Sunday 14 September 2008

Web Analytics for you

Help with Web Analytics

We can help you verify, analyse and interpret your web site data in line with your business goals.
At the first stage, we will help you define who your customers are, reviewing what they are searching for; what's important to them (voice of customers online community). This process helps us work with you to idenfity your key areas for growth, which will help set your overall goals and a clearer understanding on how to deliver to your online customer base.

Analytic implementation

Correct implementation of your web analytics will help you answer critical business questions of your websites effectiveness and highlight to you how your website is interacting with your customers.

Hint: The structure of the website should be driven by both the company and the customers.

Establishing a successful Web Analytics Framework

Clever use of your web analytics can help you and your company release the insight from the numbers. It will assist with future site design, architecture and indicate clear product / service drivers which will lead to development of a more profitable company site.

Analytics makes your site changes more meaningful and in line with customer habits.

Where to start

Pretty simply, start by defining your business goals and the goals for your website. Should you have separate product-managers speak to them, as each product-group will potentially have different targets / outcome & audience groups. Working with the project managers or solely, it is important to make sure you document and prioritise your goals and that the metrics being focused on can be actionable.

For example if you find an issue in your shopping cart, make sure you have the necessary back up / help to correct this.

Make use of the features in your web analytics package to assist you in reporting. For example; custom reporting and tracking via the use of tags on and off site.Consider how the analytics package can report on both high and medium level goals.

This may involve you setting up separate profiles in your analytics utilising use of filters –ie: you may just want to track success of organic traffic to the site.

Time to Analyse

The general rule is that you should spend 80% of your time on analysis and only 20% on reporting. Hint; make sure you keep a project list of all developments on your site ie: new banner, new page, new tracking – this will help clearly identify results.

Some areas of particular interest to me in analytics is reviewing the paths visitors took around the site, reviewing how they reached the product page and what creative on or off the site led to a purchase.

If you find that a high % are visiting a particular product page and leaving straight away, then, this may be due to your pricing strategy or they could have arrived by accident (see you organic keyword report).

A complete review will allow you to decipher:

1. How you can make your site better (navigation)
2. What customers particular like (engagement, page views, time in category)
3. How you can use the information to devise retention strategies
4. Whether you can make improvements to your calls to action
5. Look at particular market segments coming to your website, think about how the site
can be optimised for that segment. (ie: Review site traffic, build 'compare us' table)
6. etc, etc, etc – read Web Analytics an hour a day by Avinash Kaushik

Room to improve?

Remember analysis may not always indicate room for improvement, at these stages you could test things on the site to see if performance can be enhanced. This may mean moving a call to action button, or change creative (A/B testing), test different copy, give more prominence to certain benefits.

Hint; If there is a problem and you just can’t seem to fix it, speak to a usability company who can lead insight into the cause of the problem the web analytics has defined.

Analysis Paralysis

Don’t get carried away with the review, always consider how what you are finding will effect your overall business goals. If what you are reviewing is not related to overall business gain, then exclude this data. You don’t want to fall victim to a condition known as “analysis paralysis”.

Keep things focused

Develop scorecards of key business metrics, indicating where you are today and where you want to be tomorrow. These are also helpful when sharing the information with other members in your company. Ongoing review is critical, to obtain a clearer insight into the need and behaviour of your online customers and will help you identify business opportunities as your customers needs evolve.

Four step process

1. Outline your business metrics
2. Set up your reports in relation to business metrics
3. Analyse
4. Optimise the site / take action

No comments: