Good Behaviour

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.

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.

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.