A little bit techy today. I know. But really useful stuff.

With Google Analytics, you have the ability to track how many products are bought on your website, with it’s ecommerce tracking. You can also use this for your website, even if you don’t actually sell products but to categorise your lead generation, pdf downloads or whatever the call to actions are on your website.

On your product bought / lead confirmation page, you will need your programmers to add some code to the page, after the main google analytics tracking tag.

For example, I can track what type of property, the country, the postcode, the specific ID, the number of bedrooms in the property, a fictional value of £10/$10 for each lead, the price that each property is on the market for, – all by getting the programmers to use a “get” for each bit of information I am retrieving from the website. But it could any important information about either your product sales or leads.

Category is really useful because that’s how you sort your products / leads into different buckets.
Product name and Product Sku are where two different fields where you can specify what details about your product or lead you want to be able to see in google analytics as your product details type information.
The others, like price etc, are pretty self-explanatory.

In this instance, I don’t use shipping and tax – because I am using the ecommerce tracking for tracking leads generated.
This is my sample code which goes on the product bought/lead confirmation webpage code:

pageTracker._addTrans(
“$property.getCountryCode() $property.getBranch().getID()”, //Order Id
“10″, //Total
“”, //Tax
“”, //Shipping
);
pageTracker._addItem(
“$property.getCountryCode() $property.getBranch().getID()”, // Order Id
“$property.getPostcode().getArea() $property.getPropertySubTypeName()”, //’SKU’
“$property.getPropertySubTypeName() $property.getBedrooms() beds”, // Product Name
“$selectedTab”, // Category
“$property.getPrice()”, // Price
“1″ // Quantity
);
pageTracker._trackTrans();

And this is what ecommerce categories ends up looking like within the google analytics interface, eg renting:

And here are product details eg 3 bed house.

This is extremely easy to set up, 20 minutes of a programmer's time, and once done, gives a huge benefit and understanding of either ecommerce usage or leads generated in exactly the way that makes sense to you.

Have you tried it out yet?

8 conversion rate tactics below to help increase conversion rates on your website.
1. People Click On What They Want

People navigate the web by “scent”, Byran Eisenberg, conversion guru and persuasion architect, tells us. Scent was first described by Xerox PARC to describe the parallels between a human’s information-gathering techniques on the Web and an animal’s food-gathering techniques in the wild. People seek information through the “scent” given off by their trigger words.

According to research performed by usability guru Jared Spool, when visitors found their trigger words on a landing page, they were successful at completing their task 72% of the time; if the trigger word wasn’t on the page, they were only successful 6% of the time. The scent of the keywords kept them on the right path; lacking that scent, they stopped searching that particular “trail”. One tip to make sure you have your visitors’ trigger words covered is to make sure each major button or link:

completes this sentence: “I want to _____”.
includes trigger words / strong scent

2. Start Using Persuasive Call To Action Words

Impotent call to action hyperlinks like “read more” and “submit” sometimes make me feel embarrassed for website owners. They should know better.

Persuasive call to action hyperlinks should include an imperative verb and a benefit. For example, which hyperlink is more persuasive: A or B?

George found an investment secret that changed his life. Read More
George found an investment secret that changed his life. See how George doubled his income in one year.

You can see from this comparison why the second example is more likely to induce action.

3. Better Product Images Are Worth A Thousand Calls to Action

Having better-looking product images than other sellers will do wonders. If research is any indication, product images are a major factor in converting visitors. In fact, 83 percent of eBay shoppers skip listings without images, while sites with galleries get 15% more activity and those with so-called super-size photos show a 24 percent spike in sales. The better photo wins every time. Many people skimp on the quality of their product images and use manufacturer-supplied images which is a mistake.

4. B2B Products or Services Need Merchandising, Too

The same holds true if you are in B2B: Better product images are worth a thousand calls to action. Many B2B sites offer downloads of whitepapers or demos in exchange for completing a form, but fail to make the most basic of efforts to persuade visitors to do so. Don’t just tell them about your whitepaper… merchandise it. Show a cover, show them how easy it is to read with all your pretty charts. Test to see which pieces matter the most.

