dashboards can be effective if kept simple, but most of the time you cannot do what you want to do. No customisation is possible and you can only add 12 reportlets to the dashboard.
Custom metrics – you can only use the metrics deemed important by Google. You cannot create your own metrics such as pages per user, time spend per user, etc.
I currently use Google Analytics Premium at work. We did used to use Adobe Analytics which is actually a superior product, but is also considerably more expensive. It does not sample data, allows for more customisation and you can create your own metrics. Google Analytics is definitely getting there with this with Universal Analytics.
I have not yet upgraded our sites to Universal Analytics, so I cannot really comment on it just yet.
There are also a number of new tools on the block such as MixPanel, ChartBeat and Parse.ly. These offer a different take on analytics – looking at tracking events rather than traditional page views (MixPanel) and real-time analytics (ChartBeat and Parse.ly).
In addition, whatever tool you decide to use, a good Tag Management system is really beneficial. A Tag Management system allows you to paste a container tag into your templates and you can then serve any javascript (such as web analytics) into it via an interface.
It means that whenever you want to make a change you do not need to change code on the site. A lot of these Tag Management systems also allow you to listen out for certain events to fire before tracking is collected – so a click on a button, a specific page load, signing up to a newsletter etc.
Having the right tools is one thing. The next most important thing is to ensure that you have the right people in place to be able to help set a sound analytics strategy, implement the code, analyse the data and make recommendations.
Ideally, you would also ensure that the culture within the business focuses on this data and uses it to help direct decision making. What’s the point in having great data if its not being used.
I am finding that you get a real mix of people through job sites like LinkedIn and TotalJobs. I would recommend trying to build a network of analysts through meet ups like Web Analytics Wednesdays and MeasureCamp.
Hiring a good analyst is key here. If you are just starting out on your Analytics journey, I could not recommend more you hiring a good analyst with at least 3-5 years’ experience. I would also suggest that you get someone who has implementation experience as this will really help you to have the right tracking in place for the metrics that are important to your business.
I would suggest either trying to headhunt or use an agency for this initial hire.
There are a lot of very good contractors out there, but they can be relatively expensive. In my experience, good permanent analysts are not actively searching for roles on LinkedIn and other job sites. They work with agencies and you need to work hard to find them.
The only other route would be to work with an analytics agency. I have only worked with two – Acceleration for an Adobe SiteCatalyst implementation project and Periscopix for our move to Google Analytics Premium and ongoing consultancy. Both of whom I would recommend to anyone asking.
Training
Having the right people in place is obviously important, but so too is keeping their skills inline with current trends and new technologies. So too is training up your existing workforce to be able to pull basic reports themselves – lightening the load on your Digital Analytics team so that they can focus on the bigger stuff.
It can be quite difficult to find decent training programmes and they can be quite expensive.
In terms of paid for courses, we have recently completed a review and found the following:
http://www.marketmotive.com/ – Market Motive has some great courses to keep your team up to date in the industry
http://www.digitalanalyticsassociation.org/ – This is the official Digital Analytics Association where they do courses with University of British Columbia. These are more long term courses and a great way to become a certified analyst
Tracking cookies vs tracking people
As most analytics platforms base their data on cookies, you need to understand that you are not tracking people. You are tracking a cookie on a device. This in itself leads to multiple tracking of individual users. A user could visit your site across their laptop, their mobile phone and their tablet. This one person would be tracked with three seperate cookies, and therefore as three unique users.
In addition, if a user deletes their cookies or uses Private Browsing then they will be tracked as a new user the next time they visit your site. This leads to further duplication and inflation of your user count. More on this in the next section.
Cookie deletion/Private Browsing
I have done some research and its hard to find any definitive numbers on how may users delete their cookies. I found this post from April 2011 which suggests that:
36+% of Australian Internet users delete their third-party cookies in a month according to comScore report (2011)
76% of Safari users block third party cookies according to Gibson Research. (Note: This is super-high because Safari is the only browser that blocks third-party cookies by default)
Its hard to quantify, but there are a lot of people now using Private Browsing. This blog post from May 2012 suggests that 19% of survey respondents use private browsing. You can imagine that this number is now higher, two years on.
Private Browsing only stores cookies and browser history for the duration that the window is opened. As soon as the browser is closed, all cookies and data that would normally be stored by the browser is deleted.
One thing that Private Browsing doesn’t do is stop your internet activity being viewed by third parties – such as ISPs, governments or hackers – so be aware of this.
This means that any time a user comes to your web site in Private Browsing mode, they are tracked as a new user – and duplication occurs.
