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• Marketing Cohort Analysis : How To Do It (With Examples)

  12 janvier 2024, par Erin

  The better you understand your customers, the more effective your marketing will become. 

  The good news is you don’t need to run expensive focus groups to learn much about how your customers behave. Instead, you can run a marketing cohort analysis using data from your website analytics.

  A marketing cohort groups your users by certain traits and allows you to drill down to discover why they take the actions on your website they do. 

  In this article, we’ll explain what a marketing cohort analysis is, show you what you can achieve with this analytical technique and provide a step-by-step guide to pulling it off. 

  What is cohort analysis in marketing ?

  A marketing cohort analysis is a form of behavioural analytics where you analyse the behavioural patterns of users who share a similar trait to better understand their actions. 

  These shared traits could be anything like the date they signed up for your product, users who bought your service through a paid ad or email subscribers from the United Kingdom.

  It’s a fantastic way to improve your marketing efforts, allowing you to better understand complex user behaviours, personalise campaigns accordingly and improve your ROI. 

  You can run marketing analysis using an analytics platform like Google Analytics or Matomo. With these platforms, you can measure how cohorts perform using traffic, engagement and conversion metrics.

  

  There are two types of cohort analysis : acquisition-based cohort analysis and behavioural-based cohort analysis.

  Acquisition-based cohort analysis

  An acquisition-based cohort divides users by the date they purchased your product or service and tracks their behaviour afterward. 

  For example, one cohort could be all the users who signed up for your product in November. Another could be the users who signed up for your product in October. 

  You could then run a cohort analysis to see how the behaviour of the two cohorts differed. 

  Did the November cohort show higher engagement rates, increased frequency of visits post-acquisition or quicker conversions compared to the October cohort ? Analysing these cohorts can help with refining marketing strategies, optimising user experiences and improving retention and conversion rates.

  As you can see from the example, acquisition-based cohorts are a great way to track the initial acquisition and how user behaviour evolves post-acquisition.

  Behavioural-based cohort analysis

  A behavioural-based cohort divides users by their actions on your site. That could be their bounce rate, the number of actions they took on your site, their average time on site and more.

  

  Behavioural cohort analysis gives you a much deeper understanding of user behaviour and how they interact with your website.

  What can you achieve with a marketing cohort analysis ?

  A marketing cohort analysis is a valuable tool that can help marketers and product teams achieve the following goals :

  

  Understand which customers churn and why

  Acquisition and behavioural cohort analyses help marketing teams understand when and why customers leave. This is one of the most common goals of a marketing cohort analysis. 

  Learn which customers are most valuable

  Want to find out which channels create the most valuable customers or what actions customers take that increase their loyalty ? You can use a cohort analysis to do just that. 

  For example, you may find out you retain users who signed up via direct traffic better than those that signed up from an ad campaign. 

  Discover how to improve your product

  You can even use cohort analysis to identify opportunities to improve your website and track the impact of your changes. For example, you could see how visitor behaviour changes after a website refresh or whether visitors who take a certain action make more purchases. 

  Find out how to improve your marketing campaign

  A marketing cohort analysis makes it easy to find out which campaigns generate the best and most profitable customers. For example, you can run a cohort analysis to determine which channel (PPC ads, organic search, social media, etc.) generates customers with the lowest churn rate. 

  If a certain ad campaign generates the low-churn customers, you can allocate a budget accordingly. Alternatively, if customers from another ad campaign churn quickly, you can look into why that may be the case and optimise your campaigns to improve them. 

  Measure the impact of changes

  You can use a behavioural cohort analysis to understand what impact changes to your website or product have on active users. 

  If you introduced a pricing page to your website, for instance, you could analyse the behaviour of visitors who interacted with that page compared to those who didn’t, using behavioural cohort analysis to gauge the impact of these website changes on engagemen or conversions.

  The problem with cohort analysis in Google Analytics

  Google Analytics is often the first platform marketers turn to when they want to run a cohort analysis. While it’s a free solution, it’s not the most accurate or easy to use and users often encounter various issues. 