5. Headlines Must be Made to Stick

Most headlines (and copy for that matter) suffer from what Chip and Dan Heath refer to in their book Made to Stick as a curse of knowledge: Once you know something, it’s difficult to imagine what it is like to not know it. The headline on your page is the one thing that about 80% of your visitors will read. But while headlines are often crafted for their persuasive abilities, they often assume too much prior knowledge on the part of the reader. Make sure that everybody understands what your headline is about, even if they have no reference to understand it. Then invest as much time as possible testing your headline’s abilities to both (1) gather attention and (2) entice visitors to invest the next 30 seconds on your page by explaining what’s in it for them — in language they can understand!

6. Always be Testing

Doing A/B or multivariate testing used to require some in-house programming expertise or expensive third-party software. Thankfully, Google has provided us with a free alternative in the form of Google Website Optimizer. While it may not offer every feature some of the other solutions provide, it is quite an elegant solution and getting better all the time. I actually prefer that people don’t spend their money on a tool, but focus those resources on better copy and imagery instead. There are no more excuses for not testing regularly. Remember what Claude Hopkins wisely said in 1923: “Almost any question can be answered cheaply, quickly and finally, by a test campaign. And that’s the way to answer them – not by arguments around a table. Go to the court of last resort – buyers of your products.”

7. Should we be testing hundreds of thousands of variations?

This question illustrates the market’s misunderstanding of testing. For the vast majority of businesses, this is more like random testing. You can test thousands of combinations in a multivariate test, but being able to doesn’t mean you should. Let’s focus on this example. I’ve kept the numbers simple for clarity’s sake, but let’s assume:

Example I (not recommended):

1,000 = Test combinations (the number of page sections and variations in the test)
10,000 = Page views per day
100% = Visitors in experiment (we’ll run the experiment with all our traffic)
2.4% = Current conversion rate (average conversion rate)
20% = Expected improvement
The duration for this test: 34.9 days. (More than a month!)

Example II (recommended):

20 = Test combinations (focused on key drivers)
10,000 = Page Views per day
100% = Visitors in experiment
2.4% = Current conversion rate
20% = Expected improvement (focus on key drivers in the hierarchy of optimization rather than just random elements, and your expectations should be higher)
The duration for this test: 0.698 days. (Under a day!)

Under the guise of being “scientific”, the companies that originally offered these tools charged on a monthly basis. While they had plenty of experience in managing their software, they had little experience in identifying valuable tests. Plus, they had zero incentive to get quick results while customers paid a monthly fee.

Multivariate testing for the sake of conversion rate optimization should be scientific. However, testing is about improving your business results, not scientific experimentation. Unless you’re running a lab, you’re testing for profit. (No offense, non-profits… yes, you should be testing too.) Testing only what matters is how to recover opportunity cost. Time is money. Don’t waste it by testing which variables matter; rather, invest your time in improving those variables and your understanding of them. Fix the things that hurt your conversions as fast as possible, and make more money today.

8. Read the Reviews on Conversion

Reviews have been all the buzz the past couple of years. If you recently purchased something online, has a review influenced your purchase decision?

New research further illustrates the value of reviews:

77% of online shoppers use reviews and ratings when purchasing (Jupiter Research, August 2006)
63% of consumers indicate they are more likely to purchase from a site if it has product ratings and reviews. (CompUSA & iPerceptions study)
86.9% of respondents said they would trust a friend’s recommendation over a review by a critic, while 83.8% said they would trust user reviews over a critic. (MarketingSherpa)
Most people don’t seem to focus on all the factors involved in implementing reviews to enhance conversion. It’s important that you test and optimize for conversion and persuasion by focusing on the following areas:

Placement for Visibility
Above the fold
Size
Stars or other graphic
Near point of attention or action
Review Interaction

Ease of reading
Sorting
Rating Distribution
Use across the site
Single Dimension versus Multi-Dimension Reviews

What are the key attributes across different categories
Can review content influence purchase decision
Credibility Factors

Negative and positive reviews
Review approval policy
Reviewer characteristics
What Does a Review Mean

Number of reviews
What questions are you asking
Qualitative versus quantitative
Reviews are just one example of the market trend demanding more authenticity and transparency, and they are key factors in getting your visitors to take action. Any time you have a choice between opening up more or less, always opt for giving your customers more.