Campaign tracking
Campaign Tracking
In terms of campaign tracking, I am referring to how you can use the UTM campaign parameters in Google Analytics to help to organise and define your marketing efforts. Google has a great tool called the URL Builder. This is really simple to use – you just paste the url you want to track, add the relevant parameters, click submit and it gives you the newly tracked url.
You can use this to track specific content that you are posting on social media, into email newsletters or for tracking PPC campaigns for example.
What you need to be very clear on is your strategy for naming conventions. I work for a very large publishing company and I see many different teams using the different campaign variables in different ways. Some people use capitalisation, they mix the source and the medium.
Also, sometimes they post the wrong tracking on the wrong web site – in other words, they post a link that they are attributing to Twitter but post it on Facebook.
This is bad because by using campaign tracking, you are overriding the defaults of the system.
This is the thing to remember. Let’s say that I wanted to promote a blog post from my site on LinkedIn. If I didn’t use campaign tracking, any traffic coming from the LinkedIn site would appear as a referral. I wouldn’t know if it was as a result of me posting the link or someone else. By using Campaign Tracking, I can attribute my posting to my efforts:
You can see from the link above, that I am declaring that linkedin will be attributed to the source, social as the medium and blog-posting as the campaign name.
If I was to post this same link on Facebook, rather than Facebook being given attribution for the referral the UTM parameters will override the defaults and attribute the traffic to LinkedIn. So you need to be ever so careful when posting these links and make sure that whatever the values are for the parameters, that you have a consistent naming convention.
Also, one last thing on this point, do not use campaign tracking for internal links!Whenever a user clicks on a link with campaign tracking, a new visit is started, even if it is in the middle of an existing visit. Instead, look to use events to track internal marketing campaigns.
Tracking traffic from Apps
One of the issues with Web Analytics systems is how referrals work. I’ll try to keep it brief as it can get complicated. In short, web analytics systems look at header information stored in the web browser to work out whether there was a referrer and if so, the url of that refferal.
A referral occurs when a user clicks on a link from one web site to another in a web browser.
When a user clicks on a link from an app, the mobile device starts up a new browser session and sends the user to that web site. Your analytics tool will not see a referral in the headers because the user did not click a link in a web browser, they clicked the link in an app.
The only way around this is to use campaign tracking of any links that may appear on apps. The main situations where this could occur are social media and email apps.
As you have seen above, by using campaign tracking, you can override the defaults. The default action when clicking on a link for analytics tools is to set the source as direct. If you used campaign tracking, this would be replaced with the attributed described in the variables.
Obviously you cannot do this for content that is shared organically by your users, but as long as you do this for any content you share yourself, you at least know that you are attributing a large amount of traffic to the right source.
Implementation
IPC Media has well over 50 web sites, so having a standardised implementation across the board really helps with insight and analysis. I have mentioned earlier in the post about using a tag management system to serve your analytics tags. We have not yet done this, but we are working towards this – and it will make such a difference to us.
Just having the ability to centrally manage the implementation across all the web sites using an interface reduces the time to market of any changes that need to be made.
In addition, it takes a lot of the stress away from the development team as well as needing to get work prioritised by the business in the planning meetings. My analysts can make improvements/changes as and when required with changes easy to roll back.
Fortunately I was very clear on the requirements for the implementation of analytics at IPC Media, but I realise that others may not be. My recommendation here is to start with a minimum implementation and incrementally add to it.
Once I had my minimum implementation in place, the plan was to then incrementally improve the implementation by adding new features and events such as newsletter sign ups, competition entries etc once the page level implementation was complete.
Remember, your data is only as good as your implementation so I cannot stress enough how important it is to have someone who has experience of analytics implementation in your team looking at this on a regular basis.
Data Sampling in GA
If you didn’t know already, Google Analytics samples data for a number of reasons that you can read about in this article, How sampling works in Google Analytics.
Although Google Analytics Premium offers unsampled reporting, you have you specifically request each report which takes time and is a manual process. The API also returns sampled data.
Google Analytics Premium has integrated to Google Big Query which does allow you to look at hit level data to get the unsampled data. The sign up process is cumbersome with approvals required from the Google Analytics Premium team at Google. In addition, all data is put into daily tables, therefore you need to create complex queries to get the data you need out of it.
What I would love to see is that the regular Google Analytics API return unsampled data if you are a Premium user. Or at least I am given the choice of having a slower interface to get the raw data!
Big Data
Big Data
Big Data is one of those terms that will either get you really excited or will daunt you. For me it is the latter. I really do think that there is a lot of value to implementing Big Data solutions but only if you need it. If you are well organised, then you can quite easily bring together multiple data sources relatively cheaply and without much difficulty.
