Getting RIGHT to business with web analytics

When you are part of a company that has implemented web analytics to track the activities that occur on your website, how can you be sure that you are using the tool correctly and that it is benefiting your business?  Does the tool help you improve your website’s conversion performance?  Can you accurately determine where your web traffic is coming from?  Do you have someone who is actually reviewing, interpreting and using the data from your web analytics tool to meet business objectives?

 

It turns out that these questions and many more are likely to be overlooked when companies implement a web analytics tool.  In many cases, these companies are simply implementing the tool… just because they hear it is the smart thing to do. Sounds like a very serious investment without actually understanding the strategy behind it.

 

A company that had to go through this same type of self-interrogation was multinational technology retailer, Best Buy.  "We used to gather information from our web analytics program just in case someone should ever ask for it," says Lynn Lanphier, Director or Digital Analytics at Best Buy. "But doing that wasn't the best use of resources."

 

During a presentation delivered at the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit San Francisco in 2011, Ms. Lanphier and Eric T. Peterson (Senior Partner and Founder of Web Analytics Demystified) talk about the journey that Best Buy had to go through to get to a point of realizing efficiency in using web analytics.

 

Ms. Lanphier described how before 2009 the company had never maximized and optimized the use of their analytics tool (HBX) and the data it produced.  The company had many internal users who did not understand the systems and data.  They also collected a host of data without regard to how that data would benefit the overall business needs and objectives.

 

“We had tons of reporting going out and that report may have had only one metric on it. No one questioned the data.  They just used it.  We were not using the data for business analysis… only business cases and product management” she said.

 

According to a survey of 50 ecommerce sites revealed just last year, there are still many companies who are not properly using web analytics tools like Google Analytics. In fact, only 50% of e-commerce businesses are tracking the main conversion points achieved by their customers resulting in inaccurate tracking against business objectives and overall campaign effectiveness.  Among the sites surveyed, 60% of accounts that indicated using Google Analytics were not properly synced with Google Adwords, resulting in inaccurate reporting on the return on investment of paid search efforts.  Also, 67% of the websites had not integrated any form of social media tracking to determine if their content was being shared across various social media networks.

 

During the eMetrics Summit, Ms. Lanphier also talked about a defining moment that encouraged Best Buy leadership to take heed in the importance of web analytics – the fact that data was not readily available for people and that they did not understand it made the Best Buy leadership team start to understand that it does take money and people to drive the capability of web analytics and get the value out of it.   The company also realized that it was important to first develop a strategy and roadmap before fixing their analytics tool to meet their needs.

 

Now after a couple years of building out the company’s web analytics capabilities to better meet company objectives, the digital team at Best Buy is focused on maintaining better analytics reporting and understanding while avoiding information overload.  The company has learned that a better and more effective way to measure web data is to tie analytics in with specific end-user business requirements.  In their efforts to streamline the requirements of the organization’s web analytics program, Ms. Lanphier says Best Buy now collects and measures data based on the top priorities of each e-commerce department within the company.

 

"We went to each of the departments, asked them to tell us what was really important to measure and then made up a list," says Ms. Lanphier.  Best Buy now uses analytics to measure transaction and traffic data more precisely, view data on a priority basis and extract the best data to act on. "We are incorporating top user requirements and effectively measuring what's happening across new channels, such as mobile commerce and social media," says Ms. Lanphier.

 

For other businesses that are beginning to realize the importance of web analytics when measuring an e-commerce website, Bill Gassman research director at Gartner notes an interesting perspective on the future of web analytics.

"Analytics will be used going forward to measure more data on a real-time basis and that will give web merchants insight into immediate customer behavior and how that behavior has changed over time," says Gassman. "Shoppers now interact with retailers through new channels, such as mobile commerce and social media, and will generate new types of behavior web merchants will need to track."

Final thoughts... “How can understanding web analytics for e-commerce sites help?”
In my short time of learning the best practices of using web analytics, my best advice to merchants is to keep it simple at first.  Concentrate on the metrics that make the most for your business.  If your company sells books, a few metrics that might be of use to you include frequency of new versus returning visitors, referring sites, and average time on site.  You will learn whether you have gained a loyal following of readers who frequent you site, how these readers were led to your website and how engaged they are with the books available for purchase.  See, it does not have to get too complicated. But for savvier web analysts, monitoring more advanced metrics (funnels, map overlays, and conversion goals) will come in handy especially with ecommerce sites. 