What do you think? Do you have any ideas on how to make your website perform better?

If you are a company with a sizeable email marketing budget and list you will be interested in increasing sales or increasing leads. But what should you key performance indicators be?
Some choices for a ecommerce-driven business are:

Sales (total sales, sales by campaign/type/segment/cell, per e-mail delivered)
Profit/margin per e-mail sent and campaign level
List growth/churn (size of database, growth month over month, churn rate month/aggregate)

Some companies are more about lead generation than pure sales. They want to get a lead into the hands of a partner or call centre or salesperson–so they are about efficiencies, rather than sales and/or profit margin. There choice could be:

1. Cost per lead
2. Funnel movement (how leads migrate through the funnel stages)
3. Total reach (how much of the prospect database can be reached at any given time). This includes churn metrics as well.

Notice that the primary KPIs for the two instances above are not about click-through rate or open rate.

When the real focus of the program is purely branding, the metrics seem simpler, but with a deeper definition:

1. Response rate (both open and click). Brand marketers are increasingly looking at the total reach of their base and less at campaign-over-campaign results. They want to count how many eyeballs were exposed to the brand each month, the resulting interactions and incremental Web exposures.
2. Site visits and site journeys. Site traffic statistics driven from e-mail are becoming increasingly valuable to see what content and interests are driven from each campaign/program and business division. Depth of site exploration… List growth. See how email traffic performs against searches made, types of products bought so you can define your personas against email marketing.

All brands place increased value on the size and relative growth of the database since it represents a potential share of market and voice. It is essentially the lifeline to reach a mass of customers in an efficient manner. This, combined with qualitative feedback, is quite useful in measuring brand attitude, awareness and level of involvement with the brand.
So also for example in this context thinking about how to encourage higher subscription rates to an email newsletter via personalised call to actions based on site activity or cookie id to move more people from your bottom left to top right (great customers).
Here are some standard KPIs but obviously every company’s KPIs will be different and will need to evolve over time as well.

E-mail KPIs:

E-mail sent/delivered
Campaign over campaign impressions/opens (total/unique/% rate)
Campaign over campaign clicks (aggregate/unique /% rate)
Click to open (% who open the message and click through)
Churn rate (% unsubscribe/opt out/undeliverable)
Send to a friend (viral rate)
ISP domain response (open/clicks)

Commerce-Driven Program KPIs:

Total sales (campaign, month, quarter, segment)
Profit/margin per e-mail sent / source
Sales per e-mail sent
Cost per e-mail sent
Average Order Value (AOV)
Number of orders
Conversion rate (to open/click through)
Number of site visits (page rank)

Demand Generation

Number of leads (by product/client type)
Number of downloads
Site visits
Page Rank
Cost per lead
Conversion rate
Membership/subscription/database growth

Web Focused

Cost per visitor
Number of leads by entry page
Heavy user share
Average page views
Stacking effect
Length of site visit by source

What do you think? Have I missed some that you think glaringly obvious…
Thanks so much for reading

Click here to see and also listen to my presentation of how Rightmove are using in this particular case tealeaf to understand their customer experience better and replay exactly what their visitors did and see it in their eyes (I’ve saved the presentation using Jing Project which is absolutely fab).

The presentation is just under 5 minutes long, includes all my slides, my voice (audio) and also a video of where a visitor’s journey went wrong using tealeaf’s session replay. It opens up in a new window, press play and you can listen to all 5 minutes (if you have the time that is). http://screencast.com/t/SadLainUI3

It was really great (not trying to be cheesy I promise) to meet and see everyone yesterday. You may be able me make out in the photo.

As web analysts, at times to fully get to the heart of an business issue we need to bring together web analytics metrics with empathy of the customer experience.

This is where customer experience management tools, which are not cheap, such as tealeaf and speedtrap have created a niche, and include a browser replay feature of individual Web sessions, including the specific pages a customer viewed and how he or she interacted with them, with or without mouse movements as well. Companies on a significantly smaller budget can use other tools to a certain extent such as Techsmith’s Morae, a usability lab on a CD Rom and Crazy Egg, free or almost, heatmapping of click and mouse movement over time.

