Web Analytics for Site Optimization

Introduction to Audience & Personas: Overview

This module examines the pros and cons of usability in terms of how customer needs are met. Usability studies focus on use, not the user. Many usability professionals have now moved their core philosophy to focus on User-Centered Design (UCD). Keep in mind that a usable site can’t overcome an inability to meet the motivations and desires of users.

Sections in this module discuss how to do scenario design in order to improve conversion. You design persuasive scenarios by turning the information you have on your users into personas. A competitive analysis from your visitor’s point of view (persona) is very, very valuable.

The Web is about links, connections, and the interactivity of information. Hypertext connects related pieces of information with pre-established or user-created links, allowing a user to follow associative trails. If you take the time to properly understand search engine algorithms, you’ll discover at their core hyperlink analysis and keywords surrounding those hyperlinks have the greatest value. Good hyperlinks improve both search engine rankings and persuasion architecture.

Audience & Personas: Objectives / Outcomes

Understand these concepts:

• Difference between designing for usability and designing for visitor conversion.
• Difference between demographics and the psychographic approach used in persona design.

Be able to do these things:

• Grasp why personas are used to assist in designing for conversion.
• Use personas to empathize with visitor needs.
• Design workable personas for a website analytics project.

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Advanced Persona Development: Overview

This module discusses what people hunt and sniff around for and how they do it. The hunting and sniffing is referred to as a “scent trail,” because humans track information in a similar fashion to the way animals follow a scent. This module delves into persona development and how the process of persona development can be used to train others.

If you think of a persona as a character, then you will see that each character consists of a series of layers. One layer is the character diamond. Each corner of the diamond represents a major trait in the character’s personality. A trait helps shape how the character sees the world, speaks, thinks, and acts. A character diamond loosely means the combination of three, four, or five traits that govern a character’s personality.

As you learn how to understand personas, you can then evaluate the effectiveness of your web site. You’ll find out how well your web team empathizes with these personas.

You’ll also find out if your personas be used to create persuasive scenarios that can be measured and optimized.

In business, particularly selling, empathy is the identification with and understanding of another’s situation, feelings, and motives. Personas should evoke clear, focused customer empathy in the team.

A persona should have a strong character diamond and be more than an average caricature of your demographic research. There are certainly some things you can include in a persona description that will sharpen its identity, reveal its motivations, and humanize it.

Later sections in this module help you to set up persuasive scenarios in order to can track all the micro actions and see how they influence the macro actions you want your customers to take.

Advanced Persona Development: Objectives / Outcomes

Understand these concepts:

• “Scent trails” and how they contribute to effective persona design.
• “Character Diamonds” and “Masks” and how they relate to persona design.
• How to build empathy into personas for a successful implementation.
• Different elements that make up a persuasive scenario.

Be able to do these things:

• Construct high quality, advanced personas that drive empathy among web team members.
• Use empathy to get team members to embrace and use personas in their work.
• Uncover, map, and report on persuasive scenarios.

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Fundamental Visitor Activity Analysis: Overview

This module deals with arrival analysis, also known as entry page or landing page analysis. Arrival analysis is primarily carried out by assessing the first page viewed, per visit, by a visitor entering the website, with each web page of the site being a potential entry point into the website.

Sections in the module also cover visitor departure, commonly referred to as web page abandonment or exit page analysis. The last web page viewed by a visitor, per visit, is referred to as the visitor exit page.

The lack of focus on visitor departure is often due to the interest / concern within a company to understand what visitors are doing when on the site, as well as recognizing that all website visitors will eventually leave the site.

The pages viewed and actions taken between the entry and exit of a visitor from a website are known as the visitor path. Excluding visitors who simply look at one page and then leave (entry page = exit page), every visitor creates a "path” or trail of steps taken during the website visit. Studying these paths through the website can help an analyst uncover and resolve navigational and copy issues that are leading to the success or failure of the website for the visitor.

Later sections discuss how to improve the ratio of visitors entering the shopping cart to the number of visitors completing the check out process. Evaluation of any shopping cart data will show that visitor entry metrics are normally significantly higher than the completion metrics.

Visitor Activity Analysis: Objectives / Outcomes

Understand these concepts:

• Use and importance of analyzing visitor traffic from entry point.
• Process and activities for analyzing visitor departure.
• Website navigation from a visitor’s perspective.
• Process for analyzing shopping cart abandonment, to be used as a basis for improving shopping cart conversion rates.
• Techniques for evaluating conversions.

Be able to do these things:

• Interpret and analyze reports on Visitor arrival.
• Design a landing page in order to measure traffic from a campaign.
• Analyze visitor departure website data, trends and patterns and evaluate their impact on the website persuasion architecture.
• Be able to troubleshoot and optimize the sequence of events leading to visitors achieving the goals of the website.
• Conduct relevant funnel analysis of the conversion process.

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On-site Search: Overview

Search is a fundamental component of your site, of the user experience and ultimately your conversion process.

