Analytics Q&A: Kleanthis Georgaris at People Per Hour

PeoplePerHour, founded in 2007 by Xenios Thrasyvoulou and Simos Kitiris, is a global online marketplace that connects businesses with freelance workers.

By Martina Mercer

PeoplePerHour now has more than 450, 000 registered users. By registering on the site, freelancers can showcase their work and develop contacts with businesses keen to utilise their specialist skills.

I caught up with Kleanthis Georgaris, Head of Product of PPH who uses Google Analytics daily to enhance SEO and drive more traffic to the site.

PeoplePerHour have made huge changes in the last twelve months, yet they’ve managed to retain the number of unique visitors they gain.

Do you think Google Analytics is essential to online businesses?

Absolutely. By monitoring traffic sources and visitor behaviour on their website, online businesses can optimise their website performance to increase conversion along with marketing in order to attract the right kind of visitors at the right time.

We’ve found it to be an invaluable tool that can be used by all of our team members regardless of technical ability to see where our visitors come from, who they are and what they like.

How has it helped you identify your target market?

Since PeoplePerHour is a global marketplace, it is important for us to see when and where the majority of our website traffic originates. Because our user base is very unique and many of our members work on our platform as moonlighters, without Google Analytics, it would challenging to see when our users are most active.

We also use tracking on GA to determine traffic sources in order to optimise our customer acquisition efforts and to identify areas for new opportunities.

It also helps us see which marketing campaigns are the most effective, for instance if traffic comes from searching or social media or an advertisement offline.

Are there any changes you’ve made as a result of the findings on Google Analytics?

We have adjusted our email marketing to mirror times when our users are most active on our platform.

For example, we usually see an uplift of traffic around lunch time so were speculating that by sending out our “Hourlie of The Day” email at around 11 AM we could lure our members onsite from checking their email inboxes.

After A/B testing, we found that open and click rates and consequently web traffic from our email marketing increased when emails were sent around 11 AM rather than after lunch time.

In general, we are constantly monitoring conversions via GA .What we often do is identify a specific metric that is underperforming and try to optimize it through new features, tweaks in the copy or changes in the wireframe.

For example, we know that a significant percentage of visitors abandon the Job posting form before submission. So a project we are working on right now is finding ways to reduce that drop.

Not to mention that from sudden changes in the data one could identify the appearance of a bug and get it fixed before it affects the user experience and does harm to the business.

Do you alter copy to lower your bounce rates?

As a tech start up, we keep our fingers on the pulse of everything digital and we’re firm believers in content marketing.  We constantly monitor performance and analyse the page views for each page.

For example, we recently re-evaluated the performance of our blog by listing the 50 most visited pages and classifying them in different content categories.

We found that although we only had a couple blog posts from our CEO Xenios, these received the most traffic with the longest page visits, so we introduced monthly community updates. We also meticulously cross-link our content for a seamless user experience.

We also keep an eye on a combination of goals. We are A/B testing almost all wordings of the site to see what converts better, especially on our Homepage. Wordings to tweak could be the titles, various messages, buttons and banners on any webpage.

Previously we’ve seen a 500% rise in conversions which is impressive considering the changes took seconds and seemed minor in comparison!

Are there any interesting facts you’ve learned that have surprised you about the business with GA?

Every day! For example with a change we did in the content of our Top Menu, we saw that users found their way a lot better around PPH, understood the main features of the site easily and as a result converted more. It’s obvious that users have a totally different understanding of the website than we – the employees – tend to have.

We know everything about our product whilst new visitors – in just a few seconds – seek to have an overview of what the site is about and what they can do on it! Otherwise they will just leave.

Lesson learned: even though sometimes it’s difficult, we must find ways of thinking like the average new user of our website would do, so that we deliver the best user experience possible.

Has analytics allowed you to stay ahead of the competition?

Of course it has. After all it is the tool we use the most so that we can optimize our product and marketing campaigns. I must say that, as a company, we have a real obsession to possess all the data we can and make decisions based on this.

This has helped us in various ways to beat our competition. In general based on Analytics data, we often figure out what our next initiatives should be and on a lower level, prioritize specific tasks of the product roadmap according to the impact that we expect them to have on our business.

How has PPH grown in the last 18 months and what part has GA played in this?

Based on the data we get from Analytics, we can stay alert and creative all of the time and find innovative ways to grow our business. At the same time we can stay lean and get the most impact with the least amount of resources.

We have come to a point that through product optimization and virility, our business has a 20% growth month-to-month, we built a new product that is top notch and we are launching features that help our users get more out of PPH almost every week.

When we launch a new feature we monitor it carefully and track how our core metrics are affected through Google Analytics. If it doesn’t work or harms the marketplace, we apply fixes or scrap it, like we did when we removed a Cashback functionality following user feedback and a decline in users.