BNZ analytics training

I recently held website analytics training with some of the BNZ Digital team. They were awesome – they have an open and supportive culture and everyone got involved, discussing ideas about their customers and testing them with data. They mostly worked on website content, but there were also design, marketing, data and digital strategy people there too.

Michelle Anderson, Digital Content & Communications Manager for BNZ, got in touch because she wanted to give her team the skills to:

  • find out what BNZ customers want
  • back their content and design decisions with evidence
  • show the value of their work with measurable improvements

Michelle uses analytics techniques successfully, but she can’t do all the analysis! So she wanted to create a data culture in her team.

Michelle and I designed a session using a few simple reports that are the most insightful for content performance, showing what people are searching for in Google, and what they’re searching for on the BNZ site and the links they’re clicking on. I gave a presentation to show the value of analytics, then we had hands-on training using free Google tools.

They found surprising insights about their audience. Search data showed that customers want to find out about foreign exchange rates on the BNZ home page, and people want to pay tax through their online banking system. The team were able to challenge their assumptions about which terms are the most popular – they were surprised to see that the term ‘mortgage’ is MUCH more popular than ‘home loan’ in Google searches:

Graph showing that searches for ‘mortgage’ are higher than searches for ‘home loan’ in Google (source: Google Trends)

We didn’t go into extreme detail – they didn’t want to become data analysts. But we found useful insights with a few simple reports. The tools can sometimes seem impenetrable and overwhelming, but by sticking to a couple of reports and focusing on major trends we got some good insights.

They’ve used the training since – I gave out stickers to remind the team how to find the Google Analytics reports we looked at, and Michelle found a use for hers:

“I used your handy little sticker the other day to find some data to strengthen an argument. Felt very chuffed.”

Thanks guys for a great session!

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