Once WAA Training - Session 1: Getting Started with Web Analytics ended we had a short brake and then session two began.
Session 2: Ratcheting Up Website User Experience
10:15 a.m. - 11:15 a.m.Presenter: Braden Hoeppner, Telus
Successful web sites require continuous review to maximize conversion rates. What specific actions should be taken to improve the user experience and increase web site traffic? Learn how to optimize your site’s content structure and usability, so that you can improve the quality of content on your site to increase conversion.
You’ll leave more confident about how to:
- Track, evaluate, and optimize your web site’s landing pages to improve visitor conversion.
- Diagnose shopping cart abandonment and increase completions.
- Leverage onsite search to better understand visitors and improve your site’s content.
- Use scenario analysis to understand what’s working and what’s not.
- Create simple tests to define and evaluate the value of web site changes.
- Measure the effectiveness of search engine optimization efforts.
Before you can achieve your business goals your users must achieve their goals.
Discovery – scanning - interaction – acquisitions (4 buckets - make a funnel)
Impressions and click through (DISCOVERY)
- Banners
- Email
- Internal Links – do they actually work (are you measuring it)
Cost per visitor
Segment by
- site source
- Ad creative / messaging
- Visitor segments (email)
- Use URL Parameters (www.site.com/?adddetail)
- What keywords do people use to find you?
- Are there phases that people should be finding you that are not showing up? And use PPC/SEO to focus on those items.
Is your SEO working?
- ensure you can tell organic vs. paid listings apart
- cost per click or cost per conversion (need to measure) to attribute value to your SEO work; include the money you spend on SEO companies to help you with this effort.
- Track conversion rate by Engine and Conversion rate by Keyword (gain / loss)
- Start to connect with your Discover phase (is one search engine driving more “sticky” visitors than another?)
SCANNING:
Once people have discovered your site , understand how they immediate react.
Measure
-Bounce Rate
- Single access visits to a page
-Entry pages / Landing pages (visits/ exits/conversions)
-Eye Tracking
- Start to connect with your discover phrase.
So they scanned your site and decided to stay.
INTERACTION STAGE:
Measure:
- Visit depth
o KPI Pageviews / visit
-Latency / Frequency Metrics
o Time since last visit, visits/visitor
-Exit pages
-Rich Media Interaction
o Time spend on Rich media, technographic data
-Segmentation is critical in making these metrics valuable.
Look at the screen resolution – (ie: 800 x 600 – might show visitors are not ready for rich media, etc). Also look at how people from different search engines react.
ACQUISTION
Finally the visitor does what you want them to do (or what they want to do)
Measure
- Conversion Rates
o Leads, purchase, support request (depending on your site)
-Abandonment Rates
There’s friction between the visitor and their goal and you want to reduce the friction.
Value of On Site Search
On site search queries reveal user’s desires and intents and cultures in specific language.
Use these to inform your site text
- Ex: Do people call it SMS or “text messaging”? (reduce the friction)
Multiple searches per visit – (good or bad?) despends
- Is it good (people are interacting with your site a lot)
- Or is it bad (people can’t find results).
Watch for zero result searches
Test Search Results page (see vendor case studies) – enormous payoffs in optimizing search results page.
Funnel (there’s friction between each of the parts of the funnel).
Page Analysis
Why do we do such a bad job of getting visitors though our sites? (how odo we reduce friction) – sites are started by the business rather than the needs of the users.
There’s a hole in my bucket – your job as the analyst is to figure out where the holes are and plug them, but it’s also about adding more “buckets”
I still haven not found what I’m looking for
- users leak out of your bucket because they did not find what they were looking for. You need to create waypoints for users who require additional info
Can you smell it?
Two personas:
Branden - wants to propose to his girlfriend Melanie and wants’ the perfect diamond.
How does the site appeal to both users?
Need to have both types of content.
Huh!!!! Engagement Metric – they have to scroll down to see it – then you can measure how much they care, what effort they made.
Form / Cart Abandonment
Each step within one page
(Keeps the momentum going)
Usability and Analytics
Web analytics tells us “what” happens while Usability tells us why it happened – and segmenting those so you can look at them on your website (and analytics package).
A strong site optimization strategy will leverage analytic an customer
Site Redesign is Dead?
Um…maybe we’d like to see it …otherwise don’t do it unless site is leaking money.
The Key to Site Optimization – AB Testing
AB testing allows you to segment your traffic into two streams of content and helps you evaluate the effect of a change.
Test Design
- hypothesis
o visitor segmentation strategy
o statistical significance calculation
o winners and losers
o site development
Accepting Bad News
- Avinash Kaushik - 80% of the time we’re wrong about what our users want.
- No matter how bad the old situation was, if the new one is worse, returning tot the old one is an improvement.
- Take some risks – if your not comfortable blowing up the home page, do it somewhere else
- Use the web as a low cost testing platform for message in other channels.
Questions:
1. the Easy way to do A/B testing?
a. Ad Server or Javascript around a link – send them to two pages
2. Any insight in how to get the organization to listen?
a. Change jobs. (laughter)
b. Find an advocate in the company
c. Tie it to revenue, qualify what the revenue means (but that value can be debatable in the organization)
3. Web site redesigns are dead
Most of the time gradual changes work better (less change is better – because customers are not used to radical change).
4. How do we make A/B Testing statistically valid?
a. Buy a statistics textbook
b. Just start testing and seeing what works.
Also, test where you put the search box. Also, when doing A/B testing , there’s a course at MarketingExperiments.com and take a certification course. You need anywhere between 1000 to 20,000 visits to make a valid A/B test.
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