Blogger, Caleb Donegan notes the top five metrics on Google Analytics to watch when launching an e-commerce site:

1.       Percentage of New Visits – Is your site delivering more new visitors then returning visits?

2.       Pages Per Visit | Average Visit Duration | Bounce Rate – How engaged are your visitors in your content?

3.       Landing & Exit Pages – Where are your visitors entering and exiting the site?

4.       In-Page Analytics/Event Tracking – What are your visitors doing on any given page?  Are they finding what they are looking for?

5.       Multi-Channel Funnel Marketing – How many visitors from a specific marketing channel are converting on your site?

Again as Best Buy learned, it is important that companies establish their own unique goals and objectives for their web analytics tool before implementing one on a website.  These objectives may provide better insight into which tool is the best one for your business.  Even though it is free, Google Analytics many not always be the best web analytics tool for your company’s needs.  You might find that the data learned from a paid analytics tool like Webtrends, Adobe SiteCatalyst, powered by Omniture or Kissmetrics is worth the investment. 

 

Give me your feedback and let me know, "how using web analytics for your e-commerce site can help” you sell more online.

Practical uses for conversion goals in Google Analytics

This week, the tracking of blog traffic activity through Google Analytics (GA) continues.  As I attempted to drive traffic to the blog, I learned that you cannot measure the true success of a website without properly setting conversion goals.   As part of my learnings this week, I confidently set up six goals on my blog in three of the four types of goals: URL Destination, Visit Duration and Pages/Visit.  With a limited amount of content, I chose to postpone establishing an event-based goal.

 

Blogger Jamie Least describes URL destination goals as the way Google Analytics monitors the URLs you are tracking—more specifically, specific URL’s that are directly tied to your website’s KPI’s or conversion rates.  Through the use of URL destination goals, I wanted to compare the number of times that a visitor to my blog site reached the blog posted from February 4^th versus how many times that the post from February 18^th was viewed.  I wanted to determine if people who visited the blog would go back to read previous posts versus only reading the most recent blog post.  At present the contest is “too close to call”, with only one visit going to the February 18^th post, while no one clicked on the February 4^th post.  I have a theory on why so few page views were tracked – filters.  There will be more discussion on that topic later.

 

From a business perspective, it is important to determine whether a visitor has completed some type of high-value task tracked through Google Analytics. This task could be filling out a “contact us” form, visiting a customer service page providing consumers with information on “how to pay your bill”, or downloading a file.   The data from tracking these tasks can be presented to help improve the performance of the website.  We might learn that the “contact us” form is getting several people to submit but an error occurs preventing a conversion.  The link instructing customers on how to pay their bill may not be located in a position on the site to be noticed, resulting in low page views.  Also, after tracking the data, we might learn that the file customers are trying to download “times out” after five minutes.  These are all actionable improvements that can be uncovered by properly setting URL destination goals.

 

Often the task can be purchasing a product which usually concludes with some type of thank-you page. As long as the URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) is accurately set up in Google Analytics, the company can keep track of these tasks.  Also, if the website is an e-commerce site, the business can apply a goal value to the tracked action.  This is an important metric to remember when you need to present website performance reports to executive leadership. 

 

Visitor duration goals can be used to measure your engaged visitors by determining how many visitors stay on your website longer than the average time on site.  In the case of my blog, I set up three versions of this type of goal tracking: “5 minutes or less”, “3 minutes or less” and “60 seconds or less” to determine the level of engagement that the blog readers have with my posts.  At present, again the results are “too close to call” with only a few visits logged.  There is a story as to why the site traffic is low – More on filters a little later.

 

For businesses, visitor duration goals can help determine if products or services offered on a site are more or less favorable and encourage consumers to spend more time shopping on the webpage.  For instance, if a website is generating a large amount of traffic but appears to be failing on meeting a visitor duration goal, then the site is likely not providing the type of content, products or services that your target audience is interested in consuming.  Adjustments to the product or service offerings are likely in order.   

