Karen Breen Vogel wraps up her series on website optimization with a step-by-step approach for site innovation and a discussion of web analytics tools. Learn tips and best practices that will get you moving toward making more informed marketing decisions and achieving greater business value for both you and your customers (Part 5 of 5).
Thank you, Sarah. As Sarah mentioned, today I'm going to run through some slides that will wrap up everything that we've been talking about over the last couple of weeks and present a couple of new tips and best practices, in one place so that, as you look at all of this information, and you go back to your company to try to drive your company towards a more focused website that's going to drive better businesses results, you will really have some tips in a checklist in order to do that.
So, let's get started. As you may recall, we talked about the fact that in business to business, the purpose and function of a website is to really get the right people, the right traffic and the right visitors and engage them on their terms, based upon what they need, what they want to do, who they are, and where they fit in the buying cycle. So, you achieve business value for yourself, but also for them. And since they're driving this in the Internet environment, you really have to be conscious of what they need. Clearly if you satisfy that, you are going to be driving business value for yourself.
It is really about relationships. That's what makes the Internet, while new certainly old. That is, it's always been about relationships. This is very much like a consultative sales call, although it's triggered and controlled by the buyer, the decision maker or the influencer. They are in control, and they are trying to find the information they need to further their decision process.
So, if you understand that, and you can help them with that, you are going to form a relationship with them. So kind of constantly thinking about what makes a good consultative sales call, would you be saying to a person oh, you're ready to buy a product? OK, what are the specs of that product, or how are you using that product? OK, let me help you think about what product I have to help you. Or if you were actually asking them, do you have a problem that needed to be solved and you don't know what product you need? You need to explore that a little bit with us. Let me help you explore that.
So, think of that kind of language as you go to build a website and as you go to create online programs. It needs to be formed around helping the buyer move through their process and giving them the information they need.
As we talked about in the previous sessions, we need to improve the sales call. If the website is in effect like a consultative sales call, you don't want to continue to make the same sales call over and over, if it possibly can be improved, and if you can detect that the buyer is not responding to certain aspects of the sales call. So, measuring the value of your website to your business really starts with measuring whether or not your visitors have been successful.
Just like if you were in a sales call one on one with someone and consulting with them, you would be watching their body language. You would be watching how they respond to you, and then what they would agree to do at the end of that sales call whether they would be willing to take the relationship forward. So, you have to think about setting up measurements on your website in tune with, 'Have I given them things to do that they wanted to do?' And if they do those things, would they consider themselves successful? And how would that translate into my business?
One of the problems that we have I threw this in here, because I always want people to realize what's going on out there. Why isn't every company being really successful with measuring their website? These are a couple of bullets on kind of the current web analytics state of the state.
I think many times marketers lack systems that support business level data. Their business may have a really great tool, like a WebTrends, an Omniture, a Coremetrics or one of the well known platforms, perhaps even Google Analytics that is still offered free from Google. But, they're not getting any business view orientation of what the visitors visit, or what a path means to their actual business from a value perspective.
There is also, often, ownership disconnects between IT folks, who have been responsible for the implementation of the tool, and marketing, who needs to use it and apply the information to take action and to give ROI. Also in general, I think it would be safe to say that this is all still relatively new, so we have limited skills within many companies to manage complex data and technical functionality around what these tools are able to do.
These tools are actually quite robust these days. But, the amount of that robustness and capability that is actually getting utilized is relatively low, because the skill sets within many companies are just not at the level they need to be. That will change over time.
I think there are also, in general, a lot of common misconceptions about what data points mean. People tend to like to jump to conclusions about data instead of being detectives, and understanding that they maybe should form a hypothesis about what a data point might mean and then realize that there may be other meanings. If they look at the bigger picture, they will understand that.
So, the other thing that I want to talk about, before we wrap up with some best practices, is that there are really two different kinds of processes going on in most companies today, relative to the website. The top the process that I've put on this document is when people are making new websites or fixing websites. They usually realize that they have a very product centric site. It's not a consultative sales call; it's a product sale. They begin to try to really try understand who their customers are, what their pain points are and how do they create a website that's going to respond to that.
Most times what happens is it bifurcates into product capability. It may be supported through very good product information that can be found through a site search functionality, really good content and navigation and that can support someone who does not know specifically what product they are looking for, or they are not at that point in the buying cycle. Developing very relevant content, implementing site changes, and really ending up with a version 2.0 of that site...
When you're in that phase, it's really important to do an implementation of web analytics. This is where you understand the various milestones on the website, the content, the interactions, the tools and the downloads. You put them into the architecture, as we discussed in a previous session.
So, you're really in an architecting the way you're going to look at your data mode, and you're implementing it when you're in that process. As you actually then have a site that you feel pretty good about, or at least think you're at first base with, you begin to collect data all the time. This is where you move into phase two on this chart, or continuous site improvement. You're constantly picking up the web analytics data, which is informing you whether or not the KPIs and milestone events are occurring, to what degree they are occurring and where you have problems.
Then what you want to do... And you see I've listed a couple of other boxes here usability, online surveys, online focus groups and landing page optimization. These are really other forms of data gathering that you can use to be a detective, because your web analytics are telling you that you're not getting to the performance that you were trying to get to.
What are the phased steps that most businesses should be doing? This is checklist for you. The first one, and I've made a point here by putting "number one, obtain tool capabilities" and then striking it out. Because, this is actually what most businesses jump the gun on. They are eager to go out and get the tool. They don't really know what their requirements are and what kind of capabilities they are going to need, but they will buy a tool. Then what usually happens is the tool gets implemented very generically and the marketing people don't get the business context level data.
