UserReport: Information is Power


If I have learned anything from studying data analytics, it’s that information is the best friend a marketer can have. Just inside Google Analytics, there’s a tremendous amount of information that can give you a better look at your website and how it’s performing. Who’s clicking on what? How much time are users spending looking at your content? Did your users end up signing up for your newsletter? Where are the people located who are looking at your website? Unfortunately, one of the things that Google Analytics does not provide is a sufficient explanation of who your audience is.

In marketing, targeting an audience is of the utmost importance. If nothing else, understanding your audience is the key to formulating a successful communications strategy. Let’s say, for example, your website is extremely successful among men aged 30 to 45. Wouldn’t you want to start tailoring content specifically for that market? Unfortunately, Google Analytics does not give us any indication of our audience’s demography. Then again, how could they? All Google Analytics does is monitor audience activity.

In comes UserReport. As the company’s website states, UserReport is “based on two simple tools – a survey and a feedback forum. Running as an integrated part of your website or app, it enables you to have direct interaction with your users and learn who your users are, what they are looking for – and how they think you can improve.”

On the UserReport website, I clicked “Try it Live” and a survey instantaneously popped up: here’s the first two questions:   


The survey was not distracting in the least, and was incredibly easy to navigate. Even better than that, there was a promise of a reward, so of course I finished the survey as quickly as possible! 


I should note that these surveys accomplish much more than simply finding out demographic information about our users. As the marketer Barbara Spagnola wrote, “The most important principle that companies have to remember is that the consumer is always king. The products that people flock to are never permanent; what’s at the number one spot now can be easily forgotten next season. It’s crucial that companies, especially large ones, don’t lose touch of this fact. They have to court the people’s interests in order to keep their attention on the business they provide” (Spagnola 2014). 

Indeed, by using UserReport, we can instantly survey our audience about what they want. Let’s say you’re operating a small e-commerce business. We sell shirts, and business is doing fine. However, we are curious what sorts of items our customers are interested in. A new design, perhaps? More variety with colors? Different shirt fabrics? 

With traditional surveys, you would have to contract with a market research company, have them poll your customer base, and wait for the results to come in. By creating an instantaneous survey, we can talk directly to customers and receive feedback immediately. Perhaps even better, since we are already using Google Analytics, we can see how many people are actually responding to the survey and determine if the response sample is actually usable to our business. 

Even better yet, this app is completely free. Returning to our example of a small shirt seller, it is extremely possible, if not probable, that our small business simply does not have the resources to conduct a large-scale survey of our customers. By allowing businesses to create professional-looking surveys on their own and free of charge, this app allows for even the thriftiest brands to elicit feedback from their customer base.  

Perhaps even more excitingly, UserReport has a widget that allows publishers to collect instantaneous feedback from users. 

As you can see, this particular survey is heavy on the behind the curtain aspects of UserReport, with technically-minded users advocating for changes to be made to the code in order to give users additional flexibility. While, certainly, most marketers won’t need this level of technical know-how in their own surveys, these still provide a great deal of use for marketers. 

When designing a website, we take care to make the user experience as easy to navigate as possible. However, there are still plenty of things that we miss. Perhaps our users found an easier way to navigate the site, or they have an idea for a feature we could build in, or have criticism about a certain feature that they find particularly unhelpful. Having a central depository for these ideas, without having to navigate through a typical comment channel with all of the abuse and negativity built into that, makes life much, much easier. 

One final thing that is extremely intriguing to businesses is UserReport’s introduction of kits. Now, this tool is not, necessarily, for everyone. However, for publishers, it is extremely important, but I would add that this service is not free like the two previously discussed. With the “kit” tool, you can instantly show off your website to potential advertisers. As the Audience Project states, kits “work as a flexible planning tool, enabling you to show advertisers which media and sections are relevant to them and exactly what to expect if running a campaign in your network. In other words, Kits optimise media planning for both publisher and advertiser” (Gaulshøj 2017). 

Imagine you run a blog network. One of your sites is a general men’s interest site and  another is a women’s interest site. When approaching a potential advertiser, you want to show that your site reaches a certain number of users every single day in the exact demographics that the advertiser wants to reach. With the kit tool, UserReport will automatically generate a description of your target audience and how often they visit your site. For a small publisher, this information is extremely valuable, and is just one more report that you don’t have to generate yourself. 

As marketers and communicators, information is the most important weapon we have. Without knowing who our audience is, we can make truly grave mistakes. UserReport removes that uncertainty and, most importantly, interacts with Google Analytics, allowing us to have a complete accounting of what is happening on our sites. 

References

Spagnola, B. (2014, August 7). The Importance of Surveys in Marketing. Marketing Source. Retrieved from http://www.marketingsource.com/articles-library/the-importance-of-surveys-in-marketing


Gaulshøj, S. (n.d.). Optimise Your Ad Sales: UserReport Introduces “Kits” for Publishers. Audience Project. Retrieved from https://www.audienceproject.com/blog/publishers/optimise-ad-sales-new-powerful-tool-for-publishers/

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