  For starters, Google Analytics can’t process user visitor data if they reject cookies. This can lead to an inaccurate view of traffic and compromise the reliability of your insights.

  In addition, GA is also known for sampling data, meaning it provides a subset rather than the complete dataset. Without the complete view of your website’s performance, you might make the wrong decisions, leading to less effective campaigns, missed opportunities and difficulties in reaching marketing goals.

  How to analyse cohorts with Matomo

  Luckily, there is an alternative to Google Analytics. 

  As the leading open-source web analytics solution, Matomo offers a robust option for cohort analysis. With its 100% accurate data, thanks to the absence of sampling, and its privacy-friendly tracking, users can rely on the data without resorting to guesswork. It is a premium feature included with our Matomo Cloud or available to purchase on the Matomo Marketplace for Matomo On-Premise users.

  Below, we’ll show how you can run a marketing cohort analysis using Matomo.

  Set a goal

  Setting a goal is the first step in running a cohort analysis with any platform. Define what you want to achieve from your analysis and choose the metrics you want to measure. 

  For example, you may want to improve your customer retention rate over the first 90 days. 

  Define cohorts

  Next, create cohorts by defining segmentation criteria. As we’ve discussed above, this could be acquisition-based or behavioural. 

  Matomo makes it easy to define cohorts and create charts. 

  In the sidebar menu, click Visitors > Cohorts. You’ll immediately see Matomo’s standard cohort report (something like the one below).

  

  In the example above, we’ve created cohorts by bounce rate. 

  You can view cohorts by weekly, monthly or yearly periods using the date selector and change the metric using the dropdown. Other metrics you can analyse cohorts by include :

  • Unique visitors
  • Return visitors
  • Conversion rates
  • Revenue
  • Actions per visit

  Change the data selection to create your desired cohort, and Matomo will automatically generate the report. 

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  Analyse your cohort chart

  Cohort charts can be intimidating initially, but they are pretty easy to understand and packed with insights. 

  Here’s an example of an acquisition-based cohort chart from Matomo looking at the percentage of returning visitors :

  

  Cohorts run vertically. The oldest cohort (visitors between February 13 – 19) is at the top of the chart, with the newest cohort (April 17 – 23) at the bottom. 

  The period of time runs horizontally — daily in this case. The cells show the corresponding value for the metric we’re plotting (the percentage of returning visitors). 

  For example, 98.69% of visitors who landed on your site between February 13 – 19, returned two weeks later. 

  Usually, running one cohort analysis isn’t enough to identify a problem or find a solution. That’s why comparing several cohort analyses or digging deeper using segmentation is important.

  Segment your cohort chart

  Matomo lets you dig deeper by segmenting each cohort to examine their behaviour’s specifics. You can do this from the cohort report by clicking the segmented visitor log icon in the relevant row.

  

  

  Segmenting cohorts lets you understand why users behave the way they do. For example, suppose you find that users you purchased on Black Friday don’t return to your site often. In that case, you may want to rethink your offers for next year to target an audience with potentially better customer lifetime value. 

  Start using Matomo for marketing cohort analysis

  A marketing cohort analysis can teach you a lot about your customers and the health of your business. But you need the right tools to succeed. 

  Matomo provides an effective and privacy-first way to run your analysis. You can create custom customer segments based on almost anything, from demographics and geography to referral sources and user behaviour. 

  Our custom cohort analysis reports and colour-coded visualisations make it easy to analyse cohorts and spot patterns. Best of all, the data is 100% accurate. Unlike other web analytics solution or cohort analysis tools, we don’t sample data. 

  Find out how you can use Matomo to run marketing cohort analysis by trialling us free for 21 days. No credit card required.

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• Make better marketing decisions with attribution modeling

  19 décembre 2017, par InnoCraft

  Do you suspect some traffic sources are not getting the rewards they deserve ? Do you want to know how much credit each of your marketing channel actually gets ?