Big Data works well when you are dealing with millions and millions of rows of raw data that is unstructured and that needs a lot of filtering. In essence, tools like Google Analytics are big data platforms – just specifically for web analytics.
You can have all the systems in place, collecting every single scrap of data that your business is collecting, but without the right business questions and workers in place this data will just sit there and cost you money.
As with all these systems, I would suggest that you make sure you are extremely clear on what the KPIs are for your business and decide on the right analytics strategy. Don’t just collect data for data’s sake. Only collect the data you need to make the right decision.
I originally posted this on my LinkedIn profile, but felt that it was a good one to make available on my blog as well.
Responsive web design, if done correctly, can be a great way to ensure that your users get a consistent experience across all devices. The idea is that you have one code base (html and css) that covers different screen-sizes and renders the same content differently for these different screen-sizes. When a change needs to be made, it only needs to be made once – but still needs to be tested across multiple platforms.
Before responsive became more universally used, you would have separate code bases for each rendering of your web site – so for desktop, mobile and tablet, you would have three different code bases. This means that when a change needs to be made, or you add a new content type etc, your developers would need to make changed in three different places and still be tested across multiple platforms.
On the face of it, responsive solves a lot of problems. It ensures that only one code base needs to be maintained and that users get a consistent experience across all devices. All this sounds great, but I can’t help but think that we are missing something – motivation and context.
Motivation and Context
Users access the web across different devices for different reasons at different times of day and by using different methods of discovery. Does one design/experience suit all of our users?
With a responsive site (in most cases), the navigational architecture of the site is consistent, the homepage hierarchies are consistent, the related articles are consistent, the most popular articles are consistent etc.
I find that both from my own experiences and from the data that I am seeing from my position as Analytics Director is that users want different content depending on which platform they are accessing a site on.
When I am on a desktop device – whether its at home or at work – I tend to use Google more to find things that I want to know about. I’ll search for something specific and will only want to really read about that one thing. It will lead me to bounce and not be very valuable to the web site that I am visiting.
Don’t get me wrong, there are some sites that I am very loyal (mainly centered around social, news and sports) that I am very loyal to, but outside of that I find that I am a serial bouncer when it comes to the Desktop. I need one hit information. I am not in browsing mode here.
My mobile phone browsing is driven a lot more my social media. Again, I have my loyal sites that I will frequent directly regardless of device, but overall, my mobile web consumption is driven by what I see on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. I am more likely to be accessing the web during down time – traveling, breaks from work, boredom – so I am much more likely to browse and enjoy my experience.
My tablet is more used as a second screen. I don’t tend to be using it as a second screen based on what I am watching, but more as a way to keep me entertained when my wife is watching Secret Eaters, Celebrity Big Brother, Come Dine With Me etc. So my behaviour here is a hybrid between Desktop and Mobile – which I suppose is one of the main points of having a tablet!
The data that I have access to is showing me the same thing. I find that Google dominates acquisition for Desktop, social for mobile and an equal mix for tablet.
This leads me back to my question – is responsive enough?
I could not agree more that having a single code base makes the most sense. I also agree that content should render correctly across all devices. But what I do not agree with is that one experience suits all.
What happens when users on desktop are more interested and only access content that ranks highly on SEO? So news stories, one shot pieces of information that are important at that moment in time.
And on mobile, what happens when that gallery is proving popular or a top 10 list drives traffic. This is very different to the desktop experience.
Likewise with Tablet being a hybrid of the two.
So what do I suggest?
I am not and have not come up with a new concept for web site design. What I am suggesting however is that we take a step back and see if there is some form of hybrid – where we can take responsive design but make it adaptive to the context of the user.
Ensure that we can change the experience to better reflect what a web site is offering to a specific individual based on behaviour exhibited by others and their context.
To assume that those users that visit your site across multiple devices is arrogant – its something to strive for, but in my experience it is just not the case.
I think that different devices should be designed for differently based on behaviour and that we need to be more fluid in site hierarchies and functionality that best suites the devices that the content is being consumed on.
I would really like to hear what other people’s experiences are and whether you feel that responsive is enough – or if you think its missing something and if you can put your finger on what that is!
Regex, or Regular Expressions, can be a seriously powerful tool when creating custom segments, reports and filters. They allow you to go beyond the already powerful standard click and select functionality that comes as standard with Google Analytics.
There are plenty of resources available out there to help with this, but they can get quite technical. I hope to bring together the regex patterns that I find the most useful, and hopefully you will to.
