Good Behaviour

An argument often made in relation to website performance goes as follows:

If the conversion rate on a site is 2% then there is a 98% pot of untapped revenue? Technically yes but realistically no.

If 98 out of every 100 visits to the average e-commerce site don’t make a purchase then there is clearly an opportunity, but it’s unrealistic to think that the size of that opportunity is the entire remaining 98 visits - no sane person would think that anyway!! The question then becomes, what is the realistic size of the opportunity?

This is worth asking in light of the fact that site managers and marketers must spend money chasing the revenue and the amount spent often relates to the size of the opportunity.

It’s far more likely that some visitors are there simply to research either products or prices or both. Anything between 2% and 10% percent may admit to wanting to buy and it’s these are the guys that represent the real opportunity. The reality is that even a site wide conversion rate of 8% would be well above average for most e-commerce sites so it would be an impressive feat to reach that but this is at least a more realistic figure to aim for.

The best way to find out why they’re there? Ask them.

This is an article I wrote for issue 176 of .net magazine in the UK.

I used to be Head of Online Planning and Buying at a London based media buying agency. I was there for 3 years between 1999 and 2002. In my first year our nascent online media planning and buying department experienced a 1000% growth in billings and some growing pains. Of course overall spend was much lower then than it is now as online media was also in its infancy relatively speaking.

Then in 2001 things slowed dramatically. At the time, growth in online media had been fed by new internet start ups with lots of VC capital looking to advertise to help grow their businesses and drive inexorably towards IPO! Additionally it was driven by a growth in interest from mainstream advertisers looking to dip a toe in and check the temperature.

Advertising is often considered a bellwether of economic decline as it’s one of the first things to be cut from budgets as belts tighten and when the slow down came in 2001 billings pretty much flat lined in our corner of the online media world, but other channels fared worse.

Part of the reason why online advertising may have fared better is due to much greater levels of accountability compared with other forms of advertising. Now consider the level of accountability we have with web analytics.

Back then in the early “naughties” web analytics was barely a twinkle in a webmaster’s eye, now it is proudly sitting at the boardroom table.

Not only can web analytics bring even greater accountability to on and offline advertising (if set up correctly) but it also completely opens up the level of business accountability for the website itself. It can be used to drive growth and cut costs through improved efficiencies across the whole spectrum of online communication.

If we are truly staring down the barrel of worsening economic conditions, especially looking forward into 2009 then arguably the worst thing any organisation could do would be to cut its web analytics budget.

Back in January I was working with a client that operates in an industry that is itself suffering but the saving grace for this particular client was their new website which had proved a great success in the face of a generally poorer trading climate.

If economic conditions deteriorate web analytics and the insight that it provides should be safeguarded and pored over with even greater intensity in the same way that normal business reporting and results are.

Analytics seems almost joined at the hip with conversion but improving profits doesn’t just have to be about selling more.

As times (look set to) get tougher improving operating efficiencies can be as important to the bottom line as improving on-site conversion rates. Spending money on valuable resource when it’s being under utilised is effectively wasted capital.

Thinking outside the web server

Improving operating efficiencies of a website is what web analytics was made for but it can also provide valuable information that can guide off-line operating strategies, an example of this would be in businesses running call centers.

Some businesses that have a presence both on and offline, and I refer not just to the “clicks and mortar” (hackneyed expression!) operations but also to others such as catalog retailers, may have found that their offline channel customers behave differently in varying degrees to their online punters. There are also those customers that come through both channels.

For potential customers driven by the web it’s not unusual to see day part website visitor patterns showing two spikes, one at lunchtime and one later in the evening after people have gone home and had supper.

For business that drive response to their call centers the online phone number will most likely be prominently displayed on the site.  A call me back form may also be provided so customers don’t have to waste their money waiting on hold & listening to mind numbing elevator muzac as they move up the queue.

Whether it’s via call me back forms or via the web only contact number, potential customers will pick up the phone at a time that will suit them but staffing call centers is not as easy.

Within in normal working hours businesses can run fully staffed call centers at standard rates but after hours rates for call center staff typically increases by 50% and between 200 & 300% on other “special” days such as Christmas and Easter.