So, what I'm suggesting is rather than getting the tool first, first of all you establish ownership with a new company of who is going to own web analytics. Who is going to own the business level data? And tie back, definitely do the work to tie it to the goals of business as we have discussed before.
Set up the visitor's success my off term point and create key performance indicators. All of that needs to be done before you ever investigate which analytics tools you are going to use. Then you should obtain the tool capabilities based upon what you intend to do with the tool and make sure that your users are very well trained.
And when I say train users, I don't mean just technical implementation training. We really mean here all users of the system, and the users that are going to be involved in that continuous improvement loop, those are really analyst type users who are going need to be people back and look at data, interpret data, pool reports, dig deeper and actually in many companies, those types of users don't exist or they haven't been sufficiently trained.
Next, what you want to do coming right off of that is realize, really what where you are off with this. Are you an analyst at any kind of capabilities that they can be useful to the business. Do you have analysts? Or you relying on people who do not have a numbers orientation to look at the data, interpret the data, and make recommendations to the business?
This is a big shortcoming out there. A lot of companies just go, "I've got my tool, I've implemented it," and are off and running. And when they look back they realize they just don't have any analyst capabilities or anyone really in the role of interpreting the data.
Next thing is also to begin to use testing disciplines. If you have hypotheses about something is happening on the website, good or bad you should form testing disciplines to go deeper and test your hypothesis A and B and C, and see which one is in fact correct.
You need to also go back to the very beginning and say now that we have some data, do we really think the original thinking we have around segmentation of our markets and our visitors is correct? Or do we want to review that or enhance that to make it better. Because we've now learned more about our visitors and they actually maybe coming in slightly different flavors than I thought they were. We can build some better content, we can build some better navigation tools to respond to this new information about who the visitors are.
And the last one on this is begin to merge attitudinal data. And which one I put this in here is, in addition to the behavioral data you pick up out of a web analytics system, which is the [inaudible, sounds like 'ants'] are coming in, what are the [inaudible] doing? You don't know how the people feel about the experience: you don't know who they are, why they are there, what they intended to do and how they felt about it.
What I have done here is actually shown your picture of something and I am saying, Do you know what this is? Well, you don't and you don't know unless I show you the next slide. It was actually all these words standing on their sides.
And that kind of help people who look at web analytics data are if they haven't added the missing perspective of attitudinal data, they really only see part of the picture.
Then they form conclusions about visitors and their success, and they are really forming conclusions that are missing really great perspective that may be would cause them to think about the data entirely differently.
So, just remember that attitudinal data which comes from doing intercept surveys where you briefly ask visitors, why are you here? Did you get what you were looking for? How did you feel about it?
That kind of data is going to give you another depth of perspective that you really need, as would online focus groups and usability testing where you have the ability to qualitatively ask visitors about their experience.
So, what are some of the tools of the trade? We mentioned some of these throughout the presentation. But I just want to a recap so people can kind of categorize as they hear tool names out in the market place what are used, in which situations.
So behavioral web analytics is definitely what you get from installing a web analytics platform that you might get from Omniture, or WebTrends, Google Analytics, Coremetrics, Unica NetInsight.
If you need to go get attitudinal data, intercept surveys are offered. The tools to do these are offered by companies like iPerception, and ForeSee Results. Definitely more people do this, but just a couple of the big names out there.
If you want to gather competitive data, to add to your dataset, you might be able to get that from Hitwise, comScore, Nielsen Net Ratings.
And if you want to begin to look at particular landing pages or forums and optimize them you are going to want to use tools like Offermatica, which is now owned by Omniture and Optimoz, as these are tools also there are others in the market place that are going to help you get a different set of data that you are going to get purely from behavioral web analytics tool.
So, another thing I want to mention that I think everybody is aware of that this going on out there is Web 2.0. And Web 2.0 are techniques that people use to engage visitors most deeply, and a more at a peer to peer level.
And what will happen as you implement more Web 2.0 functionality on your websites is you're going to multiply the amount of engagement data. And if you haven't done the work that we've been talking about over the next couple of sessions, you are definitely just going to be awash in a sea of data points. And you won't have any understanding of what those data points mean to your business.
So by doing the work that we've been talking about you can actually take all that data and begin to put it into an organization that your business will understand and be able to respond to and make good business decisions around.
So, let's wrap this up with what are the key best practices for moving to informed marketing decisions? Rate your measurement approaches to determine how successful the customer or visitor was in their mind. Create a culture, a process, and a framework, for placing visitor behaviors into a business value or a financial context.
This is the financial valuation that we talked about last time. Get consensus on business goals for the websites investments and what contribution are expected from your website and set up associated key performance indicators or KPIs.
Determine baselines for each KPI over a sufficient period of time and then create continuous improvement goals against those baselines. Always focus on trends and not individual data points in time. It is not relevant what happened yesterday, it is much more relevant what happened this quarter versus last quarter.
Appreciate the value of attitudinal data and use a variety of techniques to go straight to the source. Behavioral data, can point the way to a trouble spot that it can't usually provide the complete answer you need to solve the problem. Appreciate the value of the attitudinal data. Enable the analytics tool that you choose whether it be free or for fee, to report to your business context specifically.
They are very powerful tools, but they need a good architect and an analyst to oversee them to actually leverage the investment to get the business results.
And my last one is do as much of this as you possibly can before you spend dollars on either fixing your website or bringing visitors to your site. Because you don't have any throttle to use to decide where you should spend your money or how it's really working, or how I am going to report ROI.
So, it is very important to do this work first to set up your measurement framework, orient your business the right way then go out to spend the money to continue to improve the website and continue to get the visitors to your site.
So, thank you very much, and I am going to turn it back to Sarah and good luck with all of your work on your website and on measuring websites. Thank you!
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