By Brian Molstad, 7Summits, 7Summitsagency.com
Time is, of course, money. If you really want to see an ROI from web analytics, you need to reduce the time to insight. This will require taking a fresh look at what you’re tracking and why. In this series, I outline ways to abandon bureaucracy and obligatory reports, and take action faster.
First Things First
As with any other initiative, if you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll never know if you arrived. Save massive amounts of time and cost by ensuring your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are clearly defined and accepted throughout the organization. For most websites these can include:
- Revenue goals
- Closed deals
- Leads generated
- Acquisition rates for key target audiences
- Email signups
- Trial downloads
- Dealer contacts
- Site engagement levels
- Ad impressions
- Etc.
Elevate your KPIs in your reports and focus on outcomes. In most cases, your web analytics tool (once configured correctly) will automate the tracking of these metrics (also providing your data gaps are closed – see below). If this is challenging due to the use of numerous third-party systems, you may want to manually log performance over time in a spreadsheet or work toward automating KPI data collection via APIs. These are also good candidates to be featured in custom-designed reports for the top brass in your organization.
Close Those Data Gaps!
Now that you’re in agreement as to why your site exists in the first place, it’s time to make sure you can actually verify if it’s achieving set objectives. In some cases, your site may not be configured in a way that allows for the right data to be collected at all. Minor site updates can have major impact. Examples include:
- Update contact forms to submit to a unique URL making it easier to track conversions in your web analytics tool
- Avoid single pages that contain content for multiple topics: Breaking topics out into separate pages allow for individual pageview measurement, segmentation, and targeted landing pages.
- Enable site search! Without a search function on your site, not only are you depriving users of a helpful tool, you’re also missing out on seeing the terms they enter into your search box. Learn what your customers are NOT finding by reviewing internal search data and the start pages that trigger the most queries.
- Add campaign parameters: You advertise a key promotion from various places (homepage, banner ads, external sites, email), but lacking proper campaign parameters in your URLs, you can’t tell which source is performing best. (More on campaign tracking in Google Analytics): http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55540)
- Stop handing off traffic to affiliates or partner sites without measurement: For example, your main site features product overview information but the actual purchase takes place on a partner ecommerce site. If sharing clickstream data across two different profiles isn’t possible, at least track referrals to the partner sites as events.
- Add voice-of-customer tools: By tracking only the quantitative, you’re only getting half the story. Add rating and comment tools, opt-in surveys, and social sharing tools to collect and compare the qualitative response.
- Avoid cryptic URLs: If your URLs are full of parameters and session IDs, or worse, are dynamically created based on various scenarios, it will be difficult to sort out which page is which in your analytics data. Work to standardize URLs, file names, and page titles.
In an upcoming issue, we’ll continue our exploration of an agile web analytics philosophy and cover topics such as creating a “To Review” list and why data automation is not the end-all-be-all.