If there is a lull in call center traffic at any point within normal working hours then staff will be under utilised and money potentially wasted. This becomes more acute if call center traffic peaks after hours when either there isn’t the staff to deal with it resulting in lost revenue or there is the staff to deal with it but the associated cost is higher.

To mitigate increased costs through up-weighted call centre staffing at peak times after hours it makes sense to re-coup as much as possible at other slack(er) periods.

Using web analytics to shed light on when web traffic is likely to put pressure on a call center can help improve efficiencies and bring down running costs while keeping customers happy and revenue flowing in.

Where the web is driving a significant contribution to revenue it can pay to keep the web analyst up to speed with issues that don’t necessarily relate directly to the website.

I whole-heartedly agree that visitor engagement is a concept that needs to be considered as an aggregate of several elements covering both data and, crucially for me, context. I also think it is quite subjective.

I have recently done a piece of work for a client who put a new site redesign live at the beginning of January. Looking at the data before and after the live date there were three very clear changes:

1. Performance to the required goal has dramatically increased

2. Average time spent per visit has increased by c. 50%

3. Average pages viewed per visit has more than doubled.

I was only interested in comparing the data within this one particular site and not with others in the same industry since I accept that competitors design their sites slightly differently, may have different goals and different acquisition strategies - and so may view engagement differently. For this purpose I was interested in our little world only and I will try to justify that later.

Looking at the post redesign data I was initially tempted to think that if overall site performance, as measured by conversion to one specific goal, had increased at exactly the same time as a change occurred in the average visit length and pages viewed per visit and that the occurrence of that change was at the time of the site re-launch then it could be said there is a correlation between the three.

In an effort to try and filter out as much noise as possible, I looked at one referring source which has been a constant over the past 10 months - pay per click marketing. I also know from looking back over the ppc performance data in this particular business that seasonality in market demand appears to have a limited impact on conversion.

Looking at just pay per click (from Google only) the results were the same - a marked increase in conversion occurring at the same time as a marked increase in average visit length and PVs/visit.

Theo Papadakis talks about the idea of positive and negative engagement in an article recently posted on Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik. I like this idea and would consider what I have seen here as an indication of positive engagement.

Looking further into content popularity it became clear that the new internal search function had started receiving much more traffic and now forms the backbone of the site’s navigation. This element of the site functionality was given much greater prominence in the new re-design.

So, what can be observed?

1. It’s easy to see that all 3 key changes occurred at the time of the site re-launch (in this respect we were lucky to have such a marked even to punctuate the data)

2. The same behaviour appears to be the case with a single source of referring traffic.

3. The increased conversion, average visit length and PVs / visit appears to be linked to a change in the sites primary navigation

4. Seasonality in the business cycle can in the main be discounted

This all points to the suggestion that visitors who convert tend to spend more time on the site and view more pages per visit. Given that the conversion goal is a positive outcome for us, then a simultaneous increase in average time on site and average pages viewed per visit must also be positive suggesting that visitors are more positively engaged with the content.

What do we do with this engagement?

I don’t propose to use it as an indicator to drive change in its own right. I see it as a “soft”  indicator; I prefer to think of it as a stalking horse. One which will prompt further investigation should a significant change occur. Additionally, where we have other referral sources I would like to use it to help assess relative value.

One final factor that will have to be taken into consideration and which cannot be accounted for so soon after the site launch is the novelty factor of the new site itself. This particular site sees a high proportion of returning visitors and customers, because of that we will have to see if the new re-design has prompted repeat customers and visitors to stay and look around partly out of curiosity. This should be born out in time.

My view is that engagement should largely be considered on an individual site by site basis. That is why I prefer only to look at engagement in the context of one particular site over time. It may be interesting to compare with other businesses but brand recognition and loyalty will most likely skew results to some degree regardless of site design.

Just before Christmas the prolific Blogstorm wrote a post on what a week’s vacation taught him about web design. I was reminded of his post whilst I was away over Christmas and perhaps inevitably I’ve ended up with my own set of comparisons specifically regarding managing visitor’s expectations.

I firmly believe that specifically managing visitor and customer expectations is one of the most important things that can and should be done with a site. Here are 4 basic and probably rather obvious observations on managing expectation.

1. Do what you say you will do

After taking off from Lisbon to Maputo we had to turn back because the wing flaps weren’t working properly. Sitting on the tarmac in Lisbon an announcement advised us that we would have to disembark. We waited and after a while another announcement informed us that we should remain seated with belts undone whilst the pane re-fuelled; still not sure what the problem was and if we would still have to disembark at some point. Eventually we took off again rendering the first announcement redundant.

Meeting expectations of visitors to your site is critically important. In part this can be measured using the Bounce Rate metric. This flagship metric demonstrates how good a particular entry page is at meeting the expectations of visitors arriving from specific sources. However meeting expectation goes further than this. At every step in the visitor’s journey through a site there should never be a corner around which the visitor finds something that wasn’t expected. Don’t leave them guessing.

2. Avoid dead ends and information black holes.

As a result of our delay in Lisbon we were re-routed to Johannesburg before going to Maputo in Mozambique - our final destination but we weren’t told about that until we were over half way to J’burg. The flight was supposed to make those stops in the reverse order. I asked how long we’d be in J’burg and was told 25 minutes. That’s how long the stopover would be if it was scheduled, in fact we were there for nearer 4 hours but we only knew that after the boarding announcement came in Johannesburg.

Every page on a site should have a purpose, if it doesn’t then you have to ask why its there. Try and empathise with visitors to your site and ask what they would want to know as they reach each page or type of page. Then make sure the information is readily available to them in a clearly identifiable format - clever (Web 2.0) technology is not always the solution here.

Some people will look at exit pages to understand if a page has fulfilled its role, this can be misleading as all visitors have to exit a site from somewhere, but knowing the 2 or 3 pages that were viewed immediately before the exit page may help shed further light.

3. Provide relevant information before it has to be asked for.

As already mentioned, on arrival in Johannesburg there was no indication of how long the stop over would be. Additionally there was nobody in the TAP office to answer questions. We simply had to wander around and wait. All the time we were cursing TAP for being so useless.

When a visitor or customer completes an important action such as registering for an email or buying a product or service be sure to tell them know what will happen next and what they should do. Remember that visitors to your site will not necessarily (probably not) read the fine print so you need to make important information stand out, this in itself is not as easy as one might think.

4. Don’t over complicate

There’s no holiday related comparison for this one.

Design your site for your grandmother. Clever technologies are only good if they actually make life easier. If a potential customer has to spend more than a few minutes trying to figure out how to access a piece of content that will show off the product in all its unfettered glory then, unless you are offering a financial incentive, the opportunity is lost to all but the most determined.

Finally I should add that despite my experiences flying with TAP which prompted the above comparisons my thoughts are also, in part, backed up by a piece of work I did for a client just before Christmas in which we provided a link on the category and product pages to a simple piece of content which served to provide additional reassurance to the customer during the research and purchasing process. Prior to the link being there very little traffic had been reaching the content in question. Once the link was installed traffic to that area shot up, visitors were reassured and relative performance improved.

A recent article in the Economist entitled “Many ways to skin a cat” (Dec 1^st to 7^th) prompted me to write this post. Essentially it is because I disagree with the statement “Whether or not there is truth in advertising there is certainly none for online advertisers…”.

The article mainly discusses the different metrics that can be used to price online advertising, these being page views (actually should be ad views as there is often more than one ad position per page), sessions, unique visitors, average session time / average page views per visitor (arguably basic engagement) etc. But there is in fact a more relevant way of buying online media space and one which most savvy advertisers are looking towards, that is cost per sale or cost per action.

To return briefly to some of the metrics discussed in-depth in the article; many of them mentioned are already being used but in pricing different types of advertising:

• page / ad views for banner advertising on sites which do not utilise Web 2.0 site build techniques
• sessions or more likely unique visitors for media owners offering sponsorship deals across an entire section or high traffic page
• “dwell time” for media owners selling “top and tail” video ads on streamed video content or “web 2.0″ sites.

John Wanamaker once famously said: “I know half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, but I can never find out which half”. Contrary to the comment quoted at the start of this post, I believe Wanamaker’s comment is becoming less true of online advertising. I think the reason for this is revealed in how online advertising should now be being bought.

Google is a good place to advertise for many reasons but also because while ad space is bought on a CPC (cost per click) basis, campaigns are increasingly managed on a CPA or CPS (cost per action / cost per sale) basis enabling advertisers to realise true return on investment. This is achieved by tagging the target page on an advertiser’s website and measuring the number times this page is requested as a result of a response to an ad on Google.

The tag is a little piece of code that sits on the final page of a process that represents the desired outcome for an advertiser e.g. the Order Complete page. The tag enables a report to be produced that tells the advertiser how many desired outcomes occurred and so when set against total cost of the media spend allows a rough cost per action can be calculated.

The process of measuring visitor behaviour on websites has become much more sophisticated with the advent of web analytics tools, the most popular of which by far is Google Analytics - no surprise there. These tools are most commonly implemented on websites using similar little pieces of tracking code to the ones used to track pay per click advertising.

Google bought Urchin Software (an independent web analytics service provider) a couple of years ago and now gives away this service for free. Microsoft is about to provide its own free package called Gatineau - currently in Beta testing. These are highly complimentary technologies to pay per click advertising as they enable advertisers to associate far greater value to their campaigns based on what a visitor did after clicking on an ad and arriving on a website.

Among many other things, web analytics tools can be used to measure campaigns from sources other than pay per click. So an advertiser could use Google Analytics to measure the worth of advertising from banner campaigns, email, affiliate marketing and so on as well as Google pay per click. They can even be used to track offline advertising if they are set up correctly.

Advertisers can now use a single measurement tool to compare their media spend based on cost per action or cost per sale (or what ever the desired outcome they chose).

Whilst some media buying agencies have reported the performance of their media campaigns on a CPA basis for a while, for many especially the smaller agencies and advertisers, CPA has perhaps been harder to track. With these free web measurement packages from Google and Microsoft the loop can now be closed by everybody and the benefits to the advertiser can be realised in the media buying process across all their online advertising.

The next trick for big advertisers that are engaged in multi channel acquisition strategies is to discover which channel and acquisition source has the biggest impact on sales or the desired outcome.

This can now be achieved using some of the most sophisticated web analytics tools on the market, such as Visual Science, to do complex sequential segmentation. This kind of segmentation allows advertisers to look at website conversion based only on specific combined acquisition sources and the order in which a single visitor responded to one or more of these sources.

The specified aquisition sources can then be included or excluded from a super segment to discover which has the greatest impact on the overall level of conversion to the desired outcome.

Assuming that most advertisers online are driving traffic to a website and that most online ad campaigns and associated websites have a desired outcome, all this means that the traditional method of pricing and buying online advertising as mentioned in the article should actually be much easier; simply look at whatever price is being offered, take the known click through and conversion rates if the media owner has been used already, or estimate if it hasn’t, and see if this will reach the CPA target. If not negotiate accordingly.

Caveat: For advertisers that are only interested in branding and / or awareness and where there is no goal beyond that then I accept the above is less / not applicable and you’re back at the mercy of dwell time and estimated unique visitors being quoted by the media owner.

In The Sunday Times (a leading Sunday newspaper in the UK) on 11^th Nov. 2007, there was a supplement devoted to the Customer Experience Awards 2007. On page 4 of the supplement there was an article written by Andrew Stone and based on work by David Jackson, the MD of Clicktools, a firm specialising in customer feedback. In it the article outlines the top 10 most important lessons for creating a positive customer experience. Whilst it doesn’t directly reference online it seems to me there are clear correlations to be drawn between the two.

With permission from The Sunday Times I am referencing David Jackson’s 10 lessons to draw these comparisons.

1. David Jackson: Three questions form the foundation of customer intelligence: Who are our chosen customers? What are their needs and expectations? How are we meeting their needs?

Online translation: Knowing your target audience is the central tenet of communication on or offline. Knowing what the needs and expectations of your audience is especially important online since the web is both a research medium and a sales and distribution medium. Therefore potential customers find it much easier to shop around if they don’t find exactly what they are looking for initially. Knowing if you are meeting those needs and expectations is first expressed in the Bounce Rate metric which is why it has become one of the flagship metrics in click-stream web analytics.

2. DJ: Understand how customers think.

Online translation: One of the advantages of doing business online is the relative ease with which customer insight can be gathered. There are many techniques for gathering insight online some of which have already been written about on this blog. Web analytics clickstream data, usability studies, online exit surveys, competitor data are just a few areas in which data can be gathered using existing technologies and, in most cases, without having to purloin unsuspecting members of the public who fall in to the relevant target segment.

3. DJ: Trust in your people.

Online translation:In web analysis, and especially click-stream analytics, it is important to give people their lead. It’s very hard to identify what visitors are thinking when they arrive on a site and while there are some fundamental performance indicators that should always be considered when looking at click-stream data, the analyst should always be allowed to disappear down rabbit holes to see what can be flushed out. You may be surprised by what you find out from your web insight team but you should always take it seriously until it can be reasonably refuted.

4. DJ: Work with people who believe in service excellence.

Online translation: Passion for a product or service and the way it’s delivered translates well and can help enormously in putting across a message online. This is all the more valuable on the web where the visitor / potential customer is in control. But, online where service excellence is translated through the web page, it’s important to remember that you design your site for your customers and not for yourself - an easy trap to fall into. So while it helps to have a passionate team it is important to make sure that belief and passion is channeled in the right direction.

5. DJ: Master the art of organisation

Online translation: It is critical to make sure there are strong lines of communication between the web insight team and all the key stakeholders. The first task is always to establish the objectives of the site in the eyes of the stakeholders, in doing so it will provide a clear goal to aim for. This will remove ambiguity and should result in better output internally and so a better experience for the customer. Additionally, mastering the art of organisation within the web insight team can be applied to the disparate techniques for gathering insight which need to be combined to provide a coherent impression of customer need - this as oppose to conducting research using techniques (mentioned in point 2) in isolation. Finally it is important that the insight can be translated into a clear set of actions that everybody involved can identify with.

6. DJ: Make the link to the bottom line

Online translation: This applies in the exactly the same way online as it does offline. In most cases it is standard theory online, in practice many are doing it but because the pace of change is so rapid it’s important to be able to identify as cleanly as possible the level of contribution an individual element will have. When reporting back on performance, filtering out noise from other concurrent efforts can often make proof harder to demonstrate.

7. DJ: Make everything a little better every day

Online translation: Never stop looking at how you can improve the customer experience online. Analysing your performance online isn’t a one-off exercise to be carried out every quarter, it should be an ongoing and iterative process. Some organisations may feel there is neither the time nor the budget to operate in this way so scaling the approach to fit the primary objective is important. Using dashboards which can be easily updated every week or two with the 5 most important performance indicators is the starting point for this. Making sure this is always tied to action that will improve the customer experience is the goal.

8. DJ: Understand that the future will be different

Online translation: I don’t think anybody in the online world has a problem with this, except that sometimes change and new technologies can be bought into with alarming ease and little thought as to how they will really help the customer. The current debate regarding web 2.0 technologies and content is a point in case.

9. DJ: Learn from your mistakes

Online translation: Make changes to the customer experience online but if they go wrong don’t go around wringing your hands and covering your back, learn from them and turn them to your advantage by making sure customers benefit from your learning.

10. DJ: Make things easier for customers

Online translation: This might almost come before #9 in that making life easier for customers online is all about ease of navigation and presentation of important information. This is where changes need to be made either to supporting technologies or to site design. Craig Menzies of Forrester research said during a recent speech in Barcelona that while so many tools and research technologies are available to online marketers, unless used to drive design changes that generate demonstrable improvements the insight they provide is really not much more than a form of customer voyeurism. In the pursuit of insight it’s important that we don’t loose sight of the actual goal.

If you use Google Analytics and you’re hot on your SEO and your site has an internal search functionality then you may be faced with a dilemma.

This post is about the apparantly confilcting relationship between URL rewriting and tracking internal search using Google Site Search and why it’s an issue worth addressing.

SEO & Dirty URLs
Everybody wants to optimise their site so it appears high in Google’s SERPs. “Dirty URLs” produced by dynamic web pages are considered harder for search engine bots to read, additionally they are harder for visitors to understand so there is also a usability argument for cleaning them up.

URL rewriting and associated best practice rules effctively turns a dynamic URL with all its query strings into a nice clean easy to understand URL. For a (very basic) example: www.site.co.uk/?page=SearchResult&SearchInput=widget&search=yes into www.site.co.uk/searchresult/widget . As a result the rewrite URL will obviously mask the original URL. The practice of using URL rewrites has been gaining some momentum over the past few months so keeping this in mind now consider internal search on your site.

The importance of internal site search
Internal search is one of the primary ways a visitor will find something on a site. Collecting insight from internal search can help inform and drive action; it’s as if the visitor is marching up to the e-store keeper and asking where to find to ketchup - or whatever. Internal search gives valuable insight on what visitors are actually looking for, in their own words. As a result it can drive tactical and strategic decisions ranging from words and phrases used in the pay per click aquisition strategy to product placement and stock control.

So, both URL rewrites are popular as part of the grander SEO strategy and internal search analysis is important for gaining deep insight into a visitor’s wants and needs as they browse a site.

Google Analytics has recognised the importance of internal search by introducing an internal search tracking function to its product, it’s called Site Search. But like the funnels in GA it needs to be set up using elements from the page URL. In this case it is the search query parameter that GA needs and therein lies the rub. If dynamic URLs are hidden using URL rewrites in order to optimise for SEO, then it is not going to be possible to see the search query parameter in Google Analytics - even though the rest of the data will be easier to understand. GA support confirm the proplem. In their own words:

“To set up Site Search, you’ll need to enter the query parameter. You may not be able to set up Site Search if the query parameter is masked using a URL rewrite.”

The tyranny of the “or”…
It seems like a choice needs to be made, but naturally the best of both worlds is most desired. The answer should in fact be relatively simple. Avoide using URL rewrites for internal search results. By doing this the search query parameter will remain exposed and therefore should be visible in Google Analytics. As a result it can then be used in setting up Site Search tracking.

Getting this sorted out will depend on how the rewrites are set up and the content management system in place but in most cases it should be possible to achieve.

The object of this post has simply been to draw attention to an issue that some may already be facing and which may become more prevelant given the ubiquity of Google Analytics and the increasing usage of URL rewrites on sites with dynamic pages.

The solution should be fairly simple and although it means that uniformity across all URLs will have to be forgone, the ends will most definately justify the means. If there are any other alternatives to solving this please feel free to comment.

I may get shot (down in flames) for writing this post.

Web analytics is not just about data, this is well documented and blogged by far greater minds than mine - so I won’t get shot for that I hope! Web analytics is simply the engine behind driving better performance online. Better performance online for most organisations that actually engage in web analytics is usually about driving more revenue and improving cost efficiencies- and of course improving conversion.

99% of companies in the UK are SMBs and I think this is the great challenge for the web analytics industry. Many SMBs have websites and many of those websites perform a function, but the hard reality is that amazingly they don’t have the same size budgets as the average blue chip fortune 1000. They still need to invest to improve performance so they must approach their performance optimisation from a different perspective.

Usability is arguably a part of web analytics (2.0 as it has been labelled). There are many great usability experts out there and several different ways of approaching usability; these range from individual lab based usability tests, remote sample based usability tests using services such as Ethnio to journey replay solutions like Tealeaf.

To be clear, after looking at click-stream data and having identified where a problem might lie, if usability is what’s needed to unearth the truth then the methods just mentioned should be the preferred route; but they aren’t cheap.

A more cost efficient option would be to use a click based heat mapping product such as ClickDensity or CrazyEgg. These are not new products, they’ve been around for a while and they’re like click maps on steroids. They record clicks regardless of the presence of a link or not. They show the results either as actual clicks on the part of the page where the click was made or aggregated as a heat map. The advantage here is that where a standard link overlay will only record a click if it occurs on a link (assuming the tag is set properly) these tools will record click activity regardless. In other words, if a visitor reaches a page and attempts to click on something that looks like a link but isn’t, it will be recorded and show up.

So how do you get the most out of these tools in 5 ½ steps?

1. Assume a customer journey based on a task – making a purchase or signing up to an email
2. Replicate the customer journey as best as possible using a funnel or scenario in your analytics tool
   • Start with the most popular entry page
3. Allow enough data to collect
4. Identify main points of attrition (try and think why this might be happening i,e, form a hypothesis for each page where there is considerable drop off)
5. Look at the offending page using the heat mapping tool. The heat map will of course only show where your users have clicked but because it records every click there may be some surprises regarding where activity has and has not occurred and this could lead to action resulting in improved performance. For example there may be a high volume of clicks on a piece of text which has been mistaken for a link, this is potentially lost traffic and could go some way to explaining the drop off.