Why we wish to understand the experience our users/customers in greater detail:

The unique session replay functionality would allow the company to hone in on live technical and customer orientated issues to achieve a fix with a quick turnaround on their website.
Help customer services teams work with customers where they were having a problem on the website doing what they wanted to do – so the customer services team can replay the customer’s session and tell them where they missed a step or alternatively where the website didn’t deliver.
Identify problems in our customer journey on the website e.g look up sessions where a page or image had a problem loading, 404 errors etc.
Identify fraud or unexpected activity on financial services websites
Compare click activity on a page to mouse movements on a page to eg identify elements on a page that are encouraging a high number of mouse movements but that are non-clickable (and hence should be clickable).

B2B customer issues: Identify issues that our B2B customers are having on the site. Allows customer services to replay customer sessions.
B2C customer issues: Identify issues that B2C customers, visitors to the site are having on the site. Allows customer services us to replay customer sessions.
Usability testing: B2B and B2C usability testing, where our test audience journeys on the website can be replayed to identify issues, be that on a form process or product. For usability testing, tools developed specifically for usability testing such as Morae will allow metrics such as “time on task”, “error rate”, satisfaction, mouse movement over time, mouse clicks, web page changes and survey results.

However, these customer experience tools will allow almost video recording replay of visitor sessions which can be used as part of a website usability process.

Mouse click and mouse movement activity, if that is all is wanted initially is offered either free or very reasonably by crazy egg – but that is all one is getting. On a page by page basis (each page needs to be tracked individually), a heat map of that one page where one can breakdown mouse click and movements is shown. However, there is no ability to replay sessions.

The ultimate aim is to drive improvements in the customer experience of the website you provide, small improvements to conversion rates can lead to significant increases in leads.

Successful capture of end-user sessions and session data.
Visual replay of end user sessions.
Successful search for sessions based on free-text and event constraints.
Click versus mouse movement activity.

Challenges associated with these tools:
Getting to grips with the “customer experience method of thinking” in terms of the perceived traditional web analytics definitions of items such as visits and page impressions versus “sessions”.
Either trawling through the source code of the website to identify unique code that can be used to set up the relevant metrics in the case of tealeaf (Tealeaf can implement site tracking without adding javascript to the source code, tealeaf uses http requests), or adding tracking tags throughout the website, in the case of Speedtrap.
Learning how to use the product and to configure the events required from scratch.
Set up and configuration of the product across all hosting sites and servers.
The ability to configure the customer experience tool to your exact requirements, rather than accept a standard “off the shelf” approach or black box approach, can be a blessing or curse depending on the processes in-house at your organisation. As they are completely flexible so reliant on good processes internally to set them up to maximise their return on investment.

Customer experience management tools with their ability to replay sessions are a window to better customer experience understanding. I hasten to add, I say a window – as it is up to the web analytics manager / user experience manager to drive value and understanding from these tools, to drive a better understanding of the customer experience.

I am a huge fan of management and marketing theory (not for the sake of it of course), but applying and finding ways to make the continuous job of improving overall marketing performance (web analytics of course) a little easier. I developed my Activity Based Scorecard (ABS) after working with the balanced scorecard - traditional management theory. In my “web analytics scorecard”, see image below, define KPIs, I identify relationships, I bench mark these relationships (with trends) against themselves: and ask the question how effective is my website and marketing performance? This is my correlation between effectiveness of my website under review and the web analyst’s approach to continuous improvement, of said company performance.

              (Click image for higher resolution) 

  

My ABS scorecard, large image above, measures the relationship(s) between:
1. Usability, multi-variate A/B testing, market research.
2. Management information and web analyst reports.
3. Web data and statistics.
4. Actionable insights and decisions.

These can all be classified as flows of information and should have separate agenda and metrics. Each component should be weighted according to its importance and the overall metric for assessment. In other words providing weighted scores for different components to provide a more accurate picture of their value to the overall picture, from the company perspective which would be aligned to their commercial objectives.

At the outset one should understand the objective, content, and overall aim of the website, in other words if everything went kaput, as Avinash often tells us, what is the most important thing for your business. My Activity Based Scorecard, analysis and decisions then flow from this. My analytics scorecard is a very similar assessment to the cash flow forecast of a company (finance people will love this) it takes basic inflows of information (whether product or service based) and links these inflows to outflows. A relationship Forms. Also, a cross relationship forms between the numbers of statistics and the reports generated and not to forget the decisions that flow from these relationships.

