Always Be Testing: The Complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer (Sybex, an imprint of John Wiley & Sons; August 2008; $29.99; 336 pages) teaches users of all levels what to test, how to test, how to use Google Website Optimizer to do so—and ultimately, how to improve conversion rates.

In the book, Eisenberg and Quarto-vonTivadar discuss the important theory behind testing so that readers not only understand the clicks reports, but also the “why” of clicks and the data behind the reports. While primarily intended for hands-on implementers (marketers, webmasters, designers, media buyers, small business owners) who need to better understand, design, implement, interpret, and tune for conversions, the book also speaks to financial decision makers (directors and VPs of marketing) about better understanding the importance and impact of testing and optimization.

Always Be Testing is the latest addition to Wiley’s online marketing library. As a publisher, Wiley offers a number of titles that help develop successful online marketing plans; leverage quick start solutions for blogs and websites; test and tune for maximum results; get buy in and support from key stakeholders, and so much more.

You can view a sampling of that library here: http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/Section/id-320406.html

About the Authors

Bryan Eisenberg (New York) is a leading expert in online marketing and marketing analytics. He co-authored #1 Wall StreetJournal, New York Times, USA Today, and BusinessWeek bestsellers Waiting For Your Cat to Bark? and Call to Action. He also publishes the award-winning blog and newsletter, GrokDotCom, authors ClickZ's “ROI Marketing” column and has been a featured speaker at such trade shows as Ad:tech, DMDAYS, Search Engine Strategies, Shop.org, Internet World, Net.Marketing, DMA Annual, eMetrics Summit, Electronic Retail Association, and others. Bryan is a Google Website Optimizer Authorized Consultant who co-founded Future Now, Inc., a marketing consulting company, and has worked to improve the marketing of such companies as GE, Volvo, Computer Associates, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, SAS, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and CBS.

John Quarto-vonTivadar (New York) is Chief Scientist at Future Now. His diverse background includes working on the Hubble telescope, managing a $5 million hedge fund, and authoring books. He is a frequent speaker at internet marketing trade shows.

About Sybex®

Sybex has been a leading publisher for the global Information technology community for nearly 30 years. Known for its high quality publications that are translated into more than 20 languages, Sybex published about 100 new titles a year and has an impressive backlist of over 450 titles in the graphics, digital photography, operating systems, programming, and gaming categories. Sybex, enjoys a very strong presence in the areas of IT and Business certifications and has close relationships with a number of leading technology companies, including Alias, Microsoft, and Juniper. For more information, visit sybex.com. Sybex is an imprint of Wiley.

About Wiley

Founded in 1807, John Wiley & Sons, Inc. has been a valued source of information and understanding for 200 years, helping people around the world meet their needs and fulfill their aspirations. Since 1901, Wiley and its acquired companies have published the works of more than 350 Nobel laureates in all categories: Literature, Economics, Physiology or Medicine, Physics, Chemistry and Peace.

Our core businesses publish scientific, technical, medical and scholarly journals, encyclopedias, books, and online products and services; professional/trade books, subscription products, training materials, and online applications and websites; and educational materials for undergraduate and graduate students and lifelong learners. Wiley's global headquarters are located in Hoboken, New Jersey, with operations in the U.S., Europe, Asia, Canada, and Australia. The Company's Web site can be accessed at http://www.wiley.com. The Company is listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbols JWa and JWb.

For more information, contact: Ashley Evens 201 748 6702 aevens@wiley.com

Always Be Testing: The Complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer By Bryan Eisenberg, John Quarto-vonTivadar with Lisa T. Davis Wiley; August 2008; $29.99 978-0-470-29063-7; Paperback

SHARE:

When we conducted our survey among mobile businesses to find out what their 'most wanted' stat was for their mobile website, we were surprised that the mobile component of web metrics was considered less important than knowing the unique visitor count. But should we have been surprised?

Afterall, knowing exactly how many people visited your mobile site has got to be pretty important. Without this you don't know the real value of your mobile business. The problem is measuring unique visitors rather than just visits is very hard on mobile and we found that folks were having to guess, patching together information from hosting companies and advertising partners.

Here's what 550 businesses said in answer to the question: “Which of the following mobile web metrics are important to you?”

• The daily/weekly/monthly number of unique visitors to your mobile website - 80%
• Conversion rates/effectiveness of mobile marketing - 71%
• New/repeat visitors - 58%
• Information about the handsets your visitors use - 54%
• Location - 50%
• The mobile networks used by visitors to your mobile website - 41%

The way that Bango solves this problem - how many unique visitors do I have? - is covered in our new release: "Bango first to offer both Site and Campaign mobile analytics" at http://news.bango.com.

We gave away 5 Flip video cameras to say thank you for people completing our survey.  The winners were: Bernie, USA; Derek, UK; Benoit, USA; Javier, Spain; and Casey, Canada.

• the number of people, use unique visitors
• traffic levels, use visits
• quantity of content consumed, use events

Caveat: there are certain times when you want to group people on a certain criteria.  Examples of this include wanting to know the number of people who accessed a certain site section or who arrived via a particular traffic source.  However people can view multiple site section and access a site via multiple traffic sources.  Therefore be aware that the sum of people via traffic sources, site sections and other similar situations will be more than the actual number of unique visitors to a website. 

