Engage-Digital

Change tracking is as important in web analytics as the data. So much so that it should be seen as an integral element of the ongoing performance optimisation process.

By now Christmas will be a very distant memory and for some online retailers it will be happier than for others. For almost all, the first few months of the New Year are a time to reflect on past sins committed over the Christmas period in the rush to capitalise on the annual consumerfest.

For the more well organised and generally larger e-commerce operations all major development on their sites will have been locked down since the end of September last year, October at the latest; other smaller outfits may still have been making final tweaks right up into the first and second weeks of December. For everybody the more fluid nature of online marketing means that this activity can be changed tactically right up to the final few days before pre-Christmas delivery deadlines make it impractical to spend any more money on acquisition.

All of this means that, waiting to be analysed in the first few months of the New Year, there is a wealth of information about the site and acquisition performance that will reveal which strategies and tactics on the web design and acquisition front worked best. Or is there….?

There have been occasions when I have shown trended data to a client indicating a step change in performance either one way or the other and followed up with the question, “what did you change then?” (…for a web analyst cannot know everything!!) This is often followed by a little head scratching and then sometimes a blank. Working on the basis of cause and effect, if the cause isn’t known, the effect which may be apparent is almost worthless if it can’t be either replicated or eliminated depending on whether it was good or bad. It is surprising then how often change tracking is forgotten about.

Change tracking is the responsibility of many different stakeholders within the organisation ranging from marketing, e-commerce and web development to merchandising and individual product managers. However many differing departments and stakeholders there are, each has a responsibility to log the changes they make in the implementation of their strategies and tactics where they are likely to have directly measurable effects on the performance of the website and business.

It is often a good idea to set up a central location where all change tracking information can be stored and accessed by everybody. Ultimately as long as it’s being tracked and can be plotted against data over time, it will become usable and subsequently have a significant impact on the ability to improve performance. Experience often leads to improvement and it’s easy to look back in hindsight with 20/20 vision if you put in a bit of effort on the way.

Interview ith Dr. Brian Clifton. At the time of the interview Brian was  Head of Web Analytics at Google for EMEA. He is now Senior Strategist for Omega Digital Media.

1. How will the new set of features currently being rolled out in Google Analytics help SMBs improve efficiencies and increase profits online?

There are a few new features that have been recently introduced to GA and are now already available for use. Site search is one which we feel most of our customers will find especially useful. This feature allows people to understand more about internal site search, what words and phrases are being used, which ones convert most effectively and which are generating the most revenue. Another nice feature of site search is that users will be able to tell from which pages searches were originally made and which pages were subsequently visited.

2. What do you think are the most pressing issues currently facing SMBs that are looking to get the most out of their web analytics?

In my experience of working with both SMBs and large organisations there is a common issue of data overload, that’s why with Google Analytics we’ve tried to focus on simplifying the data while providing reports that can actually be acted upon. Additionally I think the two of the biggest issues facing SMBs today are education and resource. By education I mean the ability to understand the reports and know how to act on them. By resource I mean ensuring that there are both financial and human resources available to implement change.

3. As the largest supplier of web analytics how does Google view recent efforts by the Web Analytics Association to formalize a set of standard web metrics and associated definitions?

As a member of the WAA myself I subscribe to the importance of creating a standard however, one issue that still needs to be addressed is how tools are implemented. Different implementations can yield dramatically different results at the data output end so if we are to have standards I think it is important to address the issue of implementation as well.

This is the first of a series of brief interviews done for my page on Web Analytics which appears bi-monthly in the UKs .net magazine

Interview with Ian Thomas, Director Customer Intelligence, Microsoft Advertiser and Publisher Solutions.

1. How does Microsoft think the introduction of Gatineau will affect the analytics marketplace in the UK?

The UK web analytics market is one of the most innovative in the world; we’re hoping that our entry will prove a valuable complement to the existing products in the market and provide some fresh ideas. The introduction of another high-quality free tool will further raise the bar for other web analytics solutions, which is good news for customers of these tools.

1. What are the key features and benefits of Gatineau as Microsoft sees them?

One of the features we’re most excited about is the ability to break down your site’s users by demographic (age and gender) segment – so, for example, you’ll be able to see if men are more likely to make a purchase than women. This will be out-of-the-box functionality – something you can’t do with any other web analytics tool. We’ll also be providing powerful analysis of the effectiveness of online marketing campaigns, and some innovative visualisation capabilities to help customers understand user behaviour more easily.

