Data Driving » Site Optimization

Use Case: What traffic sources are driving quality traffic?

Nick — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 12:04:53 +0000

In this series, I would like to provide real-life analysis from the site Mytripguru.com. This is my site so I am comfortable reporting the traffic figures and analysis. The aim is to show how web analytics can be used to drive real change on a website. Remember, analysis means absolutely nothing if it does not drive change!

The first thing in any analysis is to frame the goals of the site in terms of Key Performance Indicators. For the purpose of this post, the goal of MyTripGuru.com is attract high quality traffic with highly engaged visitors. How would you measure high quality traffic?

First, I set up a goal in Google Analytics to define my Key Performance Indicator. In this case, I want to see how many users sign up for the site. This goal is very simple to set up in Google Analytics. A visitor who successfully signs up for the site visits two pages – the sign up page and the confirmation page. These have to be included in the goal. In the case of Mytripguru.com, the pages end in signup.php and my-account.php. The goal looks like the following in Google Analytics:

With Google Analytics, goals are tracked once they are created, so you will need to wait for data to be collected before insights can be gained. I set this goal up a while ago so I have some traffic numbers to analyze. The first question is how many times this goal has been completed on the site. This is an easy analysis. Just pull up the report Goals Overview and look how many times this goal was triggered (expressed as a conversion).

But this data is still pretty meaningless because it is not actionable. What I really want to know, is how traffic from various sources are converting. Are my SEM campaigns effective? How good is the traffic from referrals? How are my email campaigns performing? What about organic searches and direct traffic? To analyze this traffic I like to pull the necessary metrics into Excel using the Excellent Analytics Excel plugin. This is a very useful plugin that let’s you pull data via the Google Analytics API to take advantage of Excel’s powerful reporting capabilities. The report I generated in Excel looks like this:

Now we can see some more interesting figures. Direct traffic (medium: none) has resulted in 27 registrations and referrals have resulted in 42. Not bad. But a quick glance at the figures show that cpc traffic is quite high. I don’t see many conversions here. To put things into perspective, some simple data crunching is necessary. In Excel, I added two Key Performance Indicators – Bounce Rate and Goals/Visit.

Now, the data is starting to become meaningful. The metric Goals/Visit puts things into perspective. On the low end, cpc and organic traffic is worrying. On the positive side, email traffic is converting very well, although the traffic numbers for this medium are too small to be meaningful. As a web analyst, the clear priority here is in optimizing cpc and organic traffic to generate more conversions.

The next step is to drill down into the cpc and organic traffic. Since I am running a cpc campaign with several thousand keywords and virtually no one signed up, I believe the problem is with my landing pages. In another analysis I also noticed that most of the landing pages for organic searches are the same as for cpc traffic. So, my landing pages clearly need work. Had the number of conversions been higher, I would take a look at specific keywords and ads that are converting well or especially poorly. My focus for optimization would then be on the SEM side – such as writing better ad copy or using better keywords. In this case, I think the problem is not with the quality of my ads but my landing pages. Now the fun begins. It is time to take a closer look at my landing pages. But that is the subject of another post!

An Easy Way to Improve Your HTML Email Marketing

Nick — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 12:55:41 +0000

Email Marketing has come a long way since the last decade. Despite security concerns and early calls for text based email campaigns, HTML emails have become the standard for most companies because of their visual appeal and higher conversion rates. HTML emails also allow companies to measure how many emails were opened and which links were clicked. When combined with a good customer relationship management (CRM) database, this can be a powerful medium for reaching out to your customers.

But there is still some room for improvement. As I increasingly depend on my iPhone to check my email, I have noticed a pattern where companies write a message on top of the html content for email clients that don’t support html or have it turned off (see screenshot). This is certainly a nice thing to do and the recipients lacking HTML support should not be ignored. But valuable real estate is being used to inform a small group of people that this email can be viewed differently. Instead, wouldn’t it be better to use this space to improve open rates for your email campaigns?

This change is trivial to implement. Simply add the text to a lower section in the html code, for example in another table. Recipients who open the email will see the message when the email is opened and all recipients will see an additional call to action when previewing the email.

Assuming you have tracking in place, why not give it a try and see how the open rate improves?

Mytripguru.com launched

Nick — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 20:24:43 +0000

Gutenberg, Germany

Data Driving is proud to announce the launch of Mytripguru.com, an easy to use, intuitive online travel guidebook where members are recognized as experts, or Trip Gurus, for sharing their travel experiences. The Guru Rating system rewards top contributors and promotes them as experts in their particular regions and activities.

Mytripguru.com is built on the premise that everyone is a Trip Guru and has travel experiences or local knowledge to share. The more a Trip Guru contributes, the easier it becomes for visitors to the site to get travel advice from other Trip Gurus who share similar interests.

The simple navigation and user interface is designed to let Trip Gurus focus on their travel writing and readers to find relevant travel advice as easily and intuitively as possible. By promoting the top Trip Gurus in specific and marketable destinations and activities, Mytripguru embraces local businesses who hold tremendous knowledge about things to do in their regions and can profit from high level exposure on the site. Furthermore, by recognizing Trip Gurus for the quality and quantity of their contributions, local businesses are encouraged to add related content in their region to increase their Guru Rank while safeguarding the integrity of the site.

Mytripguru.com is founded and managed by Nicolas Johansson, owner at Data Driving. For more information about Mytripguru.com or Data Driving, please contact Nicolas Johansson.

Data Driving Design Decisions – The Home Page

Nick — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 12:06:50 +0000

This series describes some of the design and strategy decisions that one faces when developing a website, especially one with a social networking component or a community focus. The first part in this series takes a look at the home page. What types of home page designs work and why?

Why is the home page important?

For the majority of visitors and websites, the home page is the landing page of a website. It is also the page where the goals and expectations of visitors are the most diverse. This makes it important to balance the page and keep it relevant for all visitor segments.

What are the options?

For sites that have an element of social networking, community or reviews, there are essentially three options for home page design – walled garden, content only or hybrid. Let’s look at some examples of each.

Walled Garden

An example of such a home page is Facebook.com. The page acts like a wall and lets the visitor know that all the action is in the walled garden.

This makes sense when all content is only consumed by members. It also sends a message that privacy is taken very seriously since no content is visible from the home page. For new member-only content sites, this is difficult to pull off, as the home page might scare away first time visitors, making growth needlessly dependent on network effects and word of mouth.

Content Only

Myspace (at least the German site) falls into this category because there is only a small, unobtrusive box for users to log in or register. The focus is clearly on content and no real attempt is made to describe the service or entice new visitors to register. To be honest, I don’t see many advantages to this approach in the case of MySpace. They might be better off with a walled garden approach like Facebook and Twitter to attract new users.

It does, however, make sense for sites where content can be consumed by any type of visitor. Epinions, for example, has this type of start page and it works well. In this case it encourages the visitor to explore the site (consuming content) while minimizing distractions.

Hybrid

This is a mixture of content and a call to action to register. This type of page shows openness. It tries to balance the needs of new visitors and returning members, each of whom have very different intentions on the site. Gdgt does this quite well, as does Vimeo. Both sites rely on user-generated content but allow regular visitors to consume all of the content. For new sites, this is probably the best way to go.

Has anyone noticed other home page designs that don’t fall into one of these categories?

The next part in this series will take a look at how the home page might change if a user is logged in and revisits the home page.

Connecting with your Customers

Nick — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 10:55:39 +0000

It has never been more important than now to maintain a personal connection with as many of your customers as possible.

Getsatisfaction.com is one way to maintain a close connection to the customer. This service enables companies to get direct feedback from customers in an honest and transparent manner. It provides a two-way communication platform between companies and their customers by allowing both sides to ask and answer questions. By creating these transparent conversations, customers can get help from company representatives or from the community, taking advantage of some of the company’s most knowledgeable and loyal customers.

From the site:

Get Satisfaction is a direct connection between people and companies that fosters problem-solving, promotes sharing, and builds up relationships. Thousands of companies use this neutral space to support customers, exchange ideas, and get feedback about their products and services. Get Satisfaction is open, transparent, and free. You’re free to ask, free to answer, and free to start a new conversation. Everyone is invited and encouraged to participate: companies, employees, customers — anyone with an opinion, an answer, or something to say.

The feedback widget is a great feature to integrate on your company site. It allows visitors to leave instantaneous feedback – an idea, a problem, a question or praise. Feedback is then tracked on your company profile page. This widget is an easy, unobtrusive way to get feedback from customers. Moreover, it personalizes the browsing experience by giving all visitors the ability to share their voices.

Getsatisfaction is especially compelling given the open and transparent nature of the Web. Hiding mistakes or handling decisions poorly can quickly turn into a PR disaster. Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV recently mentioned the importance of reacting quickly, transparently and honestly to PR problems in a video blog post after his site, Corkd was hacked. Getsatisfaction.com is an excellent tool to make sure such unpleasant situations are handled properly and ensuring customers are satisfied.

How To Serve Local Content On Your Website

Nick — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 13:02:36 +0000

Recently a client wanted to serve local language content to visitors from different countries. This practice is also known as Geotargeting, and much has been written about its potential to help a company expand to new markets or better target existing ones.

Geotargeting is, however, a tricky proposition for visitors and search engine spiders and so it is vital to know what implications the various geotargeting options have on visitor behavior. From a user’s perspective, there are several common methods used to deliver local content on any particular website.

Automatic redirect to the local language site

Skype.com does this, presumably through IP-based geotargeting. If I visit Skype.com from my office in Germany, I am automatically redirected to skype.com/intl/de/. Skype makes the assumption that I want my content in German since I am coming from a German IP.

Suggest local site with no redirect

Amazon.com takes a different approach. When I visit Amazon.com I land on Amazon.com. The site recognizes that I may be interested in the Amazon.de website and suggests I shop there. But rather than forcing the decision on me, Amazon displays the link to the German site prominently on the home page.

Splash page

Another approach is to provide a splash page with a list of countries or languages. This is done by Xerox.com and is especially suited for sites where the .com (or other Top Level Domains such as .eu) domain is a landing page for the global market.

Do nothing

A final option, of course, is to do nothing yet provide links to local content on the home page. This is the route taken by Apple.com.

From a user perspective, each method has its charm…and its weaknesses. The automatic redirect method used by Skype is likely to satisfy to the majority of visitors who use the .com extension as a quick way to get to the site. On the other hand, it is likely to frustrate visitors who want to visit the english .com site from abroad. The suggestion approach is an excellent, non-intrusive way to make the visitor aware of the local site without making the decision for the visitor. The splash page method is very typical of support sites and works quite well especially for global branding initiatives that are based on the Top Level Domain .com. It does, however, force the visitor to make an additional click to enter the site. Doing nothing puts all the responsibility on the visitor to make the decision. In a sense, it is the least “patronizing” approach since it gives complete control to the visitor.

Whatever the choice, it is absolutely essential to allow a visitor to change the language and/or country at any time during the visit. All of the websites in the above examples allow visitors to jump to a different country/language site during the visit.

Web Analytics Tip: If you are using the automatic redirect method, check how many visitors are entering via .com, being redirected, and are then switching back to .com. A high number of “switchers” likely indicates dissatisfaction with the redirect.

Web Analytics in a Recession

Nick — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 15:05:04 +0000

There has been a lot of talk about the current economic climate, the credit crunch, the stock market tanking, government bailouts, the impending recession or even depression. Everywhere you look there seems to be bad news. But it doesn’t do any good to dwell on these things. At the same time, it doesn’t mean we can safely ignore them. How, then, should companies react to the situation we are currently in? In terms of website optimization, there are few things companies should be focusing on:

Focus on conversion rates
Conversion rates are the rate at which your visitors convert any defined goal on your website. Conversion rates are likely to go down as consumers tighten their belts.

Goals are the cornerstone to measuring conversion rates. There can be different types of website goals – for example to sell a product, to gain a sales lead, to drive traffic to a special offer, or to build awareness about a new feature. Each goal is defined by the confirmation page, or the final page when you consider the goal to have been reached. In the case of selling a product, the goal would be defined by the confirmation or thank you page after placing your order. In the case of my site, whose primary purpose is lead generation, the goal I should be measuring is the Thank You page after a visitor submits the contact form.

If you are using Google Analytics, set up some goals if you haven’t already done so. They are very easy to set up and will offer tremendous insight into visitor behavior.

Test and test some more
Good companies use the lean years of a downturn to optimize the hell out of their businesses. They invest in themselves and focus on getting internal processes running efficiently. The strong companies survive by coming out of a recession even stronger. The same applies to websites, which have a virtually limitless optimization potential.

