Measuring the success of your voice product can be a tricky endeavor — but if you’re mindful of some common pitfalls, you’ll ensure a solid strategy not only for analytics and iteration, but for the product’s initial design. Here are three mistakes you can easily avoid.

Mistake #1: Waiting to talk about KPIs

In fact, performance indicators should really be part of the earliest discussions and brainstorms around your brand’s voice product — how else can you ensure the end result will be equipped to drive the objectives that really matter, when all of this is so incredibly nascent? Early, honest discussions around KPIs will force all stakeholders to properly think through the experience. Would you like the product to be measured by its ability to drive engagement? Or are conversions to a certain action (like making a purchase on your website) more important? If the former, then the experience, obviously, should give its users a reason to want to converse with it, likely on a regular basis. If the latter, then the experience should make it easy for the user to convert to that action; ideally, it should actually remove some friction typically associated with the desired outcome. Which brings me to the next piece of advice …

Mistake #2: Being unrealistic in your expectations

Let’s say you’ve decided your voice experience should, in fact, drive purchases on your website. Kudos for figuring out what’s most important, but have you thought through how that’s actually going to happen? Will the experience make it easier or more convenient for me, the user, to either a) decide to buy a new product, and ultimately add it to my cart and check out, or b) replenish an item I already have/use, or at least know? Easier or more convenient than the traditional means of driving these objectives? If the answer is no, it’s clearly time to revisit the drawing board, but even if the answer is yes, have you asked yourself whether the experience will have the ability to drive such actions at critical mass — or what critical mass in this instance even is? If not, well … even if the product ends up crushing whatever conversion benchmark you set for it, you may end up disappointed with its inability to drive a material result. On a similar note, if your product is actually really great at helping people buy your stuff, it’s probably unfair to measure its success on factors like daily active users. Assuming you’re not literally Amazon, my guess is that even your best customers don’t come to your site to buy things every day, or even every week.

Mistake #3: Ignoring the best part — the conversations!

To reiterate, unless your product is utility-based (like apps that play music, which account for the most popular experiences on both Alexa and Google Home), metrics like daily or even weekly active users are probably not the ones to watch. And since discovery for branded voice experiences on either platform remains a bit encumbered, you can’t expect your product’s user base to magically climb into the hundreds of thousands overnight; the number of people using this thing will probably not be comparable to the number of people subscribed to your emails anytime soon. But you can count on its early users being a vital and interesting subset of your brand’s biggest (and, most forward-thinking) fans. With that in mind, my advice is to pay close attention to the commonalities in the conversations people have with your product. Analyze the transcripts, and keep an eye not only on the most trafficked conversational paths, but on what actual users expected your product to give them (and where it fell short). If your product relies heavily on the user speaking in natural language, as opposed to answering specific prompts, look out for patterns. Leverage this data to help you shape the inevitable evolution of your voice product! Analytics tools like Dashbot make this relatively easy to do.

The bottom line

A thoughtful approach to analytics (with effective optimization being the goal) is a vital, non-negotiable component of your brand’s voice strategy — and what I covered in this article is merely the tip of the iceberg. If you’d like to take a deeper dive, reach out! My team and I would be thrilled to give you a complimentary 30-minute consultation on strategy.

Your brand’s voice experience doesn’t have to feel like IVR — these features make sure of it.

Having developed Actions on Google Home for a handful of prominent brands (Aveda and The GRAMMYs, for instance) I’ve spent a considerable amount of time working through some of the platform’s more experimental features — many of which entail functionality that may not immediately come to mind when you think of voice experiences. And, as I meet with brands to help them work through voice strategy, I’m reminded that people who aren’t immersed in the space are generally unaware such features exist. But when they hear the specifics, a stream of exciting, outside-the-box use cases is almost always unleashed. Here’s a brief (and totally honest/not sponsored!) look at three of the coolest features brands can and should consider for their voice experiences, thanks to the Actions on Google Home platform.

Push Notifications

It’s true: the Actions on Google Home platform allows branded voice experiences to send push notifications, which users receive on the Google Assistant app. (To point out the obvious, push notifications aren’t possible over “voice” — I think we can all agree it would be incredibly weird if our smart speakers were able to proactively strike up conversations with us. I’d honestly launch mine into the sun if it ever did that.) Push notifications pose a fantastic opportunity to maximize engagement with your voice experience by giving users personalized content. One way you might go about it? Try asking people a short series of fun, light questions intended to sort them into cohorts; after said sorting has taken place, you can send targeted content and promotions based on what users have told you they’re into. The more targeted and relevant it is, the more likely they’ll act on it, and the more you’ll drive valuable brand affinity.

Surface Switching

Just as the Google Assistant app enables your voice experience to send push notifications to users’ mobile devices, it enables the user to effectively toggle back and forth between their speaker (the voice surface) and their phone or tablet (the mobile surface, on which voice experiences are basically chatbots with whom you can either text or talk). And that’s great news — just consider a store locator use case. After the user asks your Action to find your nearest store, they’d probably find it easier to receive the corresponding address details via text than to have to grab a pen, listen closely and jot it all down, right? Surface switching makes this possible, and then some. (Taking users through a voice shopping experience? Leverage surface switching to send product recommendations on the Assistant app — not only does this make a lot more sense than orating a description, it enables you to drive traffic to your website, too.)

User Identity

Another great thing about that store locator use case? Since Actions on Google knows users’ addresses (assuming they did not opt out of providing location during device setup), it allows developers to access them in a completely secure way, too — users need only say “yes” when they’re asked if that’s okay. Clearly, it’s much easier to say yes or no than to tell a speaker your entire address, so this is already a win, but this opt-in functionality works in several different ways. In addition to removing friction from a store locator use case as just described, it also allows you to collect a user’s email address. As you can see in the example below, when talking to Aveda on Google Home, users can say “yes” to allow Google to access to this information and create an account on their behalf. With that, the user has successfully unlocked an offer code, and you have successfully generated a highly qualified lead.

Want to learn more about the Actions on Google platform? How about Amazon Alexa? Itching to have a deep conversation on how voice is poised to change the way everyone does everything online? Hit me up on Twitter: @elizabethsnower