1. How will Gatineau help add value to small and mid sized organizations conducting business online in the UK?

Historically, the ability to access demographic information about your web audience has been limited to “enterprise level” web analytics tools, which require a significant financial and time investment to set up. Gatineau will bring this valuable information to smaller organisations with more limited web analytics budgets.

Since this interview was conducted Microsoft have made many improvements to their web analytics product.

Search engine optimisation is seen by many as the Holy Grail of online acquisition. If done properly it’s considered to be the cheapest and most effective way of driving high quality traffic to a web site. Many people obsess and probably loose sleep over their favourite search term(s) reaching the cherished number one spot in Google’s “organic” rankings. A tweak in Google’s algorithm can have a significant impact on some small and mid sized businesses. When Google sneezes others get the flu.

Understanding the impact of organic search is the first useful step to improving rankings and driving increased volume of organic traffic. All web analytics tools provide reports which show the top referring search terms and phrases but in most cases these reports will need some configuration before they become useful.

To begin with if a pay per click campaign is being run it’s normally necessary to split out paid for search traffic and organic search traffic. This is done in most cases by setting up the paid for search traffic as a campaign in your analytics tool. Most tools will then automatically do the rest of the work for you by splitting out the two sources of traffic and dumping them in separate reports.

From here it becomes possible to view which organic search terms and phrases drive the greatest volume of traffic, which are the best converters, which pages they drive traffic to and what the bounce rate is. Being able to directly compare organic and pay per click in this way helps highlight gains that can be cross pollinated between PPC and SEO.

Most sites have a few terms and phrases that drive the core of the organic traffic but they also have a longer tail of terms and phrases that when combined form a significant but often ignored source of high quality traffic. Exporting this data means that these little gems in the long tail can be wheedled out based on their high conversion rate and nurtured until they make a greater contribution to overall volume.

Other measurement tools such as Hittails and Advanced Web Ranking will help in identifying search terms to focus on and monitoring actual positioning in search engine rankings.

Finally, due to the long term nature of search engine optimisation patience and trended data are key to happiness and enlightenment. It’s unusual to move up the search engine rankings and drive more traffic to a site the day after making a few changes. Quite often it can take months to rise up or fall from grace.

Has the price of insight just got cheaper?When Google Analytics was launched in November 2005, a world of opportunity was opened up to owners of websites of all sizes, that’s because Google made it free. Microsoft followed suit in 2007 with Gatineau and now Yahoo! has bought IndexTools and announced that it too will be available for free.

Both Google Analytics and Microsoft Gatineau are good products and in the right hands they can yield considerable dividends but IndexTools is in another league.

Google’s early experience showed that a free tool whilst immensely popular can, at times, be hard to manage from the supplier perspective due to high demand. Google do not offer full support, and queries can only be submitted online.

Both Google and Microsoft offer free products as added value to their respective Adwords and AdCentre suites however, whilst the Google and MS products offer some differentiation between one another both broadly compete at the same level.

By Yahoo! making it available for free, IndexTools arguably becomes the best free web analytics product available and any site owner or manager looking to improve the level of insight from web analytics should consider this option. Additionally, now such a high quality product has become available for nothing the 20/80 rule in web analytics (spend 20% of your budget on the analytics tool and 80% on the talent) may shift further still towards the talent.

However, anybody wishing to sign up for an IndexTools account must go through a partner reseller and in doing so there will be certain restrictions; to begin with it looks like there will (sensibly) be a limit on the availability of new accounts, additionally there is a monthly cap on the volume of page views per account. It also seems logical that the resellers could take the load in offering support and this would be good as long as the support is of a higher comparable standard to Google’s and matches the quality of the IndexTools product. Of course there may also be a fee attached to this; certainly there is an opportunity to collect a consultancy fee.

As a free product with a more advanced feature set IndexTools’ Enterprise level package will appeal to mid-sized organisations looking to take a step up and larger organisations looking to save money, something that may resonate in the current economic climate. However, the extent of the restrictions and the current limitations on accounts mean that there may still be a bit of a wait before we see an enterprise level tool having an impact on the cost of web analytics at the top end of the market.