With free tools such as Google Website Optimizer, it is cheap and easy to set up A/B and multivariate tests to optimize your site. This is the time to try out different landing pages or to move around elements on your home page. Try simplifying sign-up forms or reducing the number of steps in the checkout process. Not all optimizations will work but you will find your website to be continuously improving. The best sign of improvement – higher conversion rates!

Get innovative
Some of the best companies today were born during the last downturn. They used this time to innovate. Rather than lament the current situation, why not get creative and try some bold new ideas? Try ideas you ordinarily wouldn’t even consider. A/B testing offers the perfect environment to do this since you can easily try out an idea with a small sample of your visitors.

Joann.com successfully did this several years ago when they ran a series of product promotions and measured the results of each with a multivariate testing tool by Offermatica (later acquired by Omniture). They found, much to their surprise, that the least “serious” offer – buy two sewing machines and receive 10% off – was in fact the most successful. It turned out that people were ordering together with friends and neighbors to take advantage of this promotion.

This is a case study that shows how crazy ideas can turn out to be pretty good ideas. And by using A/B and multivariate testing, there is little risk in not trying them out!

Expand Your Market By Optimizing Your Content

Nick — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 08:25:54 +0000

Gerry McGovern, author of Killer Web Content, recently wrote in his newsletter about the need to consider every day speech when writing web content. As an example he gives the two interchangeable phrases, Climate Change and Global Warming. The former is the official correct term while the latter is what has generally been accepted by the public and what has made its way into the public’s consciousness.

Here is an excerpt taken from McGovern‘s article:

According to Google, every month an average of 300,000 people search for climate change, while 2.2 million search for global warming. Yet the official term on most government and media websites is climate change. And climate change is the correct overall name. But is it the right phrase to use on the Web?

The climate is changing. It’s getting warmer. And it’s probably going to keep getting warmer for quite a while. So why not use the phrase “global warming” because that’s what’s actually happening? Why be vague and say climate change, when that begs the question: what sort of climate change are we talking about?

The Web is the land of concrete, specific language. It doesn’t work well for fuzzy, official language. People want you to get
to the point, and describe the essence of what is happening.

McGovern goes on to make the point that much of this type of “technically driven” content does not get as widely read for the simple reason that the majority of people search using natural language keywords rather than official terms.

Reflecting on this, I think a lot of companies fall into this tunnel vision trap when writing content for the web. For example, Web analytics providers and practitioners go to great lengths to explain that web analytics is more than just measuring web traffic or gathering website statistics. The industry as a whole insists that web analytics is a way to measure the effectiveness of web marketing, track visitor behavior and generate action-oriented insights based on key performance indicators.

While this is certainly true, it is also evident that the vast majority of people have not heard of web analytics. For many, web analytics is still a simple stat counter counting the number of hits on the page. Therefore, when the need for measuring web traffic arises, that is presumably exactly what people search for.

Google’s Keyword Tool shows that there may be something to this. According to the tool, approximately 60,500 searches were carried out in September for the phrase “Web Analytics”. Not bad, but not much in comparison to the 301,000 searches for “Web Traffic”. Performing a search with this phrase on Google did not yield one result about a web analytics provider in the first few pages of results. Clearly there is potential!

Search results for the term “web analytics”

Search results for the term “web traffic”

By expanding the content on a website to include such terms, you will make your site more visible to a large group of people. They are perhaps not the immediate target market, but at the same time, these are the people you want to target in order to grow the market. Otherwise, you run the risk of spending your resources defending your piece of a small pie while ignoring the bigger pie outside!

Everydaycelebrations for Web Analytics

Nick — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 11:48:16 +0000

Everydaycelebrations.ca is a program created by General Mills for families, catering to every day family needs such as what to eat for dinner and what activities to undertake with the kids. By providing recipes and ideas for family outings, the site helps position General Mills as a trusted brand for families in Canada.

On the site, this program is described as follows:

Whether it’s advice on teaching your kids everyday life skills, ideas for keeping them occupied on a road trip, or a delicious dish that will treat their taste buds, General Mills Everyday Celebrations can be your resource to stir up family fun.

What makes this site effective?

As a branding initiative, the site works well. There are calls to action peppered throughout the site and between useful content for the target audience. The navigation is clean and simple and lends itself to surfing and exploring.

