Using Web Analytics to Meet your Business Objectives

You have a website. It’s beautiful. It’s got lots of bells and whistles. But is it working for you? Is it functioning to benefit your target audience and, in essence, your business?

Many of us have completed Phase I in our online efforts. We’ve done what we needed to be involved on the web and to have a presence, and we’ve learned that we could from this experience. Our work doesn’t end here, however. There’s much more to do. Phase II in our tenure online includes understanding how people are using our site and using this information to improve end-user experience.

This is where web analytics come in. Tracking and measuring your website’s utilization is an easy way to determine how your online efforts are paying off.

What Are Web Analytics?

Web analytics is a collection of data generated from your website – traffic, transactions, server performance, usability statistics and information collected from your visitors and customers. This information is compiled, reviewed and used to make business decisions and improve the experience your target audience has with your website.

Duo recently surveyed our clients about their own web analytics programs. We asked them specifically whether or not they receive website traffic analysis reports. Of the respondents, 53 percent receive traffic reports and spend up to two hours reviewing the reports for trends and changes to their website. The remaining half don’t even get a report, let alone use it!

The fact of the matter is, web analytics are more than important – they are imperative. They measure more than just visits. Using information provided by reports helps justify the cost of your site and help you keep the site useful to your users. You may identify those functions of your site that are being used the most and bring those items to the foreground. You may determine ways to ease your customers’ use of forms and fields on your site. You may even identify problems with the site structure and fix them before you lose valuable visitors.

Understanding Users

Human activity on websites is powerful information. As a website owner, you can collect data to make useful predictions and assumptions. Web analytics can tell you the following things about the people visiting your site:

• How many are visiting?
• Where did they come from?
• Were they led there by search engines? If so, what keywords lead them to you?
• Were they lead to you by links from other sites – links you may be paying big dollars for?
• How often do they return? For what are they returning?
• What are they doing? What are they not doing?
• How deeply do they dig into your site? Did they visit one page of your site and leave or did they look around for the information?
• How much time are they spending on your site? Do you want them to come, find what they need and leave or do you want them to stick around for a while?

Understanding Your Site

Which pages are being viewed? Which pages are not being viewed? Why? Is this a part of your site that you want people to find? How can you fix this? Are the pages being indexed properly? Are the links leading to that page broken?

What are your top entry pages? Believe it or not the page that people see most when they enter your site is not always your home page. Typically, something else pulls them in. Search engines may direct them to a sub-page – a bio, news item or article, for example. This is desired behavior! Landing on the home page is just adding another click to get to the information the user wants. But if people are not landing on your home page you need to ensure they have a path to lead them to other important areas of your site.

How many visitors get to action pages and how many act upon them? Action pages could be the check-out page on an ecommerce site, or the contact us or newsletter registration on a law firm site. Pages that call potential customers to action are the beginning of the sales funnel. If 98 percent of people are visiting a page and leaving before filling out the form is it because the form is hard to understand or asks too many questions?

Understand the Big Picture

How many visitors are just surfing your site compared to the number of visitors who are serious about doing business with you? Using web analytics, you can determine the number of people coming to your site and compare that against the actual target audience or potential customers as determined by your company’s goals.

Which referrals are sending the best traffic versus the most traffic? High numbers don’t necessarily reflect good or ideal activity. You need to determine whether referrals are doing anything when they get to your site. They could just be random traffic, web surfers or even hackers – just because they came does not mean they are ideal visitors.

Understand your conversion ratio, or, in plain English, which referrals, search phrases, pages, etc. are bringing in business, Pull search engine referrals to see which people are sent from Google, for example. If you can determine that 10 percent of Google referrals sign up for the newsletter and only 5 percent from Yahoo do, you can start thinking about ways to get Yahoo’s numbers up (or drive more Google traffic relative to Yahoo). In order to determine this you have to extract data from external systems and marry it with traffic data.

What parts of your site are not working as expected? Maybe no one is looking at your industry pages or search pages. They may find information through other means. Information must be organized to make sense to visitors, not necessarily to comply with your organizations internal structure. Use numbers to emphasize this idea to internal management. Do the research – it speaks for itself. Encourage content changes and structural revamps.

Data Sources

There are a number of ways you can collect the information you desire.

• Traffic Data – Most websites are built with the ability to track this basic information including number of visits, page views, and referral sources. Basic web analytics applications are typically included in your hosting agreement.
• Transactional Data –This includes the number of orders, registrations, newsletter sign-ups, and downloads. This basic information will be collected on your website but you can delve deeper by reviewing the information collected through your email distribution systems, like Exact Target, or using web traffic reporting software, like WebTrends.
• Performance Data – Performance data includes any information dealing with the actual function of your website, including: network utilization, server utilization and response times and page weights. While this does not typically fall under the marketing umbrella, the marketing department should know from an image and communication perspective that pages are loading quickly and links are working.
• Usability Studies – Don’t guess at how people are using your site – actually watch and see how they find information and get direct feedback. If 3-out-of-5 people can’t find registration links, for example, you can make a quick change to the site and easily increase the conversion rate. Set up a survey on your site to determine what people like and don’t like. Can people find what you need them to find?

Who needs Web analytics? How do you do “it”?

Everyone and anyone within your organization who has a vested interest in your clients, your users or your targets should have an interest in your website. This includes your company’s executives, marketing and IT staff. Useable information needs to be compiled into a digestible format from the various sources of data. Reports need to be compiled and reviewed regularly, on a weekly or monthly basis to catch trends.

Reports should be compiled and distributed on a regular basis because the information being collected is constantly changing and must be re-aligned against the company’s goals. Some things that could be changed as a direct effect of running reports frequently:

• Increase the number of registrations on a website
• Increase the number of documents downloaded or views to certain pages on the site
• Decrease the number of customer service calls.

