Chapter 4: Forming Insights
TELLING A STORY WITH DATA TO YOUR WIDER STAKEHOLDERS
Analytics is only as effective as the story that it tells, and with seemingly endless amounts of data available about what users are doing on your site, it can be the biggest challenge to know where to start. A compelling narrative helps the audience understand what is happening and how we can respond to it, so though distilling your data into behavioural insights, you have already taken the first step towards that.
WHY YOU NEED A NARRATIVE
Differentiating your commentary from just being a series of data points, telling independent facts, into a string of data points that speak to one another and the story you are trying to convey. Building a compelling narrative from your insights ensures your stakeholders understand the "why" behind the numbers and feel empowered to act.
Contextualisation: Numbers without context can confuse rather than clarify. A narrative provides and underlying current to numbers that explain not just what is happening, but why it’s happening
Engagement: By highlighting the data points that tell your story and emitting the data that could overwhelm or confuse, you clarify the problem to be solved. Ensure you don’t use too much ecom jargon so you do not alienate non-technical stakeholders to maximise engagement
Actionability: Stories resonate with an audience and help them to relate to the user behaviour you are detailing. That relatability calls them into action with ideas and solutions to problems they may know as users (and shoppers) themselves on other sites
NARRATIVE GRANULARITY
Following on from the lesson on Distilling Data, your narrative needs to reach a level of granularity to truly explain why users are behaving the way that they do. It can be through the five whys, or through different grades of narrative that move down through your core metrics to ones that are more specific like product relative metrics or those relating to users and segmentation.
Digital Equation Narrative
The highest level of narrative will simply breakdown how your store performed through the metrics related to the digital equation. This can be a narrative in itself because the metrics have full accountability of the picture. This means that any revenue gains or losses can be attributed to one of the other metrics - be it sessions, customer volume, AOV or CVR. This is the most common narrative that commercial teams will lead with when reflecting in weekly trade meetings on business performance.
User Narrative
The next step down in granularity from the digital equation would be to apply a level of segmentation to those core metrics. Users could be segmented by their device or region, or engagement with various parts of the site across the shopping funnel like your home page content or navigation. Your users can also be classed by levels of engagement or loyalty, like how often they came to site and how long they were engaged for. All these more behavioural indicators will impact your top line performance.
Engagement Narrative
A further step down could shape a narrative around the product catalogue specifically and what users are interested in. This might be demonstrating that they are viewing a lot of products they have no intent to purchase, or that they are very engaged through the PLPs via clicks and scrolls to view high amounts of products.
When woven all together, and approached step-by-step adding colour and detail to your narrative, you can build a narrative that adds context to the digital equation, explaining a shift in conversion rates because of a change in the user journey or quality of traffic, or even by the products those users saw on your site.
MAKING YOUR MESSAGE HEARD
There are a number of things you can look out for to fully realise the clarity of your narrative, and when applied in the following sequence, can help you not only source the correct data but also maintain brevity and being action-focused.
Define your objective: After you review your data from the highest level metrics down to the most granular, there should be a thread you would like to focus on. Remember that your objective is never to explain everything that happened, but to explain a part of the story with clarity. The nature of ecommerce is that there are so many variations in customer behaviour and journey and nuance that you will rarely tie up your entire business performance in a single narrative. Be selective and concise in identifying what you are trying to communicate and what decision you want it to lead to.
Frame the insights: Provide your audience with context around your objective, such as recent business activity like product deliveries, marketing campaigns or even a broader external factor like a shift in weather or seasonal event. How is the data either feeding into your expectations or bucking the trend? This is where you can use your instincts, because when you look at data every day, a large portion of your analytics will come down to you having a sixth sense for when something has been incredibly successful or completely surprised you. You can also engage your audience to your narrative here through connecting the objective to a broader business objective that rallies together different departments.
Use data to support the story: This tends to be where a narrative can start to feel overloaded or foggy. Be careful not to simply provide all the data you have, as there will most definitely be parts that don’t tie into your narrative. Provide the metrics that do align to your narrative like it’s supporting evidence to your insight. You can use variances in the metrics to benchmarks or baselines of previous performance, as well as how a shift in one will have a relational effect on another.
Add visuals whenever possible: Depending on your audience, ecom jargon may lose some people along the way, so it’s critical to keep their focus on visual elements that demonstrate the shifts in metrics. Choosing types of visuals that make those variances shout the loudest can be a real art in communicating to a wider business, so try to think about it from their perspective. How can you bring them into your world in a language they understand? Do you need to annotate any key moments they may be less familiar with? Can you add a longer term trend line for context?
Call for action: The most important part of a narrative is what it is leading the audience to do in response. We don’t perform digital analytics just for fun, we do it to identify opportunities to improve and solve problems. What needs to be done next to reverse a trend you’re seeing? Or how do you do more of what is working? Be clear when your actions are asking for the support of other people and prioritise the highest impact recommendations.
LESSON SUMMARY
A compelling narrative transforms raw data from simply explaining what is happening into why it is happening. Focus on context, engagement and actionability to maximise the impact of your message
Practice structured storytelling that adds granularity through different types of metrics. This can move from a digital equation narrative down to an engagement led narrative.
Tailor your story to the audience, minimising technical jargon and focusing on relatable behaviours. Support your narrative with data and visuals to compel your audience to act.