 

The Pages/Visit goal can also be used to measure the engagement of your visitors.  With this metric each individual is tracked for the amount of pages they view per visit and will only complete your goal if they are above or below the number you set in the tracking. In the case of my blog, I set this goal measurement tool to determine whether people were clicking to other pages and past posts on the blog or if they were abandoning after only one page view.  Again, thanks to a limited amount of traffic to my blog site (and filters); there was not enough data to determine a true sense of engagement.

 

Businesses that properly set up pages/visit goals can determine whether their website viewers are engaging with the site and more likely to trigger some sort of action.  Again, in this case, a goal value can also be applied to the metric to appease executives looking for deep insight on web site activity.

 

You may have noticed that I might have mentioned filters a few times in this post.  You may even have picked up the subtle hints that I accidently set up filters that disrupted my ability to track traffic to the blog site.  In my excitement after reading about goals, funnels and filters this week in my Web Metrics and SEO assigned reading, I set up a filter with the thought in mind to specifically track the traffic coming from LinkedIn and Facebook.  But that is not what a filter does.  Just as it sounds, filters throw out traffic that matches certain logic.  I should have added a new profile for traffic coming from each social media site.  Profiles enable us to segment the data in different ways including traffic sources and help us gain a much better understanding of the traffic coming to a site.

Final thoughts... “How could understanding the difference between profiles and filters have helped?”

In the case of this week’s blog post, simply understanding the difference between profiles and filters would have saved a great deal of traffic that would have been reported to this blog.  Blogger Daniel Waisberg provides some really good insight into the way that you use the two, "A profile is the gateway to the website reports.  It determines which data from your website appears in the reports. Filters can be applied to profiles in order to segment the data; for example, it is possible to create a profile only with visitors from USA, only from new visitors, etc. Since profiles use the same account and Web property IDs, data for multiple profiles can also be seen in aggregate."

Give me your feedback and let me know, "how using goals, profiles or filters may have helped" you in the past.

Using Google Analytics to Measure Your Blog's Performance

Here is an official notice to all the readers of this blog.  As of now, your activity on this blog site is being tracked. But do not worry.  Your personal information is not being collected.  Nor will I use your activity for any devious ways to take over the internet.  Through Google Analytics (GA), I will be using the data collected to make this a better blogging experience for me and the readers of this blog.

With GA, I have found a resource that allows me to become more intelligent in developing content and driving traffic to this blog.  I have begun to familiarize myself with key data points presented through GA and just beginning to discover “just how deep the rabbit hole goes.”  (This is my one reference to “The Matrix” for the day.)

New vs. Returning Visitors: This data stream helps you determine whether the content on the blog is building loyal followers who are coming back to the site for more of your wisdom.  If after a few blog posts you begin to notice a very high percentage of new visitors, but a very low percentage of returning visitors, this means that the content you are presenting is likely not piquing the interest of your visitors.  Change is in order with your content and marketing strategy.  A blogger, Mitz, offers up 9 Ways to Build Traffic to Your New Blog. Rule number 1 is to make sure that you are publishing quality material.

Visitor Flow with Map Overlay:  Once the blog develops a large number of followers, by using ‘geotargeting’ capabilities this report could be very beneficial if you wanted to solicit potential advertisers.  For instance, the Map Overlay will tell you where your visitors are when they view your site.  The data can be broken down into country specific views, showing the various regions, cities and metro areas that your visitors reside in. When entertaining regional advertisers who sell goods or services in specific areas, you can use the Map Overlay feature to determine if your web traffic matches the sales footprint of a potential advertiser.  Below is a sample Map Overlay.

Language: When blogging, it is important to be aware of what language your viewers prefer to be communicated with.  As part of the Visitor Report, Google Analytics presents the preferred language by visitors to your site.  If your blog has a regional following, for instance among Texas or California residents, then a large percentage of visitors may actually prefer to view your content in Spanish.  According to the U.S. Census, there are four states where at least one-in-five residents spoke Spanish at home in 2007 – Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas.  Also in 2010, there were 37 million Hispanic Americans who spoke (or read) Spanish in the home. If it turns out that a large percentage of your blog’s audience prefers Spanish, you may want to consider having a Spanish-focused version of the site with content catered to that community.  It will be ideal to determine whether you will need to simply translate the content or bring on experienced writers who can create culture-based content.

