In this day and age, it’s no longer enough to simply make beautiful, intuitive digital experiences. Today’s leaders are rightfully demanding to understand how investing in design will move the needle for their business and their customers. While bringing design and data together can be challenging, we believe it is the critical ingredient to creating exceptional digital experiences.

Beware of Data Overload

Regardless of your data landscape, when your company is starting to implement a data-driven approach, it can be overwhelming and easy to become obsessed with capturing every key performance indicator (KPI). This is dangerous territory to find yourself in. Going down this path often results in a lot of upfront work and a disjointed vision for your team. Instead, we recommend staying hyper-focused on a few measurable KPIs. You’re probably thinking, “But wait. How do you pick just a few KPIs and know they’re the right KPIs to be tracking?” The answer is to first start with focused project goals, and from there, pick several KPIs that directly ladder back to these project goals.

Create Focused Project Goals

Arriving at focused project goals can be challenging because you are often being asked to fulfill multiple organizational initiatives. We often hear broad goals from our clients, such as, “We want to increase website engagement.” While this goal is important and is a good thing to track, it doesn’t get to the heart of the user experience. This goal is too broad and too difficult for your team to tangibly deliver results. If you find yourself here, let your analytics data lead the way to more specific project goals — goals that your team can rally around and goals that will move the needle for your organization. We recommend looking at website and business analytics as a starting point to help you focus your project goals.

A great place to start your data investigation is to look at where your organization is making and losing money. For example, call center data can be a huge money pit for many organizations. But you can perform a variety of activities to optimize your digital ecosystems to reduce these costs. When you have your initial data insight, your team can dig deeper and get to the root of how to deliver on the goal of reducing call center volume, and then you can create hyper-focused and measurable KPIs. Note that it is okay to pivot the project goals and the KPIs after uncovering new data insights about your users or your business. The key is to stay focused and keep things simple and clear so everyone can rally around the goals and the KPIs to drive meaningful impact. Now that we have talked extensively about the importance of having focused project goals and letting your KPIs fall into place after, let’s move into a more tangible example of how exactly to leverage analytics to drive meaningful impact. To do this, we have created a fictional client case study. The content of the case study is made up, but the strategy, concepts, and approach are real and can be applied across any vertical with a few small tweaks.

I Got You, Baby — A Fictional Case Study

Our fictional client is a plant-based baby brand called I Got You, Baby (IGYB). In 2014, IGYB launched its digital storefront and started selling baby soaps, lotions, and wipes. In 2017, IGYB launched its diaper line, both à la carte and subscription. IGYB needed help to increase revenue. As we all know, increasing revenue is always the goal, but it isn’t very actionable. We sought to create project goals that were more specific.

After some initial calls, we came to collectively understand three things:

• IGYB wants to optimize its website.
• It does not have the budget to optimize the entire website.
• It wants to be able to tell a compelling story about how our work together is driving meaningful impact for their business and their users.

To help focus the “increase revenue” project goal, our team conducted a Current State Analysis of IGYB’s website and business data. We uncovered three primary data insights that helped shape and focus the project goal.

Key Data Insight 1

After uncovering this insight, we had a very strong hypothesis on how we could help IGYB increase its revenue: We needed to understand why people were abandoning the subscription flow after showing initial interest, which would theoretically increase diaper subscriptions.

60 percent of users who landed on the diaper product page were clicking on the call to action (CTA) “Subscribe now,” but only 13 percent of these users were successfully converting and actually signing up for the diaper subscription service.

After uncovering this insight, we had a very strong hypothesis on how we could help IGYB increase its revenue: We needed to understand why people were abandoning the subscription flow after showing initial interest, which would theoretically increase diaper subscriptions.

Revised Project Goal

Based off of this insight, we reframed the project goal to increase online diaper subscriptions. From here, we started to dive into the behavioral analytics data for the 60 percent of users who landed on the diaper product page and clicked on “Subscribe now.”

Key Data Insight 2

 40 percent of all users clicking on the “Subscribe now” CTA were coming directly to the diaper product page from organic search.

This meant that these users hadn’t seen any other pages on the IGYB site before landing on the product page. Scroll depth on the page wasn’t great either: 86 percent of these users were only seeing the first 15 percent of the page.

Key Data Insight 3

56 percent of the users abandoned the flow on the third step, which is the final payment step before confirmation.

From these insights, we knew immediately that we needed some qualitative data to provide more insight into our findings. For those not familiar with qualitative data, it helps you better understand why something is or isn’t happening. Up until this point, we had only been looking at quantitative data, which only tells you what is or isn’t happening. Quantitative data without qualitative data is like trying to bake bread without yeast: No matter what you do, it turns out flat.

At this point, we conducted 10 moderated usability tests with users who had abandoned the subscription flow at various steps.

Here’s what we heard over and over again:

“I was interested in the subscription service, but I couldn’t find the pricing quickly, so I clicked on the ‘Subscribe now’ button to try and figure out the pricing, knowing it would be in there.”

“I couldn’t edit the frequency of my diaper deliveries or skip a month.”

“I wanted to know if shipping was going to be free. It wasn’t, so I went with Amazon, but I was bummed because I was excited about the aspect that the diapers were plant-based.”

“Understanding the quantity of diapers in each order was confusing. I meant to come back later and look again, but I forgot and ordered from Amazon.”

“There were so many cute diaper patterns to choose from, but I wanted to be able to mix and match more than I was able to.”

“I wanted to give a yearlong diaper subscription as a gift, but there was no way to do that.”

After gathering this qualitative data and pairing it with the quantitative data, we were able to confidently put KPIs in place that everyone rallied around. With this holistic view of the customer, we were able to begin designing, building, and eventually launching an optimized diaper landing page and subscription flow. The team was able to move fast, stay aligned, and feel confident that our optimizations would provide massive improvements for the IGYB business and the IGYB customer.

The Results

After only three months of launching IGYB’s optimized diaper landing page and subscription flow, we saw a vast increase in diaper subscriptions, resulting in a 6M increase in revenue for that quarter.

In Conclusion

As you can see from the above hypothetical case study, it is crucial to let your analytics data lead you to focused project goals. If your project goal is to increase revenue, try using your analytics data to identify a problem area on your website where you can produce a meaningful impact for your business and your users. When embarking on your own adventure, there will probably come a time when you’ll run into gaps in your quantitative data. Be sure to set your project up so you have the ability to pivot, and use a multi-method approach to gather some qualitative data to fill those gaps. Implementing this approach will allow your team to stay aligned, move fast, and create meaningful, measurable experiences.