Better than 2 new front teeth?  Well maybe, I don’t know, as it depends on your smile agenda but what I do know is that with the advent of yearly financials, budget forecasts, staff reviews and accounting preparations there is a critical series of reports which are gaining increasing attention at senior management levels, home based businesses and even not for profits across the world.

 Put the pin in the right targets with Google’s Web Analytics.

Your website reporting is soon to take on a more proactive role within your business and if you or your business has not stopped to understand your web visitor’s behaviour then perhaps the resolution needing most work for the 09/10 financial year should be to take on the power of Web Analytics.

What you do with the reporting can make or break your online aspirations – no point in collecting pages and pages of data, pretty graphs and countless statistics if you fail to understand and indeed act on the findings.

Ploughing through your web analytics can be time consuming, draining as well as frustrating especially if you haven’t quite worked out what all the facts and figures mean…let alone plan to improve user visitation behaviour and usage patterns.

At Future Medium we use 5 key analytics ‘must do’s and these form the backbone of our client analytics training.

• TIP 1: LANDING PAGES

Often what we see on our sites tends to excite us, our staff and our friends but what behaviours are the site visitors exhibiting?  If you install Google’s free Analytics into the code of your website you can see at the click of a button how effective your pages are to everyone outside of your peer group – the group of people that really affect your websites ROI.

If poor percentages are showing then consider the effect of the page’s message, the call to action, even the effectiveness of a recent AdWords campaign.  It’s not all doom and gloom though – if the bounce rates are disconcerting don’t despair – use it as a catalyst for change…or at the very least a reason to visit Google’s free Website Optimizer – this tool is invaluable and can really improve website visitation and conversion.

• TIP 2: GOAL SETTING

Not the 5 kilos to be lost before the summer swimsuit season – but the goal setting function found in your Google Analytics account.

From our experience most of the websites we work with have more than one goal, the idea is for you to identify all the goals then go about and measure them.  Need a hand?  Consider customer behaviours that assist your business; online loyalty, offline sales, online sales, contact us, newsletter signups page – think hard and make the necessary changes to your goals.

The summation is simple; whilst you cannot set a goal to create visitor loyalty you should create a more solidified aim – ‘our website will see 50% of visitors return more than once in any given month’

It’s easy to look at your analytics data and know you are bringing in the business but how good would it be to use industry benchmarks to set some goals and grow your online presence?  By enabling benchmarking in Google Analytics, you can view metrics for similar sites within your category such as real estate sales.  These benchmarks enable you to identify areas of opportunity relative to the performance of your competitors.

• Tip 3: BENCHMARKING

Benchmarking, the word either excites you or frazzles you.  How is your website stacking up against similar industry organisations, well with the tooling available through Google you can easily gain external context to your online performance.

It’s easy to look at your analytics data and know you are bringing in the business but how good would it be to use industry benchmarks to set some goals and grow your online presence.

By enabling benchmarking in Google Analytics, you can view metrics for similar sites within your category such as real estate sales.  These benchmarks enable you to identify areas of opportunity relative to the performance of your competitors.

Did you know benchmarks are available for bounce rates, actual visitors, page views, average visit time, page views per visit and even a percentage of new visits both locally as well as from abroad?

• Tip 4: UNDERSTAND WHAT PEOPLE SEARCH FOR

How do people find your site?  What keywords do they regularly use to get there?  The trick here is realising that these keywords aren’t necessarily what they wanted to use – more so the ones that were actually effective.  Consider if you sell used cars -  but your site is not optimised for the keyword ‘used’ but you are well optimised for ‘car sales’ – the analytics will show great search traffic for ‘car sales’ but not ‘used car sales’.  This doesn’t mean your users are only searching for car sales!  Whilst useful in understanding some of your user behaviour you really need to know your customer well to know what they want.

• Tip 5: UNDERSTAND AND TRACK WHERE YOUR VISITORS GO

Analysing paths through site content is very important.  Whilst page popularity is essential as a metric it’s more useful to know how the users move about.  Take a contact or enquiry page as an example.  What’s the most common page that was viewed prior to landing on a contact/enquiry page?  Hopefully it’s a product view or a services description that inspires them.  If it were commonly a page about FAQ’s or service faults then maybe it tells you that users aren’t finding what they need.

Continuing on from last week’s article we’re going to help you with selection criteria for future proofing your online presence. Wikipedia eloquently states

“The phrase future proofing describes the elusive process of trying to anticipate future developments, so that action can be taken to minimize possible negative consequences, and to seize opportunities.”

The web and web technologies are ever changing; always evolving. Amusingly for those of us in the industry it seems as if the only constant is change. Consumer behaviour changes in part as a response to emerging technologies. We adopt new ways of doing everyday things. What may once have been a geek’s playground indeed tends to become a common tool or product that even your granny knows about. Take YouTube and Facebook for example.

Evolutionary trends and fads aside, your investment must generate return. You should expect a clear and tangible gain in efficiency, improvement in service, or measured exposure of your brand or initiative on an ongoing basis. Old hat measures of site traffic are not much more than a pat on the back telling you something is happening…. but what? Did you plan clear and measurable goals to deliver return on investment? Do you report on these at regular intervals and plan actions to tweak or change the course of your digital strategy accordingly? Were you encouraged to seek out integration points in your traditional business when you built your web asset? Did you integrate knowledge of your current user behaviour and determine how to keep an eye on shifting needs?

Diagram of various web criteria

Why have I raised these issues now you ask? This is a selection criteria piece, not crystal ball gazing or a rant about performance. But is it? If we look at the obvious criteria such as your supplier having: a rapport with your industry needs, a commercially sensitive design team, and a flexible but robust development approach – what are we left with? Quite a lot actually!

Considering the above issues, you’re going to need access to a proven methodology for planning success, an intuitive approach to user needs analysis, ongoing support by someone who ‘gets it’, proactive encouragement to understand emerging technologies, targeted digital marketing assistance, performance monitoring, and auditing of site structure and content strategies. On top of this you’re going to need to work with someone that not only ‘looks forward’ but ‘leans forward’.

Consider innovation in the context of the ever changing landscape of the online world – it’s hard work. Innovation in our view should be a part of the supplier’s culture. Innovation should be something ingrained in their every move; planning for the future whilst also creating it.

Do you now think differently about the selection criteria of your new project or existing web asset? I hope so. Don’t forget your budget will need to be reflective of the ongoing nature of the investment too.