Engage-Digital

If you use or are thinking of using a tag based analytics tool pay close attention to your page naming convention. Get this wrong and you’re toast. Get it right and life will be sweet.

The page naming convention is the piece of the jigsaw that allows you to find and identify content groups and pages in your analytics GUI. Some tools like Google Analytics don’t make use of page naming conventions, they just use the page URLs and / or possibly page titles. Others like WebSideStory’s HBX have specific variables in the tag that need to be filled.

The page naming convention allows the user to split areas of a site into content groups and identify pages uniquely within those content groups. It might be easier to think of it as a kind of Russian Doll. You have the site as the main content group, within that you may have a number of other content groups representing your main areas and within each of those main areas you may have another sub-level(s) of content and so on. Establishing unique content groups and page is important when creating funnels and segments which are crucial to doing in depth analysis.

It’s wise to create a naming convention before adding the tags. Within WebSideStory’s HBX the content group names and the page names are represented in two main variable within the javascript tag, these are identified as PN=… and MLC=…

JS tags for other tools use similarly identifiable variables.

Stuff to bear in mind before creating a decent page naming convention:
1. Before anything else, always think about the (business) objectives for the site and what questions your analytics tool will need to answer . Gather together the key stakeholders and ask them what their requirements are. It’s a nightmare to go through all the trouble of setting up an analytics tool only to find you can’t answers questions from a key stakeholder.

2. Do you want a “horizontal” or “vertical” naming convention?
“Horizontal” naming conventions generally identify pages by type right the way across the site i.e. Category, sub-category, product pages etc.

“Vertical” naming conventions identify pages by section i.e. ‘News>UK>article title’, ‘Sport>football>article title’.
Generally speaking media sites like online news providers tend to use vertical page naming conventions while sites selling stuff tend to use horizontal page naming conventions.

3. Don’t use illegal characters. These may be things like “()-*&? etc. They may also vary from tool to tool. Always check with the analytics provider first. To be absolutely safe stick to upper and lower case letters and “/” to separate content groups.
There are other issues with tag based tools around ensuring that you are tracking links properly, streaming video if you use it, internal search etc but these are technical issues that should be covered off as part of the essential house keeping of tagging.
If you use a tag based system that doesn’t make use of page naming conventions consider how you can improve things by using search engine friendly page URLs. There are two good reasons to make the effort here:
1. It will help categorise pages in the analytics tool user interfac
2. It will help with your SEO
Example: (you can click on the image to enlarge it)

If you are looking at setting up SEO friendly URLs you can still consider them in the context of horizontal of vertical although they will work better for SEO if they are based on a vertical solution. The trade off is a business decision you will have to take.

The objective of this post has simply been to point out that the level of ease and therefore the depth of insight you get from your analytics tool can be much enhanced if you take the time at the outset to establish a decent road map in you naming convention. I have saved myself a lot of agro in past doing this. Any thoughts or comments most welcome.

A butterfly beats its wings in the Mojave desert and there is a tornado in China

I’m not suggesting that web analytics is like Chaos theory but I am suggesting that seemingly small changes to a site can have big impacts.

It’s a happy but rare occurrence when one fix is so clear that by its implementation a site will be transformed from having poor performance to stellar performance. A cost / benefit analysis will help demonstrate expected return.

Grand solutions like fixing internal search, reducing basket leakage or improving retention through the checkout process are all quite obvious; alternatively driving more visits to a product page or improving conversion from product pages to the shopping basket are equally so.

These are important areas which everybody should cover off in the process of analysing a site and getting them right should yield good returns. But it is because they are so important and demand so much attention that we may be overlooking a number of other smaller, simpler and cheaper fixes that could have an equal effect on performance.

Example:
The site analytics data shows a relatively low conversion from product page to basket page and this has an impact on overall site conversion. When a customer adds an item to the shopping basket they should then automatically be taken to the shopping basket. “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush”. Many sites assume that the customer will want to continue shopping or that he/she can be persuaded to continue shopping and so the customer is left on the product page. A look at the average number of items purchased per order or per visit will resolve that question.

I have seen conversion rates double by making this simple navigational change. In this case the decision process about whether to progress to the shopping basket or not was taken out of the customers hands. If a customer wants to continue shopping there is nothing to prevent it after arrival on the basket page.

We spend a good deal of time trying to effectively second guess what our customers want and then providing them with the options. On some occasions it may be preferable for both the customer and the e-tailer to have a decision taken by default.

There are more of these simple and extremely cost efficient fixes out there. Analysing site data gets us closer to them. Making sure we already have our analytics configured by default to measure performance on the big stuff gives us more time to explore the data for these little gems.

I used to work in online media so I’m used to blank expressions and a polite change of subject when I answered the question, “what do you do?”

After travelling for a year in 2003 I came back and took a job in the new and emerging area of web analytics.

Friends, family and people I met began asking The Question again (some more than once!) and as I gave my long winded answer I detected a greater level of interest than I had before. There seemed to be an opportunity, but I needed to get it across in a more digestible way. An analogy was required – supermarket shelf stacking.

Web analytics is like product placement on supermarket shelves. Supermarkets use every trick in the book from puffing bakery air onto customers making them feel more hungry as they enter the shop to placing frequent buy products like milk and eggs at the back of the store so customers have to walk past other products on their way to pick up the two things they came in for. Supermarkets also place more expensive items at eye level and slightly to the right because we read and browse from left to right. The eye then comes to rest on them. Related products are grouped together in continuously different ways to improve cross sell. The list is endless…

Web analysis is essentially part of the same process but taken online. Data is studied so we can understand what our customers are like, why they have come to the site, what they are interested in and what their journey through the site is like. When we’ve reached the limits of the data we turn to usability in its various guises and to online surveys. I think this is like the mortar that fills in the gaps as we build our impression of how customers are behaving online and from there how we can best meets their needs.

The result is that we go and tinker with the web pages to make sure that we are putting products and the most tempting messages in the best places to help the potential customer find what they came to buy.

The principle isn’t much more complicated than that, the techniques are. The object here and in the work that we do with our clients is to illustrate the idea, point out that it works in the same way it work for supermarkets (very well), and suggest that it’s worth doing and that if it’s done well it can pay for itself.