While working on a new component of a project, I had occasion to build out a Customer Journey Map. Even though I’ve done this several times before, I’d kind of just cobbled together a map using Omnigraffle or LucidChart or some other drawing program. But this time I had to do a few of them and wanted a more common format template. What I found was a ton of examples in image search, but very few usable editable templates. (There were a few behind some paywalls and seemingly sketchy download requirements, but not much else.)
[Read more…]Website Speed is a Feature
Your login functionality is a feature. Your social sharing buttons are
features. Your core product offering itself has who-knows-how-many features. But what about your website’s speed? Given that research has shown slow website speed, (whatever slow might mean to some users), can hurt you in terms of abandonment and lost sales when there’s any sales involved, shouldn’t speed be considered a feature? That is, maybe website load time shouldn’t be just a “tech thing” that kind of gets done as a matter of course. Rather, it should be a core measurement given that it’s demonstrably a driver of other Key Performance Indicators. (KPIs.)
How bad is the problem?
Following are a couple versions of a chat about Speed I put together for a Udemy.com course I built for Digital Product Management. The ideas are so important though, I’ve extracted these as free segments because the more people that spread this word the better.
SaaSalytics – Some SaaS Services Lacking in Tracking
SaaS (Software as a Service), and its variants, PaaS (Platform as a Service), IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), DaaS (Data as a Service or Desktop as a Service), and more… are all on a tear right now. In the classic Buy vs. Build argument, we’ve now got more reasons than ever before to hire out for more and more components of our businesses. Unfortunately, these still nascent services may often lack core analytics capabilities or the ability to provide hooks or tags to insert your own collection capabilities.
Quick Review on Why to Build Your Own Code
There remain some key reasons for continuing to build your own technology, even when there’s some great aaS out there for you. Among them… [Read more…]
Relationship Cartography – It’s Not Just about the Social Graph Alone
Let’s talk about Relationship Cartography in general. What is it? Well, I’m not 100% sure yet as I just made it up. The thing is, I’ve been looking at so-called Social Graphs, Commercial Graphs, Economic Graphs and more lately. And I’m struggling to find a unifying theme for these various sub-types of relationship visualizations. Maybe I’ll go into these various types in detail later on in a follow on post Types of Relationship Graphs, but for now I’d like to just blather a bit about graphs in general. You’ve probably heard of them. And maybe done a little research. Still, it’s sometimes useful to take a high level conceptual view of things to understand the parts a little better.
Excel Spreadsheet Google Analytics Tracking Scheme Generator
Yes, it’s a long title for an Excel Spreadsheet used to create utm tracking scheme variables for Google Analytics. I’m just doing a tiny bit of keyword stuffing here so the page gets found and people can use the spreadsheet I made if they like.
The Poor Site’s Tracking Method!
The big web sites may be able to afford the high end analytics solutions, but most sites starting out are stuck with love using Google Analytics. It’s an extremely capable product, especially in that it’s free. There’s a variety of other beacon / JavaScript based solutions out there, but I’ve found even those using these tools typically also have Google. In many cases, tracking codes are done for you. For example, if you’re using adwords and have hooked in your accounts properly the gclid variable should show up free, no effort on your part. And over time, Google has added other referrals such as social referrals to help. Moreover, increasingly third parties, (such as sharing tools like AddThis or ShareThis), also make it easier on you. Still, there are times when you just have to make your own. For those times I’ve found a sheet like the one attached below to be useful. Admittedly, it can be a pain to create your original schema and maintain things like this. But it’s not all that bad and once you have things set up, things go pretty quickly.