  When you look at which referrers contribute the most to your goal conversions or purchases, Matomo (Piwik) shows you only the referrer of the last visit. However, in reality, a visitor often visits a website multiple times from different referrers before they convert a goal. Giving all credit to the referrer of the last visit ignores all other referrers that contributed to a conversion as well.

  You can now push your marketing analysis to the next level with attribution modeling and finally discover the true value of all your marketing channels. As a result, you will be able to shift your marketing efforts and spending accordingly to maximize your success and stop wasting resources. In marketing, studying this data is called attribution modeling.

  Get the true value of your referrers

  Attribution is a premium feature that you can easily purchase from the Matomo (Piwik) marketplace.

  Once installed, you will be able to :

  • identify valuable referrers that you did not see before
  • invest in potential new partners
  • attribute a new level of conversion
  • make this work very easily by filling just a couple of form information

  Identify valuable referrers that you did not see before

  You probably have hundreds or even thousands of different sources listed within the referrer reports. We also guess that you have the feeling that it is always the same referrers which are credited of conversions.
  Guess what, those data are probably biased or at least are not telling you the whole story.
  Why ? Because by default, Matomo (Piwik) only attributes all credit to the last referrer.

  

  It is likely that many non credited sources played a role in the conversion process as well as people often visit your website several times before converting and they may come from different referrers.

  This is exactly where attribution modeling comes into play. With attribution modeling, you can decide which touchpoint you want to study. For example, you can choose to give credit to all the referrers a single visitor came from each time the user visits your website, and not only look at the last one. Without this feature, chances are, that you have spent too much money and / or efforts on the wrong referrer channels in the past because many referrers that contributed to conversions were ignored. Based on the insights you get by applying different attribution models, you can make better decisions on where to shift your marketing spending and efforts.

  Invest in potential new partners

  Once you apply different attribution models, you will find out that you need to consider a new list of referrers which you before either over- or under-estimated in terms of how much they contributed to your conversions. You probably did not identify those sources before because Matomo (Piwik) shows only the last referrer before a conversion. But you can now also look at what these newly discovered referrers are saying about your company, looking for any advertising programs they may offer, getting in contact with the owner of the website, and more.

  Apply up to 6 different attribution models

  By default, Matomo (Piwik) is attributing the conversion to the last referrer only. With attribution modeling you can analyze 6 different models :

  • Last Interaction : the conversion is attributed to the last referrer, even if it is a direct access.
  • Last Non-Direct : the conversion is attributed to the last referrer, but not in the case of a direct access.
  • First Interaction : the conversion is attributed to the first referrer which brought you the visit.
  • Linear : whatever the number of referrers which brought you the conversion, they will all get the same value.
  • Position Based : first and last referrer will be attributed 40% each the conversion value, the remaining 60% is divided between the rest of the referrers.
  • Time Decay : this attribution model means that the closer to the date of the conversion is, the more your last referrers will get credit.

  Those attribution models will enable you to analyze all your referrers deeply and increase your conversions.

  Let’s look at an example where we are comparing two models : “last interaction” and “first interaction”. Our goal is to identify whether some referrers that we are currently considering as less important, are finally playing a serious role in the total amount of conversions :

  

  Comparing Last Interaction model to First Interaction model

  Here it is interesting to observe that the website www.hongkiat.com is bringing almost 90% conversion more with the first interaction model rather than the last one.

  As a result we can look at this website and take the following actions :

  • have a look at the message on this website
  • look at opportunities to change the message
  • look at opportunities to display extra marketing messages
  • get in contact with the owner to identify any other communication opportunities

  The Multi Channel Attribution report

  Attribution modeling in Matomo (Piwik) does not require you to add any tracking code. The only thing you need is to install the plugin and let the magic happen.
  Simple as pie is the word you should keep in mind for this feature. Once installed, you will find the report within the goal section, just above the goals you created :

  

  The Multi Attribution menu

  There you can select the attribution model you would like to apply or compare.