Referring Sites: I have always believed that regardless of the content presented on a website, referral traffic should be evaluated regularly.  Having insight into this can help you when you are determining the level of content on your blog and the way that you drive viewers to it.  There are many questions that this data can help shine light on, including:

·         Is there a common category of websites sending traffic to my blog? Looking at the sites that a majority of your viewers are coming from allows you to use specific affinities and interests to help you in the content development for your blog.

·         If there is an e-commerce function to your website or blog, are there sites that make sense to engage in a marketing partnership? Referring sites data can identify the websites that are sending heavy traffic to you that should be considered for marketing investments.  A free link on a page might drive a decent amount of traffic, but an advertising banner or page sponsorship has the potential of driving a much higher stream of customers to the website.  Also from a blogger’s perspective a partnership could easily consist of agreeing to be a guest blogger on another person’s blog in order to appeal to the other person’s followers and build credibility for your blog.

·         Is there a link to my blog on a website that I am unaware of and is it driving good traffic? In some cases, there are links to your blog on webpages that you didn’t initiate the partnership.  It is good to review these sites and the navigation trends on your site to determine if the viewers are sticking to the content presented on your site.  For instance, there may be a link to your page on a ‘dog grooming’ fan page, but when you review the referring traffic to your ‘web analytics’ themed blog you find that the bounce rate of this traffic is very high.  In this case, your link is on a site that is not relevant to content on your blog or website. Your options are to either request that the link be removed or add a bit of relevance to your site on the topic.  Depending on the topic, it may not make sense to adapt to a theme like ‘dog grooming.’ Of course there is another option.  You can do nothing as long as you are not paying for the traffic coming to your blog site.

Keywords: Reviewing the keywords that are bringing organic traffic to your blog can be very helpful when developing content for the blog.  With Google Analytics you are able to drill down and watch the overall activity based on the search engine keywords that were used to find your website.   You can use this information to tweak content so your blog ranks in higher positions at the search engines.  But blogger Bill Bolmeier also reminds us that keywords are an attribute of your content and “if you over do it, the search engines will whack you by ranking you lower if you try and trick out your site with tons of keywords, which is known as keyword stuffing.”

In-Page Analytics:  One of the features that I really appreciate about Google Analytics is the ability to review a visual assessment of how users interact with your blog pages. Through this tool, you can determine if your blog has a user-friendly design that allows your readers to easily find the content they are looking for within your website.  The tool also helps determine whether your readers are being motivated to achieve certain actions like commenting on a blog post, ‘liking’ a specific post, clicking on an image or video within a page, or sharing the content through a social media channel icon on your page. Another useful aspect of In-page Analytics is the “Avg. Time on Page” stat that will demonstrate how engaging the content on a particular page is to the viewers. 

Final thoughts... “How could Google Analytics metrics have helped ?”
Usually, I end every blog post with a section on how the topic of the day could have helped me in the past.  But in this case, the content speaks for itself by describing how to use stats presented in Google Analytics like “New vs. Returning Visitors”, “Language”, “Referring Sites”, “Keywords” and “In-Page Analytics” to make this blog more successful.  To quote you data hounds out there, the answers are all in the data. It is up to us to use it wisely.

Give me your feedback and let me know, "how using Google Analytics metrics may have helped" you in the past.

Google Adwords or Facebook Ads - Choose Wisely

Before you prepare to launch an online advertising campaign using Google Adwords or on Facebook, ask yourself one question.  “What do I hope to accomplish by advertising using Facebook or Google Adwords?”  Your answer will determine which tool is best for you.  Both platforms have the potential to produce great results for a company that understands the right way to use them.

If you don’t remember anything else, set this to memory: If the goal of your online campaign is to sell something, Google Adwords is your tool of choice.  If you wish to build brand awareness and visibility for a particular product or service, then Facebook ads may be the better too for you.  This is because, consumers on Facebook are generally not in the mindset to purchase anything when presented an ad. 

