Web analytics is one of the most valuable tools for making business decisions available to an Internet business today. But all to often they get used only for reporting. Analytics is not reporting! Here are a few suggestions to make sure you are getting what you need from your web analytics:
1) Take a step back and look at the numbers as visitors. What are they thinking? What are they really doing? Often usability problems are not captured in the stats. And if they are it is often easy to come to the wrong conclusion. For example, say you have a product that is not getting any page views. You may conclude that people are not interested in that product. When in actuality it may be a problem with your search engine. If your visitors can’t find it, it is not there.
2) Only worry about looking at stats that have ACTIONABLE results. Meaning if you can’t come up with an action that can be made from monitoring a stat then it is not worth monitoring. Page views is once such action. It is interesting to watch overall site page views from day to day. But what can you really conclude if page views drop? What stats that are key performance indicators (KPIs) of your site.
3) Have specific goals and or questions in mind before you go digging through the numbers. It is very hard to find actionable site improvements by just “browsing” your numbers.
4) Companies have a tendency to group actions into large buckets. I want my uses to first take step 1, then 1, then 3 then they will buy. But in reality each user is different. Remember the saying “there is no average user”? So think of your site as being made up of many “micro-actions” that hopefully lead the user down a path to a purchase. Users can’t be pushed but must be lead. The real question is which micro-actions are most persuasive!
5) You must use segmentation in your stats. Segmentation is the idea of breaking users into groups. This may seem like I am contradicting my previous point but I am not. Here you are not trying to force users into taking a few specific actions. But you are breaking what they actually did into segments to better understand what they did in the process. This can be by referring source, by site feature, by user status, or by content. It is very important to track conversion rate by segment. (I don’t do this yet, but I will!)
6) One trick is to assign money to the various micro-actions on your site. This way you can see which ones are most important to your business.
7) Follow the 3 C’s of understanding analytics. Context, Comparison, and Contrast. Look at the numbers in context. Then compare them to something. This can be a comparison to itself over time or a comparison to itself in an A/B or multivariant test for example. You can also contrast it to other areas of your site to prioritize changes. 
When making changes to your site make sure you get at least a 10% change in your KPI. If you are doing an A/B test you need to beat the original version by at least 10% to declare a winner and a change that is worth making. This is just a general rule of thumb. But usually if it can not make a 10% change go back to the original.
9) You can’t automate marketing profitability! You just have to go through the numbers.
10) Track spider activity.
11) Track the latency of your site.
12) Track your competitors.
13) Understand your bounce rate. A bounce is when a visitor only hits one page and leaves. The updated google analytics shows bounce rate very well.
Just one more note. I visited the booth of a company called ClickTracks. They have a web analytics system that tries to display most results graphically. I really liked some of their reports. They have a funnel report that show many different pages and each is shaded with a different color. The darker ones are more “persuasive” than the lighter ones. It made it very easy to see which pages are working best.
It seems that one of the big BUZZ topics is personalization. Meaning that the search engines are starting to personalize results based on each user. If you think about how much data each of the search engines has on us they can easily do this. Google is doing this extensively already. One example was of the same search done from 5-6 different locations using the same computer. Each was different and provided different results. Not all of them seemed right or to make sense. But you can easily see the direction that Google is going with personalization.
Personalization is based on several items.
- Current tasks. What the user is actually doing.
- The user’s search history.
- The user’s web history in general. What services to they use and what sites do they frequent.
- Social patterns. This is the idea of matching users who do the same things online and then providing custom search results based on the social group you fall into. Common memberships, bookmarks, and search behavior.
Gordon Hotchkins from enquiro.com had a very interesting “heat map” of where a user’s eyes track on a page with personalization compared to a standard page. He used Google in his example and it was amazing. The personalized page had many more “hot spots” on the page and it totally changed the way the user viewed the page. I will try and get these screen shots and post them to my blog. But the idea is that a better user experience is better for both the user and the advertiser. There is some talk about how better organic search or personalized data means less paid clicks. But I think a better user experience can only mean more searches and more eyeballs.
There is also an idea that Google has come up with a “personal quality rank”. Not only does Google want to rank pages but they want to rank Internet users. Then they will use the high quality users to effect the results of the lower quality users. So we need to design our sites to attract high quality visitors. This will then improve our search engine rankings. This is a strange idea and it will be interesting to see how this turns out. Google has a patent on this idea.
Jonathan Mendez had some great ideas. (He is very impressive and knows his stuff). One was how you can use the parameters from the organic search engine referrals. Google passes many parameters such as language, country, keywords and more. So the idea is if someone comes into your site after doing a search in spanish for example, you can then serve up spanish content. That is a powerful idea!
Many searches are very subjective. Searches like “Cool Furniture” or “What doctor should I use”. The search engines currently have no way to provide relevant results for these types of searches. They need to personalize their searches to give the users what they want.
What all this means to the search engine optimizer is that it is getting harder and harder. Everyone will start getting different results based on the user instead of on page elements or links. Everything is getting more complex!
I am happy to say that I am at SES this week. It will give me a great opportunity to immerse myself in search and to catch up on what is happening in the search industry. There have been a ton of changes in the last 6 months. So I will be blogging about each session I attend. I am doing this for multiple audiences. First because my boss Paul Allen told me to provide a report. This is my way to do it. So everyone at WVR and FamilyLink.com can learn more about the search engines. Also I will be informing my affiliates about the posts so they can learn what I learn. Lastly to all the rest of the readers of my blog. So check back often this week for many updates to the blog.
I was just listening to a review of the great new features that the Microsoft Zune will have in it’s next verision. Wireless access to buy songs from any wi-fi hotspot for example. Once they actually come out with the new features they may actually be an alternative to an ipod. I just think it is funny that time and time again Microsoft comes out with a new product as quickly as possible into a market that the need to catch up in. The initial product may be bad. The never versions may be bad. But eventually they come out with a world class product and win over the market. Look at IE when it came out. Everyone said “why would anyone use this instead of Netscape?”. But soon it was the standard.
I don’t really care how Microsoft does. But as an Internet Marketer who does a fair amount of product development we face this problem everyday. Quick to market with something less than ideal, or do it right the first time. I think especially with web development it is important to get into the market as quickly as possible and then refine the product as quickly as possible. This is what we are doing at World Vital Records and we are starting to see some real traction in the market.
I know a great web developer who is looking for a full time gig as a contractor. I worked with him for just a few weeks and could not work with him any longer because of a previous “non-compete” he had signed. He has great HTML and CSS skills and knows PHP and some MySQL as well. If you would like more info about him please drop me an email.