  Attribution modeling is not just about playing with a new report. It is above all an opportunity to increase the number of conversions by identifying referrers that you may have not recognized as valuable in the past. To grow your business, it is crucial to identify the most (and least) successful channels correctly so you can spend your time and money wisely.

  Learn more about Multi Channel Conversion Attribution

  The post Make better marketing decisions with attribution modeling appeared first on Analytics Platform - Matomo.

• How to Track Website Visitors : Benefits, Tools and FAQs

  31 août 2023, par Erin — Analytics Tips, Marketing

  Businesses spend a ton of time, money and effort into creating websites that are not only helpful and captivating, but also highly effective at converting visitors. They’ll create content, revise designs, add new pages and change forms, all in the hope of getting visitors to stay on the site and convert into leads or customers.

  When you track website visitors, you can see which of your efforts are moving the needle. While many people are familiar with pageviews as a metric, website visitor tracking can be much more in-depth and insightful.

  In this article, we’ll cover how website visitor tracking works, what you can track, and how this information can improve sales and marketing results. We’ll also explain global privacy concerns and how businesses can choose the right tracking software. 

  What is website visitor tracking ? 

  Website visitor tracking uses software and applications to track and analyse how visitors interact with your website. It’s a vital tool to help businesses understand whether their website design and content are having the desired effect.

  

  Website visitor tracking includes very broad, non-specific data, like how many times visitors have come to your site. But it can also get very specific, with personal information about the user and even recordings of their visit to your site. Site visits, which may include visiting several different pages of the same site, are often referred to as “sessions.”

  Although Google Analytics is the most widely used website visitor tracking software, it isn’t the most comprehensive or powerful. Companies that want a more in-depth understanding of their website may need to consider running a more precise tool alongside Google Analytics, like Matomo.

  As we’ll cover later, website tracking has many important business applications, but it also poses privacy and security concerns, causing some states and countries to impose strict regulations. Privacy laws and your company’s values should also impact what web analytics tool you choose.

  How website tracking works

  Website tracking starts with the collection of data as users interact with the website. Tracking technologies like cookies, JavaScript and pixels are embedded into web pages. These technologies then gather data about user behaviour, session details and user actions, such as pageviews, clicks, form submissions and more.

  More advanced tracking systems assign unique identifiers (such as cookies or visitor IDs) to individual users. This enables tracking of user journeys across multiple sessions and pages. These detailed journeys can often tell a different story and provide different insights than aggregated numbers do. 

  All this collected data is transmitted from the user’s browser to a centralised tracking system, which can be a third-party web analytics tool or a self-hosted solution. The collected data is stored in databases and processed to generate meaningful insights. This process involves organising the data, aggregating metrics, and creating reports.

  Analytics tools process the collected data to generate reports and visualisations that provide insights into user behaviour. Metrics such as pageviews, bounce rates, conversion rates and user paths are analysed. Good web analytics tools are able to present these insights in a user-friendly way. Analysts and marketing professionals then use this knowledge to make informed decisions to improve the user experience (UX).

  Advanced tracking systems allow data segmentation and filtering based on various criteria, such as user demographics, traffic sources, devices and more. This enables deeper analysis of specific user groups. For example, you might find that your conversion rate is much lower when your website is viewed on a mobile device. You can then dig deeper into that segment of data to find out why and experiment with changes that might increase mobile conversions.

  3 types of website tracking and their benefits

  There are three main categories of website tracking, and they each provide different information that can be used by sales, marketing, engineering and others. Here, we cover those three types and how businesses use them to understand customers and create better experiences.

  Website analytics 

  Website analytics is all about understanding the traffic your website receives. This type of tracking allows you to learn how the website performs based on pageviews, real-time traffic, bounce rate and conversions. 

  For example, you would use website analytics to determine how effectively your homepage drives people toward a product or pricing page. You can use pageviews and previous page statistics to learn how many people who land on your homepage read your blog posts. From there, you could use web analytics to determine the conversion rate of the call to action at the end of each article.

  

  User behaviour

  While website analytics focuses on the website’s performance, user behaviour tracking is about monitoring and quantifying user behaviour. One of the most obvious aspects of user behaviour is what they click on, but there are many other actions you can track. 

  The time a user spends on a page can help you determine whether the content on the page is engaging. Some tracking tools can also measure how far down the page a user scrolls, which reveals whether some content is even being seen. 

  Session recordings are another popular tool for analysing user behaviour. They not only show concrete actions, like clicks, but can also show how the user moves throughout the page. Where do they stop ? What do they scroll right past ? This is one example of how user behaviour data can be quantitative or qualitative.

  Visitor information

  Tracking can also include gathering or uncovering information about visitors to your site. This might include demographic information, such as language and location, or details like what device a website visitor is using and on which browser they view your website. 

  This type of data helps your web and marketing teams make better decisions about how to design and format the site. If you know, for example, that the website for your business-to-business (B2B) software is overwhelmingly viewed on desktop computers, that will affect how you structure your pages and choose images. 

  Similarly, if visitor information tells you that you have a significant audience in France, your marketing team might develop new content to appeal to those potential customers.

  Use website visitor tracking to improve marketing, sales and UX 

  Website visitor tracking has various applications for different parts of your business, from marketing to sales and much more. When you understand the impact tracking has on different teams, you can better evaluate your company’s needs and build buy-in among stakeholders.

  Marketing

  At many companies, the marketing team owns and determines what kind of content is on your website. From landing pages to blog posts to the navigation bar, you want to create an experience that drives people toward making a purchase. When marketers can track website visitors, they can get a real look at how visitors respond to and engage with their marketing efforts. Pageviews, conversion rates and time spent on pages help them better understand what your customers care about and what messaging resonates.

  But web analytics can even help marketing teams better understand how their external marketing campaigns are performing. Tracking tools like Matomo reveal your most important traffic sources. The term “traffic source” refers to the content or web property from which someone arrives at your site. 

  For instance, you might notice that an older page got a big boost in traffic this month. You can then check the traffic sources, where you find that an influential LinkedIn user posted a link to the page. This presents an opportunity to adjust the influencer or social media aspects of your marketing strategy.

  

  Beyond traffic sources, Matomo can provide a visual user journey (also known as User Flow), showing which pages visitors tend to view in a session and even in what order they progress. This gives you a bird’s-eye view of the customer journey.

  Sales

  Just like your marketing team, your sales team can benefit from tracking and analysing website visitor information. Data about user behaviour and visitor demographics helps sales representatives better understand the people they’re talking to. Segmented visitor tracking data can even provide clues as to how to appeal to different buyer personas.

  Sales leadership can use web analytics to gauge interest over time, tie visitors to revenue and develop more accurate sales forecasts and goals. 

  

  And it’s not just aggregated website tracking data that your sales team can use to better serve customers. They can also use insights about an individual visitor to tailor their approach. Matomo’s Visits Log report and Visitor Profiles allow you to see which pages a prospect has viewed. This tells your sales team which products and features the prospect is most interested in, leading to more relevant interactions and more effective sales efforts.

  User experience and web development

  The way users interact with and experience your website has a big impact on their impression of your brand and, ultimately, whether they become customers. While marketing often controls much of a website’s content, the backend and technical operation of the site usually falls to a web development or engineering team. Website analytics and tracking inform their work, too.

  Along with data about website traffic and conversion rates, web development teams often monitor bounce rates (the percentage of people who leave your website entirely after landing on a page) and page load time (the time it takes for an individual web page to load for a user). Besides the fact that slow loading times inconvenience visitors, they can also negatively affect your search engine optimization (SEO).

  

  Along with session recordings, user experience teams and web developers may use heatmaps to find out what parts of a page draw a visitor’s attention and where they are most likely to convert or take some other action. They can then use these insights to make a web page more intuitive and useful.