According to blogger Alexis Thompson, Google AdWords responds to the demands of consumers as the platform allows businesses to advertise to people who are already looking for a specific product or service.  In most cases, customers have become familiar with a particular product or business and are looking for it by name.  Google’s ad system serves up ads that will likely match their query with high probability.  Then they are likely to click on it.  Consumers primarily use search engines because they are looking for something in particular.  To ensure that they see your ad, all you have to do is meet that demand by bidding on the right keywords.

According to data from Google, AdWords serves an average of almost 30 billion impressions per day - 29,741,270,774 impressions per day to be exact.

 

On the flipside, Facebook ads are presented within the environment of the social media site.  During a consumers’ session on Facebook, they are likely to be presented ads for products or services that they aren’t exactly looking for but could be interested in.  This hopefully leads to a position within the consideration set.  As Thompson describes, in this case the demand is created by the ad instead of the consumer unlike with Google Adwords.

According to statistics presented by Cara Pring, “89 percent of marketing agencies said they would use Facebook to advertise for their clients in 2012 – either by purchasing ads, creating pages, or other methods of engagement.”

Despite the major difference of how you plan to use advertising through Google Adwords or on Facebook, the usability of the two platforms is actually quite easy and accommodating.  Both platforms come with capabilities including:

·         Geographic targeting:  Both allow advertisers to pinpoint down to the city level the target audience they hope to reach.

·         Start and stop any time:  Begin a new campaign and suspend the advertising activity at your convenience.

·         Pay per click:  Pay for performance when the ad drives traffic to a specific destination.  (Executives love this!)

·         Real time analytics

·         Set a daily budget.  No need to worry about exceeding a set marketing budget.

·         Direct traffic to website or landing page

 

Final thoughts... “How could Google Adwords or Facebook ads have helped?”

Since Facebook ads rely on the data provided in their members’ profiles to target the ads we create, I immediately thought about affinity marketing.  There is a great deal of data that a marketer can use to pinpoint a specific target including hometown, gender, university attended, employer, and interests.  Let’s say that my company wanted to market to the female alumni of a certain university, but only those who live in Texas.  Facebook ads would allow us to present ads to this distinct target audience.  There is some real potential in using Facebook ads to engage and build awareness among affinity groups.  It could be an easy alternative to purchasing a direct mail list.

Give me your feedback and let me know, “how could Google Adwords or Facebook ads have helped” you with a past marketing strategy.

Content vs. Conversation: No clear heir to the throne

In the real world, you may have a variety of things to say about life, business or practically any topic you can think of. But just because you have the ability to say it, it doesn’t mean that anyone is listening, wants to discuss your topic further or is willing to share it with others. It doesn’t mean that anyone will be engaged enough to interact with you on this topic. In a competitive online marketing environment, the same can be said in the long debate over what is more important, content versus conversation.

I can’t go as far as either Michael Greenberg or Catherine Novak who offer up compelling stories as to why they believe content or conversation is king.  I wouldn’t even say that there is a definite line to the throne for either.  It’s more of a democracy where the two complement each other.  But I do think that conversation has a little more weight in the marketing arena, especially when there is competition involved.  Ultimately, what‘s the benefit of having great content about your product or service if you can’t get your target audience to tune in and pay attention to it?  As Novak notes, we need a good “conversation starter.”  Often it takes time to stimulate a conversation into an engaging relationship.

Let’s examine the impact of conversation on content in the perspective of two rival retail electricity companies.  There’s not much differentiation within the product category, as both sell a commodity product - electricity.  Both have a great deal of similar content and boast how their customers can have a low price and help save the environment with a 100% wind electricity plan.  The messaging and content could easily be attributed to either company.  But their “conversation” tactics are how the two companies differ.

Company A has all their content about their renewable energy products and relatively low pricing on their website.  There’s even a page on their website that provides energy conservation tips and other helpful hints.  But this company has not embraced the full potential of social media. Consumers are finding the website through paid and organic search.  But there is no conversation with customers until they begin the purchase process on the website.  That’s if they actually make it there.