Using Web Analytics to Your Advantage

We know that web analytics is important and the information collected can change the way you manage your website, but in order for you to get the most out of your efforts, you should do the following:

1. Establish baseline data. Measure you stats and then, in a day, week or month measure again. Compare your new data to your old data to identify trends
2. Measure and change. One of the great things about websites is you can easily make improvements. Once you have baselines established you can begin to experiment with making changes and then observing whether the changes have made an effect on user behavior – be it positive or negative. Then make another change. Cycle time can be as short as a few days!
3. Establish new baseline data. Based on the continuing changes and improvements to your site, continue to change your standard for excellence or your baseline.
4. Measure and change – again. Keep on keeping on. Each time you create a new baseline, you build a rung on a ladder. To keep your website excellent you need to continue to build those rungs and improve your site along the way. Continuously improve your site based on the data you’ve collected and continue to measure those changes against previous data.

Some General Traffic Reporting Concepts

Metrics are reported over some unit of time – hour, day, week, month, and it’s important to make sure when comparing metrics that you are using the same periods of time. Metrics that are useful to report using units of time are visits, page views, downloads, etc. Other metrics are reported as visits per category per unit of time. Browser statistics, referrals, operating systems, page views and visits, time spent during visits, screen resolution, etc. are all examples of these.

Trends, or changes over time, are more typically important than absolute numbers. For example, a 20 percent increase aligned with a specific campaign is more relevant than 3,000 visits on a certain day. The number of visits means nothing if you don’t have an idea as to whether or not they indicate growth.

The example here represents the number of downloads of a Duo whitepaper compared to number of visits during the same time frame. It shows that downloads significantly increased on the day an email newsletter was sent. Of the 1500 people who opened the email, 250 clicked through to for more information, and half of those people downloaded the whitepaper.

Think of how you can use this information to develop marketing strategies. If we know we can get 10 white paper downloads per 100 visits, for example, we may be able to think of ways to increase that to 20 people per 100 visits. Or we might focus on increasing the number of visits.

This information provides a great performance indicator for your email marketing campaigns. The deeper you dig down into data, the more powerful and useful the things you can do to encourage people to use your website. In addition to email marketing campaigns you can measure the effectiveness of pay-per-click campaigns or online directory listings.

It is important to note that this graph in particular was not created automatically. It was created using information gathered from web reporting data and Exact Target email distribution software. Reports that are automatically generated by software packages aren’t always as effective as creating custom reports, which may need to be created to appeal to your target audience. Some of this information is quantitative, some is qualitative and most of it is available in web analytic tools. Many times you must compile the information in order for it to be relevant. Other times it’s right there in front of you.

Here are some suggestions for encouraging your constituents to review your data:

• Give people what they want and add something else.
• Teach them what’s important – don’t expect them to “get it” on their own.
• Tie the information to specific marketing campaigns

Web Analytics Analyst – The Perfect Role for Someone in Your Organization?

Having an interest in web analytics is one thing but someone needs to take responsibility for this. Probably the biggest challenge in terms of incorporating web analytics into your business plan is finding someone to actually run your web analytics program. Many organizations assign an intern or lower-ranking staff member the responsibility of running a month-end report that middle-management may or may not actually read.

One software package and its auto-reports might not be ideal for finding and reporting the information that is most important to your constituents. In order to place the much-needed emphasis on this information, you need to dedicate a single resource to finding information from separate areas and compiling the data to make it useful. The person charged with the development of these reports must have an interest in both technology and marketing to know what reports are important to making business decisions affecting the functionality of your website.

The person suited for the web analyst role in your organization is:

• Business minded – He or she understands your business and the goals of the website.
• Technically savvy – They “get” the Internet and fully understand your site’s architecture.
• Skilled Communicator – They are the bridge between executives, marketing and information technology.
• Senior enough to be heard – This person should have a place and a voice at the executive roundtable because the fact remains, this stuff can really make a difference if acted upon.

In September 2005, Jon Van reported in the Chicago Tribune that the latest trend in C-Level styling included the “Chief Data Officer.” According to Yahoo’s CDO, Usama Fayyad, “Data needs a voice at the executive table.” From “Data chief climbs the executive title tower,” Jon Van, Chicago Tribune, Business Section, 9/11/05.

The Time for Web Analytics is Now!

Businesses have been creating Websites for 10 years, very seriously for the last 5-6. They are spending a lot of money on sites so they want to know what they are get- ting for their big dollars. The tools we use to measure data have drastically improved. People realize they need to do something with this before their competition does. The fact of the matter remains... your competition is doing this! You can too by giving us a call at 312-529-3000.

Key Definitions

Page Views- a fundamental unit in web measurement – are defined by web pro Eric T. Peterson as the “successful loading of any document containing content that was requested by a website visitor, regardless of the mechanism of delivery or the number and frequency with which said content was requested.”

Visits- also known as “sessions” or “user sessions” – are counted when a visitor creates activity on a website by visiting one page after another sequentially (this is known as a clickstream), regardless of the duration of this activity. This gets a little foggy when we start talking about periods of inactivity – when a user gets up from his or her computer for a period of 15-30 minutes and then comes back to your site to finish browsing. Essentially, each time a user comes to your site, it’s known as a visit.

Unique Visitors are people. The first time a person visits your site, they are considered a unique visitor. When they come back, they are no longer “unique” because, typically, your website recognizes that person through the use of online registration or cookies.

Referrers are any URL or HTML page that refers an online visitor to your site, including search engines, portals, email, banner ads, purchased keywords and blogs. Search engines are by far the most important of these referrers because they are used most often by visitors of the web. Knowing how people came to your site – by which referrer – is imperative to determining where your online advertising dollars are spent.