  Visitor tracking and privacy regulations 

  There are different data privacy standards in other parts of the world, which are designed to ensure that businesses collect and use consumer data ethically. The most-discussed of these privacy standards is the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which was instituted by the European Union (EU) but affects businesses worldwide. However, it’s important to note that individual countries or states can have different privacy laws.

  Many privacy laws govern how websites can use cookies to track visitors. With a user’s consent, cookies can help websites identify and remember visitors. However, many web visitors will reject cookie consent banners. When this happens, analysts and marketers can’t collect information from these visitors and have to work with incomplete tracking data. Incomplete data leads to poor decision-making. What’s more, cookie consent banners can create a poor user experience and often annoy web visitors.

  With Matomo’s industry-leading measures to protect user privacy, France’s data protection agency (CNIL) has confirmed that Matomo is exempt from tracking consent in France. Matomo users have peace of mind knowing they can uphold the GDPR and collect data without needing to collect and track cookie consent. Only in Germany and the UK are cookie consent banners still required.

  Choosing user tracking software

  The benefits and value of tracking website visitors are enormous, but not all tracking software is equal. Different tools have different core functionalities. For instance, some focus on user behaviour over traditional web analytics. Others offer detailed website performance data but offer little in the way of visitor information. It’s a good idea to start by identifying your company’s most important tracking goals.

  Along with core features, look for useful tools to experiment with and optimise your website with. For example, Matomo enables A/B testing while many other tools do not.

  

  Along with users of your website, you also need to think about the employees who will be using the tracking software. The interface can have a big impact on the value you get from a tool. Matomo’s session recording functionality, for example, not only provides you with video but with a colour-coded timeline identifying important user actions.

  

  Privacy standards and compliance should also be a part of the conversation. Different tools use different tracking methods, impacting accuracy and security and can even cause legal trouble. You should consider which data privacy laws you are subject to, as well as the privacy expectations of your users.

  

  Some industries have especially high data security standards. Government and healthcare organisations, for example, may require visitor tracking software that is hosted on their premises. While there are many purely cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) tracking tools, Matomo is available both On-Premise (also known as self-hosted) and in the Cloud.

  Frequently asked questions

  Here are answers to some of people’s most common questions about tracking website visitors.

  Can you track who visited your website ?

  In most cases, tracking your website’s traffic is possible. Still, the extent of the tracking depends on the visitor-tracking technology you use and the privacy settings and precautions the visitor uses. For example, some technologies can pinpoint users by IP address. In other cases, you may only have access to anonymized data.

  Is it legal to track someone’s IP address ?

  It is legal for websites and businesses to track someone’s IP address in the sense that they can identify that someone from the same IP address is visiting a page repeatedly. Under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), IP addresses are considered personally identifiable information (PII). The GDPR mandates that websites only log and store a user’s IP address with the user’s consent.

  How do you find where visitors are clicking the most ?

  Heatmap tools are among the most common tools for learning where visitors click the most on your website. Heatmaps use colour-coding to show what parts of a web page users either click on or hover over the most.

  Unique tracking URLs are another way to determine what part of your website gets the most clicks. For example, if you have three links on a page that all go to the same destination, you can use tracking links to determine how many clicks each link generates.

  Matomo also offers a Tag Manager within the platform that lets you manage and unify all your tracking and marketing tags to find out where visitors are clicking.

  What is the best tool for website visitor tracking ?

  Like most tools, the best website visitor tracking tool depends on your needs. Each tool offers different functionalities, user interfaces and different levels of accuracy and privacy. Matomo is a good choice for companies that value privacy, compliance and accuracy.

  Tracking for powerful insights and better performance

  Tracking website visitors is now a well-ingrained part of business operations. From sales reps seeking to understand their leads to marketers honing their ad spend, tracking helps teams do their jobs better.

  Take the time to consider what you want to learn from website tracking and let those priorities guide your choice of visitor tracking software. Whatever your industry or needs, user privacy and compliance must be a priority.

  Find out how much detail and insight Matomo can give you with our free 21-day trial — no credit card required.