Company B has all the same type of content on their website.  But instead of a static page with conservation tips and hints, this group delivers the information through their blog on the website.  The company has also adopted a robust social media strategy that includes:

• Daily insightful keyword specific posts on Facebook and Twitter that link back to relevant content on the website or in blog posts; and
• Monitoring social media posts for special phrases like “high electricity bills” in order to insert themselves into the consumers’ conversations. 

Both actions engage and direct consumers to the website for more information on how they can save on electricity costs by switching to Company B.  In this case, the conversation with the consumer starts even before the customer gets to the website and leads to well-informed conversions.  Plus, these conversations are likely being shared to others who will be led to the content on the website.

Once the customer makes it to Company B’s website, the conversation is validated by the credible content.  Thus bringing us back to my comment earlier about the two (content and conversation) complementing each other.  The conversation aspect of social media provides fast, real time interaction with users.  It works to engage with them and whets their appetite for the more detailed content on the company’s website.  From my perspective, it takes both to achieve true success. In a world with cluttered media and less differentiation among some product categories, a good conversation can lead to great sales numbers.

Sarah Kessler wrote in a blog post,

"If social media continues to become focused on real-time conversations around professional content, it could become a more powerful distribution channel than print, television, radio or static web pages ever were."

 

Final thoughts... “How could conversations leading to content have helped?”

I am currently in the retail electricity business in Texas where there are over 40 retail electricity providers competing for roughly 5 million homes in Texas.  Many of which have very similar messaging.  In many cases, you can fill in the following blank with the name of at least half of the providers:  “(Electricity Company name here) offers Texas consumers affordable power and a variety of plans to meet your needs. “  But it is the way they initiate conversations with consumers that will stimulate the greatest success.  To answer the question, I’m living in this world now, striving to follow the example of Company B.

Give me your feedback and let me know, “how could conversations leading to content have helped” you with a past marketing strategy.

Learning from Referrers and Landing Pages

In the past week, I’ve been able to gain personal experience and apply two very important metrics to my day-to-day role as a marketing manager.  They are referrers and landing pages. 

If you are new to the realm of web analytics, let’s look at each one:

Referrers

Ever wonder how your website visitors are finding you?  Page referrers are simply defined as websites or pages that send you visitors. They could be search engines (Google, Yahoo, or Bing), a link from a marketing partner’s website, a social media site or some random website that has linked to your site.  When reviewing your page referrer stats, remember that when you see a referrer you don’t recognize, it is likely that someone has linked to your site, and it’s worth checking out the page to ensure that the subject matter is somewhat relevant to your brand or at least not damaging to it.

 

One way of using this metric that some people may overlook is within your own site to determine pages that promote additional website interaction and clicks to other pages.  This metric allows the user to determine which pages are more successful leading to another page within a site.  For instance, on some retail websites this metric would tell you which specific product pages led to the checkout page during a specific period of time.  The product pages that have a low amount of page referrals just may be a good candidate for being a discounted sale product or may need to be removed as sale options completely.

As mentioned earlier, page referrers are a good way for marketers to drive traffic to their websites by forming alliances with other businesses.  For instance, in this example on the Safeway Foundation “Our Partners” page, nonprofit organizations like Easter Seals, the Special Olympics and the Muscular Dystrophy Association all benefit from being hyperlinked on the page.  In this case, the marketing team of these organizations is likely monitoring how many people are being driven to their website from the Safeway Foundation page.

Landing Pages

In his blog, Tradesmen Insights, John Sonnhalter describes landing pages as a tool that helps marketers target a particular audience using a unique page that allows visitors to download content relevant to them. Landing pages are also very instrumental in helping you track and monitor activity by offers so you know which offers work and which offers don’t.

From an advertising perspective, landing pages can also be used to help marketers track the performance of traditional multimedia campaigns.  For instance, each message would have a slightly different tracking URL for the specific media driving to a landing page, i.e. “www.duonebyars.com/radio” for radio and “www.duonebyars.com/OOH”” for out of home.  These landing pages would allow the user to determine which medium is driving the most traffic to their website.  This metric partnered with sales data can help identify the right mix of media to maximize the marketing budget and return on investment.