Everydaycelebrations does an admirable job in subtly reminding visitors that General Mills is behind the site. By offering various product promotions and including branded products in the recipes, visitors are gently guided towards these products in a way that builds trust rather than coming across as an advertisement.

The copy is written in the active voice, helping to entice visitors to click deeper into the site. It is clear that the titles such as “Love Your Thanksgiving Leftovers” were written for people and not search engine spiders!

How can the site be improved?

The sign up page has some optimization potential. The contrast between text and background makes reading the text a bit strenuous. There is no footnote for the “opportunity to save up to $5 on great General Mills products!**”, leaving the visitor wondering what terms apply. The form itself is quite long with mostly required fields. This could scare off some visitors. Finally, the large spacing between the form descriptions and the form fields makes it difficult to follow the form.

From a design perspective, there are a couple of minor elements that could be considered for optimization. For example, the search bar contains the text “Enter keyword”. A clearer instruction would be “Enter search term” or better yet, “Search”. This would eliminate any potential confusion. Also, the information about the program is buried in the footer and could feature more prominently on the site, since some visitors might need this information to make an informed decision to sign up on the site.

Web Analytics

Obviously, only General Mills can know how much uplift they are getting from this initiative. Web Analytics data could certainly shed some light onto the effectiveness of the site. For example:

Web Analytics Tip: As a marketing/content site, visitors should be staying on the site as long as possible. So, check the average time on site and look what content visitors are consuming the most and the least. Optimize or remove the low-performing content and add to or enhance the best content!

Web Analytics Tip: Track the number of sign ups as a conversion rate – number of sign ups / total visitors. This metric will show how the site is performing on one of the site’s main goals.

Web Analytics Tip: Track the number of times a recipe is viewed and printed. This will give a good indication of popular dishes and possibly even insights into which products to promote on the site or even offline.

Conclusion

In conclusion, this is an excellent site that effectively guides visitors towards specific goals. As is usually the case with well-designed websites, the site is in a good position to profit from more web analytics and site optimization measures such as A/B testing and form optimization. This is when the fun starts!

Traveling from one travel site to another

Nick — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 14:44:24 +0000

Originally I wanted this post to be about the redesign of the Skyscanner website. I use this travel site a lot and the recent redesign made it cleaner and easier to use than before. But the more I thought about why I like this site, the more I thought about other travel sites that I also use on a frequent basis. I realized that Skyscanner is very good at what I need it to do, but it does not fulfill all of my travel needs.

I primarily choose Skyscanner when I am flying within Europe and especially when my flying dates are flexible. Skyscanner checks Europe’s discount airlines and allows searches across an entire month. So, when I want to fly to Sweden sometime next month, it will tell me what days are the cheapest.

When I am flying longer routes across the pond with specific dates in mind, I try my luck at Kayak.com. This site does an excellent job in providing comprehensive results that can be filtered by criteria that are important to me, such as Airline, Nonstop flights, Layover Duration, and of course, Price. The email alerts are also very useful for booking last minute trips back home to New York.

Finally, I also visit ebookers.com in the rare event that I decide to book a pre-packaged tour or need a rental car.

Despite addressing different travel needs of mine, all three sites have a couple of things in common.

1. Navigation – Technologies such as AJAX blend into each site, enhancing the user experience rather than detracting from it, and therefore contributing to a very intuitive navigation.

2. Simplicity – Each site has distinct Call to Actions that drive the visitor farther into the site. The home pages are clean and simple, allowing visitors to get started with their searches right away.

3. Choice – The choices offered by each search engine are comprehensive, and more important, reliable.

I believe Skyscanner in particular holds tremendous potential. I find myself browsing the site for flight deals like I do on techbargains.com for extraordinary tech deals. It is a site I enjoy going to, and I find myself visiting when I do not necessarily have a specific destination in mind. The intuitive search makes it fun and easy to explore options for a weekend getaway.

This is where the potential lies. Skyscanner could cater to these browsing visitors by providing travel information on different destinations. Ryanair, for example, does this very well. This would be a great way of maintaining its competitive advantage since this type of flexible search is probably not too difficult to replicate. In fact, Kayak offers a similar search already. The main advantage is in addressing the needs of this visitor segment and proactively trying to keep them on the site. After all, flying to Lithuania for 6.45 EUR is only attractive when you know something about Lithuania!