If you have any use cases that you are having trouble with, please add them to the comments below and I will help you to find the best way to use regex to solve them.
I will be keeping this blog post up to date so please do bookmark and check back every once in a while.
Useful Regex
The Wildcard
If you want to see traffic to a specific section of your site using your url structure, then this regex is the one for you. This technique can be applied to anything where you want to match a word or phrase within a string (in this case a keyword in a url).
In your filter ensure that you select Page for the URL, Regex for the condition and (.*)2013(.*)
In this example, the filter will return any page that has “2013” in the url. You could use this for anything where you are trying to match a specific work within a string of letters and numbers.
The regex (.*) is essentially a wildcard that, when placed before and/or after a keyword allows you to say to Google Analytics, please give me everything where this word appears.
The OR Regex
There is a regex condition that allows you to find multiple keywords in the page title. Let’s say that you wanted to find all content that relates to Christmas. You could create a filter on a Page Title report that only pulls in data based on a certain set of words.
You do this by using a PIPE:
In your filter, ensure that you select Page Title, Regex as the condition and then your keywords – which should look like:
christmas|santa|noel|mince pie|holly|misteltoe
The filter will return any pages where the page title contains the keywords listed above. Remember not to add a PIPE at the end of your keyword list as this will result in returning all pages.
The give me something specific Regex
Let’s say that you wanted to filter only traffic from Facebook and Twitter in your All Traffic Report in Google Analytics. To do this, you need to use Regex.
Go to the All Traffic report and select Source as your dimension rather than Source/Medium, then click on Advanced Filter. In the filter, you need to add the following to ensure that you only include traffic from Facebook and Twitter:
facebook|twitter|^t.co$
By using the PIPE, you are ensuring that any of the keywords you added are included. The ^t.co$ ensures that you are only including traffic from Twitter’s redirecting url, t.co.
If you hadn’t encased the keyword with the ^ and $ symbols, you would have seen sources that contained t.co – for example pinterest.com and other domains.
Marissa Mayer seems to be everywhere at the moment. Whenever I am on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, I’m seeing news in all my feeds at the moment. Obviously since taking the CEO and President of Yahoo roles her profile while already large when at Google, seems to have increased exponentially.
One of the things that I realised was that I had never actually seen a video of her speaking. All I ever really saw was a similar shot taken of her smiling when on a forum or during a presentation – much like the image above. So I thought I would search on YouTube for some videos and I stumbled across this relatively short video interview of Marissa Mayer with Charlie Rose for the IAB.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zP1p8ZTCio
Mayer on The Importance of Listening
In the video, Marissa Mayer discusses what its like to be a CEO and her early successes. One of the main things that she said that resonated with me was this:
I think the most important thing I have learned about being a CEO is the importance of listening. People talk about what changes as you grow in your career. Someone pointed out to me which I think is really true is that early in your career you get ahead by following the rules perfectly. Like getting things done on time, like following the rules and meeting expectations.
Mayer on Breaking the Rules
Another pertinent point that Marissa Mayer went on to say was that its important to understand when to break the rules and when the rules do not apply.
When you become an executive it becomes knowing when to break the rules or knowing when the rules do not apply.
I must say that I have been impressed with Marissa Mayer and her leadership of Yahoo. They have seen traffic increase, been building new products and innovating.
I believe that to grow in the digital space, you need to be doing all of those things. Without building new products, innovating and focus, you will be left behind. Big businesses are competing against small start ups who are amassing large groups of users without worrying about how to monetise this audience until much later.
Too often I see big companies shooting great ideas down because of lack of investment or lack of resource. While I understand how traditional businesses work, this is not how the company with grow. They need to take more risks. They need to start pushing the boundaries.
When faced with a new platform, they tend to just try to repurpose their existing products on to it, rather than taking advantage of the technology and trying something new.
I’ll be keeping a close eye on Marissa Mayer and Yahoo as I think that they are on course to grow further and surprise a lot of people on the way.
Leadership is something that I am really passionate about – and reading articles to help me to be a better leader is hugely important and I just read an article on LinkedIn entitled Great Leadership Starts and Ends with This which really resonated with me.
The Best Leadership Advice EverI was struggling to engage the audience. Okay, forget struggling — I was dying onstage. Maybe I was having an off day. Maybe they were having an off day.
In short, Jeff Haden (the article’s writer) was talking in front of a number of CEOs and senior managers and out of the blue asked them what makes a great leader.
Not expecting any response from them, one of the CEOs chirped up with No one cares how much you know until they first know how much you care about them.
He went on to explain that you can convey to employees what the company strategy, vision and goals are and they might care for a short period of time, but they will then go back to what they normally do. It doesn’t resonate with them and doesn’t necessarily change their behaviours.