Any tweaks to the page that are implemented can subsequently be A/B tested to verify performance.

Cons

• Again, I should state, this is not the real deal in usability circles (don’t shoot!)
• You can’t talk to the people viewing the page and you can’t hear their thoughts as they navigate the page
• You can’t see cursor movements
• You can’t run the test with users instructed to carry out specific tasks

Pros

• For the budget conscious business it is much cheaper and more cost efficient. Even for large organisations it is a good practice
• The sample size includes everybody that interacts with a given page
• You can run A/B tests using these tools and compare your results instantly and run the best performing page.

This final point is perhaps the crux of it. The objective here is to amend the page design so that it makes life easier for the visitor and thereby unblocks the path to customer satisfaction.

This post has been written in the hope that it will prompt the more budget conscious business to think about how they can approach usability from a standing start. It’s not an attempt to provide a definition.

Please feel free to comment with your own thoughts and experiences.

Analysing performance of a web site is only as useful as the results it achieves. If insight isn’t acted upon and changes aren’t implemented then progress can’t be made and the analysis becomes nice but pointless.

Failing to act on insight that will yield results is probably a bit like panning gold, finding a rock with a rich seam in it and then being too knackered to break it up to gain access to the loot.

Time(ing) and money are often the reasons given for resistance to change. The advent of Google Analytics and shortly Microsoft’s Gatineau means that good quality web analytics data is available free of charge to all that want it. This removes part of the expense in acquiring visitor insight. Much of the remaining expense (depending on the methods used in doing the analysis) is down to resource both in conducting the analysis and implementing the changes.

Additionally, interest is normally around the actions rather than the insight, this is not surprising but it’s important to remember that unless the site is a mess its less likely that actions will present themselves without some level of quantitative and / or qualitative site analysis; a classic chicken and egg situation for many site owners but one which shouldn’t be difficult to resolve.

Before embarking a specific piece of analysis it is worth asking the question:

“If change is recommended, what financial and human resource is available to implement it?”

This should have two effects:

Firstly it will prevent money being wasted on an analysis from which no action can realistically be taken.

Secondly it will help concentrate the analysis on the areas where change can actually be effected. Again, this will help focus resource and avoid waste.

In a large organisation where resource is available timing may be an issue because changes to the site could be restricted to scheduled site update periods. There may also still be departmental budget issues which can act as constraints.

In small organisations that are more agile and where timing may be less of an issue budget availability could prevent action being taken especially if some changes are particularity expensive to implement.

In order to make sure that valuable resource is not wasted at the analysis stage, whatever the size of the organisation, it worth considering the following:

1. What are the objectives for the site? This is obvious but always the first thing to consider whatever your intentions.
2. Are there any specific areas that need to be investigated? Although it may be preferable “on paper” to start with a blank sheet and let the analysis guide the output, in practice it generally helps reduce cost and focus resource if there is already some idea of where the problem may lie. i.e. acquisition and retention, site stability, navigation, page design etc
3. Assuming there is neither time nor budget available to afford the luxury of using all available analytical techniques (quantitative, qualitative, competitor and so on), which one or combination is most likely to yield the desired results, how quickly can the insight be obtained and at what cost?
4. If changes need to be made who will make them? Consider the possibility of changes to the design, marketing and back end of the site and think about who will actually implement these changes. Check their schedules over the next few weeks to see if they have any available time.
5. Budget availability. This is perhaps more of an issue if any part of the process is outsourced to agencies or other suppliers but can still have an impact if not as some changes might involve buying in new or extra technologies.

Points 4 & 5 are the two main ones. Knowing these opperational parameters in advance should really help concentrate effort.

When the analysis is done it will still be necessary to run a cost benefit analysis to see what kind of revenue uplift can be expected, this is the final stage in persuading the FD - or whoever holds the purse-strings; but, knowing in advance if the resource if even available on all levels will avoid wasted effort in the first place.