As an analyst, your effort to improve your site’s navigational structure must include a plan for measuring onsite search analytics and providing resources for the optimization of your content and the search solution itself. Search performance influences your entire site and should be addressed by key people in the organization. You need to prepare a plan for analyzing and optimizing your search solution’s usefulness to get visitors to your organization’s goals, make those conversions, and keep visitor’s trust in your navigation system.

Sections in this module discuss how to set up your search solution for analytics. You can make sure your search log details include relevant data about the search such as the number of pages returned and the search terms used. If you rely on the default log file format, you may not get the information you need.

As one of your key navigation devices, the search engine should be an integral part of any medium to large sized site. It should be instantly available everywhere. If users are having trouble finding or using the search form, then they may miss much of what your site has to offer. Your site will miss out on this short, but interactive dialog with your visitor.

This module includes a case study that deals with onsite search.

On-Site Search: Objectives / Outcomes

Understand these concepts:

• Importance of analyzing a site’s onsite search behavior.
• How onsite search affects website conversions and website optimization development and architecture practices.
• Basic measurements for onsite search performance.
• How results of the onsite search form impacts user behavior.

Be able to do these things:

• View onsite search as an interactive navigational element similar to sitemaps and navigational bars.
• Evaluate and analyze results of onsite search to optimize search results.
• Identify the measurements for evaluating and improving the search form.

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Navigation and Site Analysis: Overview

To support the web development team, the analyst must take a detailed and strategic approach to implementing a system that helps to evaluate and improve the site design. The web analyst needs to be involved in the earliest phases of site development providing background research from prior logs in the case of a site redesign, be able to advise on information architecture development and Content Management System (CMS) selection if a content management system is in use, and be prepared to analyze minimal logs to extrapolate the full potential of a new metrics solution.

Sections of this module discuss supplemental navigation systems, which include sitemaps, indexes and guides. These are external to the basic hierarchy of a website and provide complementary ways of finding content and completing tasks. Supplemental navigation systems can be critical factors for ensuring usability and find-ability within large websites.

Later sections discuss how forms analysis is a direct measurement of conversion, for both e-commerce and lead generation purposes. Web forms create an exchange of information and value. If people must spend any amount of time filling out a web form, you must offer something in return and communicate to the visitor that benefit.

Navigation and Site Analysis: Objectives / Outcomes

Understand these concepts:

• Primary factors to consider in design for evaluation.
• Role of the web analytics professional in a web development team.
• Supplemental navigation components and reasons they are used.
• Metrics relevant to these site components.
• Forms analysis purposes and requirements.
• Purposes and applications of forms analysis.

Be able to do these things:

• Create a plan to implement metrics in a site redesign.
• Describe analyst’s role in the team responsible for the development or redevelopment of a website.
• Assess web structure and design compensating for limitations in tracking methods and analytic tools.
• Explain why and how supplemental site navigation (site indexes, guides and maps) is used.
• List and describe the basic requirements of initiating forms analysis.
• Create and implement metrics for forms analysis.

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Content Analysis: Overview

In order to understand website content grouping, it is important to realize that all website content should have value and a purpose in communicating with the target audience (visitor). At the same time, website content needs to be organized so as to improve the effectiveness of the website. The goal is to understand content relevance and how this can be best structured within the website to move (persuade) the visitor along a path to conversion. This would also take into account the “call to action” on a web page and the linking strategy used within the page.

Content-heavy sites are websites in which new content is generated in significant volumes on a daily basis. Websites of this nature typically generate the content internally or use the website community to generate the content or alternatively some form of content feed, and tend to rely on advertising support, a subscription base, or sometimes both as a revenue model.

Sections in this module discuss how to identify key performance indicators (KPIs) that can lead to additional insight that improves website performance, leading in turn to a more successful subscription or advertising model. The success of these models is contingent on growing the monthly visitor base to a critical mass point, whereby monthly repeat visitors combined with new visitors, generates the page views or requests required to sustain the revenue model.

Later sections cover different types of Intranets: those used as a “library” or store of content, those used to provide service to employees, and those used actively to run or manage business operations. Intranets have additional requirements that should be discussed in some detail because they are generally used by employees and suppliers who are familiar with them, as opposed to consumer websites where often the user has never used the website before.

This module includes a case study on Intranet content analysis and a site optimization strategy project.

Content Analysis: Objectives / Outcomes

Understand these concepts:

• Usefulness of content grouping within the site.
• Why content groups should be aligned with personas / task.
• How grouping site content affects visitor behavior.
• Methods of measuring content popularity and effectiveness.
• Difference between Intranet and web site Content Analysis.

Be able to do these things:

• Apply content grouping to understand visitor behavior.
• Appropriately use a content audit for the categorization of content and for the grouping of similar content items.
• Use content naming structures to ensure useful measurements of content effectiveness.
• Analyze content relevancy over time.
• Apply business goals / task scenarios and personas when grouping content.
• Apply key performance indicators to monitor the effectiveness of a content site and to identify areas of particularly high or low value within that site.
• Assess and develop the metrics used in Intranet Content Analysis.

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What to Watch Out For with Site Technology: Overview

As an analyst, you may not be responsible for addressing / fixing the following issues, but you should know something about them so you can monitor them and be able to communicate with the IT department to get them resolved.