Only when a leader demonstrates their passion and how much they care about their employees will it really make a difference. He went on to say:
“We can try to communicate and engage and connect all we want but no one really listens. They just smile and nod and go back to doing their jobs the way they always do.
“Our employees don’t really care about what we want them to do until they know how much we care about them. When employees know — truly know — that you care about them, then they will care about you. And when they know you care, then they will listen to you… and then they will do anything for you.”
This really resonated with me. I have had a few different managers in my time and by far the best one was the one who cared about me and my career. Others who have either just barked orders or dictated what needed to be done and how didn’t inspire me or motivate me.
A great leader trusts their employees
It was under this manager who cared that I really progressed through the company. I completely bought into his strategy, which in turn allowed my team to buy into it as well. I learned that you need to nurture a good working environment and build up a level of trust to really engage with your employees and for them to engage with the business.
This really is the only other point I would make on this. Not only does a great leader care about their employees, they also trust them. Great employees are able to make decisions, try new things, feel comfortable to fail and learn from their mistakes.
My recipe: Great leaders create great employees which in turn makes these leaders even better – repeat.
I know that there is a lot more to it than this, but I felt that this article was worth highlighting as it gave a slightly different, tangible and achievable example of great leadership.
Measuring referrals from mobile and tablet apps to web sites is extremely difficult – actually, its practically impossible. Over the past few years you will have seen traffic from direct/typed/bookmarked sources increase steadily as app usage has increased. Unfortunately this is not because your web site has become a destination for your chosen content, but instead its because your analytics platforms are unable to attribute traffic to apps.
I am specifically finding traffic from social media apps, so Facebook and Twitter, the hardest to track down. There are techniques that I discuss below that can help you to track content that you post yourself, but unfortunately this doesn’t help with organic sharing.
While Facebook Insights for domains does give you some level of overall referrer information, it does not breakdown the traffic between desktop and mobile.
This post explains why your analytics package is currently unable to track this traffic and tries to find some solutions to help you to make sense of it all.
So how do analytics platforms track referrals?
Most analytics packages use header information contained in your user’s web browser to determine which site the user had been to previously to visiting your web site. This header information only appears if a user clicks on a link to your site. For example, if I am on web site A, click on a link to web site B, then the header information would show that the referrer was web site A.
Just so we are clear, if I am on web site C, then type web site D’s domain name into my web browser, then there would be no referrer and the traffic source would be Direct.
No referrer in the header
This latter example explains why measuring app traffic is extremely difficult; an app is not a web site, it is not viewed in a web browser and they do not contain header information when linking out to a web site.
There are two different techniques that apps can use to open up web content:
Open the content in a native mobile or tablet browser – such as Safari, Chrome, Android Browser, Opera etc
Open the content in an in-app version of the native browser
In both cases, because the app is opening up a new instance of a web browser, whether its the native browser app or the in-app version of the browser app, there is no referrer in the headers. So when your analytics package is seeing the user visiting your web site, it is seeing that there is no referral and it will deem the traffic to have no source and therefore assign that referral as direct.
So how can we track app referral traffic?
There are a couple of things that we can do as content creators to get around this:
If you use Google Analytics, you can use the built in UTM tracker to track links that you post to other web sites or platforms. Quite a few URL shortening services and sharing plaforms such as Buffer, Bit.ly and Owl.ly allow you to add these dynamically so you don’t need to keep adding the tracking manually.
When a user visits your site using a UTM tracked link, this will override what is contained in the web browser’s header and attribute the source of the traffic to relevant keyword that you add to the tracking. You need to be very careful here as I have seen instances where these have been setup incorrectly and links posted to Facebook with Twitter as the source have been shared which makes the data inconsistent and unreliable.
One thing to note on this, is to only use this method for external, inbound site links. You should not use these links on internal links as they automatically start a new site visit – meaning that you will see a spike in visits whenever someone clicks on your tracked links.
Using a similar service for other analytics platforms:
Many other analytics platforms have a similar method for campaign tracking. While these have been primarily used for more traditional marketing campaign tracking, there is no reason why you cannot do use this same method for the sharing of content.
Limitations
This would only work for content that you share yourself. There is no way to enforce this for any organic shares – so when a user copies and pastes a url from your web sites into a social status update for example.
Also, as you cannot post content to a specific device or platform, you cannot differentiate easily between a social media’s desktop, mobile web or mobile app experience. So while you may get closer to tracking Facebook traffic, you will still not know the make up of desktop, mobile web or mobile app referrals.