Separate metrics or cross relationships develop and can be assessed alongside the overall assessment. Usability can in some cases prevail over say the numbers leading straight through to decision flows which influences both the statistics and the reports generated. Through timely assessment of my ABS report trends (and metrics) can be established through each component and the overall assessment.

Actions can have a corrective or test feedback straight through to the inputs or changes of the core components. But, for me the most important factor is that the activities of the analyst have direct influence to the drivers of the website. This ultimately impacts the assessment.

Strategic objectives can be best described as the common ground between what we focus on, what we do best and ultimately what our passion is. We are however constrained by our financial drivers. Our marketing plan directly links with our strategic objectives. So when senior management ask: how is our website performing? - we have a context and a weighted activity based scorecard within which we can measure our true performance and ongoing actions and decisions.

The reality is that for any of this to work at all requires alot of hard work, perseverance and at the outset defining the key business objective(s) for the company. There are some tools on the market to help develop one’s scorecard, for example with Balanced Scorecard Designer you can create a set of KPIS and group, categorise and weight them.

Do let me know if you have any questions or if you agree or completely disagree. Thanks so much for reading.

 

Say for example, we would like to compare the performance of three different marketing campaigns against one another, by which I mean organic, ppc, online banner advertising, we would want to analyse the conversion rate of the campaigns over time.

First of all, we would take the average conversion rate on a daily basis, by average I mean the central tendency for our data to centre around a particular value, be that mode, median or mode. And then compare these average conversion rates over time for each individual campaign against one another.

However, when we are looking at how the data is dispersed, we may see some points that either stick out too high or too low. So how can we tell whether these are significant data points. If we look at all of the raw data that makes up the averages, it may be that there is one number that is so off the charts that it is completely skewing the whole average – these are called outliers.

It is important to get rid of outliers, otherwise you would have no idea whether or not one campaign is performing better than others.

I will post more about this later in terms of my key take aways overall. But for now, thanks so much to Rene and Aurelie for their interesting event Web Analytics day and their hospitality. Here are some take aways from the event.

Ian Thomas from Microsoft showed us some slides from Gatineau which will be launching in a couple of weeks. Click here if you would like to sign for Microsoft’s beta invite request.

The key USP of gatineau is the ability to segment your visitors by age and sex demographic from Live passport holders who visit your site (there are 30 million live passport holders so for your website this is likely to be a statistically significant segment). This demographic data is apparently completely anonymous. Plus some nice zooming in. As to whether this become a significant player in the market, like Google analytics, only time will tell. I do have some nice photos of the screen shots but will have to put those up later.

Actual web analytics client casestudies – I always think that actual results from actual clients are the meat on the bone, for example Eric Petersen’s presentation, Web Analytics is hard.

1. Top online retailer improved site design as a result of web analytics and multi-variate testing.
Analyst finds that visitors using site search are better customers.
Analyst recommend improving visibility of internal site search.
Controlled testing of different visibility and position of internal search within site
One successful experiment returns a 2% increase in visitors using site search.
Result: a six figure lift in weekly revenue, equal to a nearly 1% increaase in total company revenue over a year.

2. A well known brand analysed website to isolate a specific group of users on the web site.
Analyst shows that “product compare” functionality is under utilised.
Visitor segmentation is used to isolate visitors using “product compare” functionality.
Analyst discovers this segment has a 33% higher average order value.
Changes made bsaed on this analysis increase traffic to “compare product” functionality by 11%, increase purchases by 16% and reduce exits from these pages by 56%.
Result: an annual increase in revenue of $2.2 million

3. A Fortune 500 travel company used web analytics too and made millions by improving their messaging.
Analyst speculates that prospects were not seeing “best price guarantee” information.
Concerns were confounded by multiple messages and placements throughout site.
Multi-variate testing was used to test different messages and treatments.
The winning format was shown to convert at a rate of 0.6 points better than the control.
Result: an estimated life in online bookings of $30 million annually.