Final thoughts... “How could landing pages have helped?”

Back in the days when I was placing a ton of media for a Houston sports franchise promoting ticket sales, the ads were always driving to the team’s home page.  But as I look back, I can’t help but think that the conversions would have been higher if we had directed visitors from the ads to a landing page that was designed with the sale of tickets in mind.  The problem with sending the traffic to the home pages are typically overloaded with information like game headlines, information about the stadium, team schedules and player profiles.  If I could do it again, I’d have a landing page specifically established for the series of games that we were trying to sell.  Once someone hit the page, they could simply select the game they wanted and click “Buy Tickets Now.”

Give me your feedback and let me know, “how landing pages (or referrer metrics) could have helped” you with a past business decision.

Web analytics helps companies make sense… and dollars

Ultimately, marketers who are using the web as a channel for their business are in it to make money on a particular product, service or even ideas.  So it is important that they utilize the right tools to determine whether the digital efforts that they are investing in are contributing to the growth of the business and providing an adequate return on investment.  We’ve come to a time where more data is required to help us improve the performance of our sites, instead of simply measuring our success on the number of “hits” we get.  The tool for this job is web analytics.

In a short video, Jason Koeppe of Manta, eloquently describes how with web analytics, online marketers are able to track the success of how they stimulate consumer behavior on websites and maximize their performance by keeping a close eye on some key web metrics, including how visitors get to the site (page referrer), time spent on the site (visit duration), unique visitors, and bounce rates.

 

As we dive deeper into using web analytics to help us chart the course to a successful website that generates leads or sales, I suggest that any marketer embarking on this journey take a few moments to familiarize themselves with Avinash Kaushik's four attributes to great metrics: Uncomplex, Relevant, Timely and Instantly Useful.  When you apply these attributes to the metrics you are considering, you’ll be on the right track to establishing web analytics standards for your company and its growth goals.  Let’s look at each one.

Uncomplex: The metric needs to be simple and understandable when presented throughout various levels of an organization.  As Kaushik put it, “If you’re the only person who understands the metric…, then you have just guaranteed that your company will not take action.”

Relevant:  When considering metrics to monitor, we have to make sure that they are relevant to the goals and objectives of our business.  For instance, if we are operating a nonprofit website that is designed to provide information and encourage people to volunteer at a local facility, we would not need to concentrate on metrics like recency and conversion rates.  Metrics more relevant might include page referrer or bounce rates to help determine where visitors came from and if they stayed to interact with more than one page.

Timely:  Give your business leaders the time to react to web issues by providing data that can be acted on within a reasonable amount of time.  Kaushik notes that “between real time and three months, there is a sweet spot“ for delivering web metrics.  As marketers, it’s in our best interest to determine what that sweet spot is and ensure that the data that we get from our analytics can be acted on in time to better the performance of our web activities.

Instantly useful:  A good metric that is easy to understand and can be acted on immediately once it is delivered can be very beneficial when it comes to improving the performance of a website.  Just the other day, I was able to provide some information about referrer pages to our company leadership showing the number of visitors coming from a partner’s website.  The data helped us make an informed decision about a potential new marketing partner.  Another way to think about this is that if you present a metric that is not instantly useful, it is very likely that the data will be instantly ignored. 

Final thoughts... “How could web analytics have helped?”

With each blog post, I will try to look back on my career and briefly describe how the topic subject matter could have helped in a past business scenario.  Today, I look back at a time when I was in the restaurant industry.  One of the executives of a family friendly restaurant concept insisted that the website should include a “games section” that featured themed characters for kids to interact with.  Before the section was created, we could have used web analytics to determine just how long visitors were staying on our site (visit duration) and the types of pages that where being viewed most often.  We could have conducted a test by placing a link to a kid-friendly gaming site on our page to determine if there was any interest in that type of content. This could have helped us determine if a “games section” would be a worth-while addition that would increase the performance of the restaurant website with more kid interaction.

 

Give me your feedback and let me know, “how web analytics could have helped” you make sense of a past business decision.