• Typical visitor tracking methods, such as IP address tracking, cookie tracking and registration/login tracking
• First-party vs. third party cookies
• Browser types and operating systems
• ISPs and geography
• Server errors
• Spurious traffic
• Data cleansing
• Screen sizes

This module also discusses how some site technologies significantly complicate online measurement by using frames, Flash and AJAX. The ability to measure rich media interactions is increasingly important as the digital marketing landscape continues to evolve. The key to successful measurement under any circumstance is a thorough knowledge of the application’s content and structure.

Later sections cover how to get good reporting on a dynamically generated web site by communicating with the IT regarding what you need in terms of setting up the site to comply with reporting requirements. Understanding dynamic site measurement helps you to communicate with IT and understand your vendor’s documentation on this topic.

Web Site Technology: Objectives / Outcomes

Understand these concepts:

• Technical issues that may affect analysis of data.
• Major differences between Flash and AJAX, and how each is measured.
• Measurement problems associated with frames.
• Content management technologies currently in use which complicate online measurement.

Be able to do these things:

• Use knowledge of technical issues to ensure your analytics are as accurate and helpful as possible.
• Explain the methods available for measuring Flash interaction.
• Explain how CMS and Dynamic pages are tracked, and how to modify tracking methodologies to allow for CMS or Dynamic pages.

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Optimizing for Conversion: Overview

This module describes how to use intentional scent trails on your site to improve conversion when people click on search engine result links. To optimize scent trails, make sure that when the intent is transparent, the scent trail on any chosen term matches that intent. It doesn’t matter if the trail starts with PPC (pay-per-click) or organic search. Prospects usually hope to find one of two things: the answer they seek or a link that takes them to the answer.

Optimizing a website for the search engines is an excellent goal, but getting higher rankings in the search engines only means your links will be clicked on more often. You can get all the clicks in the world and still not convert visitors – just ask those who have gone out of business “buying traffic” and never making a sale or conversion to goal.

Sections of this module look at several kinds of reports that help you to understand how visitors are arriving at your site. The first set, for example, that people look at is usually the Referrers – sites that have links to your site. It is also valuable to look at the highest volume of search phrases.

This module includes a practicum that analyzes email and how scent trails are broken or created.

Conversion Optimization: Objectives / Outcomes

Understand these concepts:

• The relationship of visitor behavior via organic search engines and visitors’ subsequent activity.
• How the source of the visitor impacts conversion.
• How landing page content affects visitor conversion.
• How web analytics metrics can help to identify search engine / keyword traffic and define strategies to optimize search engine rankings.

Be able to do these things:

• Describe the “scent trail” approach to understanding search engine behavior and how it relates to visitors’ subsequent activity.
• Determine a site’s effectiveness in maintaining the interest of organic search engine visitors and use that interest to drive conversion.
• Test and measure conversion by visitor source.
• Create and modify landing pages to improve visitor conversion.
• Increase the natural rankings of site pages in search engines and the conversion rate of these pages based on the visitor behavior associated with them.
• Create and modify web pages that continue the scent trail from clicks on organic search listings.

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Tracking Visitor Behavior and Value Over Time: Overview

This module deals with how you can track changes in customer behavior and use this information to forecast trends in the value of the customer. Forecasting customer value is a core concept when trying to understand Engagement and for managing Customer Retention. These changes in customer behavior and value over time are called the Customer LifeCycle. LifeCycle Metrics are used to discover behavior that is “not as expected” and flag management that action may be needed with the segment.

One LifeCycle Metric is called Latency. Latency refers to the average time between customer activity events, for example, making purchases, calling the help desk, or visiting a website. You can use this metric to trigger changes to the web site or campaigns for customers who appear to be dis-Engaging from the business.

A second LifeCycle Metric is called Recency. The more recently a customer has completed an action, the more likely they are to complete it again, relative to other customers whose last completed action was not as Recent.

In the context of marketing: Recency simply reflects the power of the Customer LifeCycle. As customers pass through different stages of their relationship with you their needs change. You can optimize the web site and Marketing by understanding these changes and reacting to them with communications tailored to the stage of the LifeCycle the customer is in.

You can also use Latency and Recency to rank the Potential Value (value in the future) of visitors, customers, and campaign segments. Combined with an understanding of the Current Value of the visitor or customer, you can use these metrics to map all visitors and customers to the visitor / customer value model. The map can be used to predict the value of various Marketing activities and forecast the profitability of the business.

Visitor Value Over Time: Objectives / Outcomes

Understand these concepts:

• Portfolio approach to customer value management (Visitor Value Model).
• LifeCycle and Friction as they apply to CRM modeling and forecasting.
• How Latency and Recency map the Customer LifeCycle.
• How Latency and Recency can be used together to predict the outcome of visitor campaigns.

Be able to do these things:

• Apply this LifeCycle analysis to the allocation of marketing resources.
• Predict customer behavior and use these predictions to design programs for optimizing visitor and customer value.
• Use Latency and Recency to rank the potential value of visitors and customers.
• Use your own customer’s behavior to tell to you the most important (and profitable) time to market to them.