Sometimes in web analytics, we get far too concerned with which tool should we use, which theory or thought leader are we following. Ultimately, we are in the business of making more money for our clients or our own website, be that in increased sales or increase lead generation – which is why I gain so much from hearing exactly how and why people are getting the results they are for their websites.

Thanks for reading and please do comment if you have thoughts for web analytics princess

This is a different type of post from normal because there will be lots of graphics instead of words. I am also ill at the moment which is really annoying. The question being, which online marketing banner is more effective, from a web analyst’s perspective of course, and which other bits of data or charts would you have liked to have had?

Bubble charts key (I like bubble charts because you can compare 3 datasets at the same time):

Size of bubble determines number of visits in (000s) driven to website.
Bounce rate is the number of visitors who leave site after less than 10 seconds and only visit 1 page in the site.
Conversion rate is total number of conversions (eg items sold) divided by total unique visits to the site.
Message effectiveness chart where each different coloured bubble represents a completely distinct marketing message and design on logo.
CTR (click through rate) is the total number of clicks on the banners divided by total number of impressions on media/publications/other websites where banners were placed.
Cost represents the total ad spend in (000s) with the various publications.

 

 

As usual, I very much welcome your feedback and thoughts and please do let me know which online banner you think is more effective and why and which other charts or data would you would have used?

Last weekend I went to the inaugural Podcamp UK and co-presented a session with Lucie Follett on the monetisation of podcasting and podcasting measurement using engagement metrics, in the auspicious surrounding of Birmingham’s NTI (new technology institute). It was fast paced and innovative. You may be able to spot us in one of the photos? There were a whole bunch of people there including all the top UK podcasters, Twitter guys (I twitter, do you?), bloggers, journalists and new media folk in general.

In the social media ecosystem, in which I would include podcasting, there is so much potential for businesses to use podcasting to generate brand awareness and interest in their product or service from a niche audience. At the same time, there is an increased awareness of the potential monetisation of podcasting, if it is done effectively. I am still a big believer in “Content is King” - ie create podcasts that genuinely interest and compel your target audience. And have seen examples where “view movie” (ie watch podcast) with the right kind of engaging content has resulted in a tripling of lead generation on a particular car company’s website, such as brochure requests. So podcasting can and does work for business when done in the right way - you need a good story, and definitely not my boss told me to do a podcast!

However, how do you begin to measure a podcast’s effectiveness?

Due to the nature of downloadable media, there are a number of difficulties when it comes to getting accurate metrics from podcasting and issues to consider which impede the efficient implementation of big marketing or advertising campaigns across multiple website.

-How many podcast downloads are there – if the podcast is embedded in the website, is it still considered to e a podcast?
-How many viewers actually watch or listen to the podcast once it is downloaded?
-What degree of the podcast is listened to, for example if you have ad in the podcast towards the end, how many people actually listen to it?
-What true influence or buzz is actually generated by the podcast, because link content (popularity) does not equate to influence.

The key things is to look at podcasting in the same way one does other social media.

Engagement metrics are key. Things to consider include (and please feel free to add any more via comments):
1. Visitor reviews of your podcast (for example on itunes).
2. Visitor comments – where a podcast:comment ratio is the most helpful one as it strips it down to pure engagement on a podcast, by podcast basis.
3. Social capital/Visitor influence – if an established reviewer ie top podcaster or specialist within the industry writes a review/comment etc, this will have a lot more influence than if Sam from Dunkirk did (sorry Sam).
4. Ranking on established podcasting platforms, such as podcasting news top 25 or podcast alley top 10.
5. Wisdom from the rest of the web, such as the reaction on the blogosphere, twitter-sphere, facebook-sphere, general search engine results etc.

The monetisation of podcasting, is not about corporates trying to strangle the life out of a vibrant, independent podcasting community – which will definitely continue to thrive, but a marketing journey where businesses who understand social media will use it to their advantage. Businesses that podcast will be able to measure those tangible or intangible (hence engagement metrics) benefits to their business, and where eventually marketers and advertisers will be able to efficiently implement advertising across multiple podcasts, similar principle (but very different at the same time) to the way google adwords has their content network advertising – where you can run campaigns on a keyword/sector basis, having illustrated the value of advertising on podcasts or websites running podcasts.

Thanks so much for reading and do let me know if you have any thoughts or ideas, or if you completely disagree.