If you want to evenly attribute a total between different options, you might need to choose a lower level metric.  The important thing in this case is to choose the metric which is independent for what you are looking at.  For example, a unique visitor may have multiple entry types but each visit only has a single entry type.  Unique visitors and visits can view multiple site sections but events are each from only a single site section.

While we lost the ability for my client to edit the emails (darn, I'm heartbroken), I did gain the ability to create a branded look & feel. I also obtain a better understanding of tracking between email (HTML) and web sites, which I'd like to share with you here. Note that I'm at the beginning stages, and there may be several inaccuracies or inefficiencies. So send me a comment if things could be done better.

Specifications

• Email System: Constant Contact
• Web Analytics: Google Analytics
• Web Authoring: Dreamweaver CS3

Creating the HTML email

I use Dreamweaver to create the email, as a copy will be online as a view option (best practice). Once I finish creating the email and tagging it up with the various tracking tags, I then copy/paste the styles and HTML code into ConstantContact.

Getting a handle on creating HTML emails that view as well as possible across various email clients and systems was a culture shock. Back are the days of using tables for layout, spacers gifs (I refuse), and font tags (actually, I use styles, ConstantContact creates font tag equivalents, using both font tags and styles), etc.

The key to the layout is to create a container table, then stack nest all tables within this container. You should keep in mind that multiple nested tables will cause problems in some email clients.

Adding the Google Analytics Attributes

With out layout, text and images in place, we now focus on tagging the hyperlinks.

First, we want to add the Google Analytics attributes to our URLs that point to our website. Google offers a tool that simplifies this process.

Simply enter the URL, followed by required parameters:

• Campaign Source: The overall name of the item/campaign/email that your tagging.
• Campaign Medium: Email
• Campaign Content: A name of the element you're tagging. Note that if you have multiple links for the same thing, you want to decern in your naming at this time. Example, say this is travel related with with an itinerary name, image and a "view details" link. Each one should have an individual name here. This will help you understand what motivates your subscribers to click through.
• Campaign Name: For my purposes, I simply repeat the Campaign Source.

Clicking on Generate URL provides the custom URL in the text box. Simply copy this URL and use it for the link's URL in Dreamweaver.

With all URLs in place with the Google Analytics attributes, I now move to add the Constant Contact code.

Adding the Constant Contact Markup

First, let me say that the documentation from Constant Contact is less than intuitive. I wasted several production emails to learn later that something had been coded improperly. Hopefully, this post will help. Note also that while I'm using ConstantContact, on a high level, this is similar to several other email service providers (MailerMailer, Lyris, MailChimp, etc.) that allow for custom coding.

First, the <OpenTracking/> tag must be in place after the <body> tag but before the content. Then, surrounding each hyperlink anchor <a> tag, the <SimpleURLProperty> tag is inserted.

<SimpleURLProperty name="" type="plain" href="" img="" label="" track="true">

The attributes are as follows:

• name: The name of this link. I tend to use the same unique name as I did for the Google Analytics link.
• type: I always use plain.
• href: The entire URL (including Google Analytics attributes) goes here.
• img: If the element hosting the link is an image, the URL of the image goes here.
• label: If the element hosting the link is text, the actual link text goes here.
• track: Value is true. This is the default, yet must be in place for tracking to be recorded.

To make this somewhat manual process a bit easier, I simply created a Dreamweaver Snippet with the  <SimpleURLProperty> code that I can wrap around after selecting the anchor tag.

Adding the custom code to ConstantContact

Once all links I wish to track have been tagged, I double check my code to make sure it is valid.

I currently don't validate this. Here's why:

While I have the option to use either HTML or XHTML for my Custom Contact custom emails, I choose XHTML, because it affords me some additional features with Constant Contact. Custom Contact uses a custom XML Namespace for its emails; xmlns:cctd="http://www.constantcontact.com/cctd. Because of this, I get numerous, additional validation errors. Therefore, I use a slightly dumbed down approach. I let Constant Contact point out the errors, then use Dreamweaver to find the line number and fix the error. Common errors I've run across are self-closing tag errors, like img, br, or hr.

Once I feel confident that my code is clean, I start a new email in Constant Contact, select the custom email & XHTML options, then begin by first copy & pasting the CSS into the Styles panel. I then copy & paste the HTML code into the HTML panel.

I then preview to check for errors. If errors are reported, I copy/paste the code back into a new Dreamweaver file and troubleshoot. If no errors occur, I send a test message to myself, hitting three different mail clients. Once the test email is received, I click on the various links, then check back in Constant Contact to see if the clickthroughs were triggered. Only after the confirmation is the email sent. I would check Google Analytics, however, there is a long delay before they are presented.

The Resulting Metrics

The first metrics received come from Constant Contact.

The statistics provide totals on sent/opens, spam reports, opt-outs, opens, clicks and forwards. Constant Contact also shows me the number of clicks per link. So this gives me a good idea of what happened in the email environment. Note that like most email service providers, Constant Contact cannot track opens for text emails. However, if a link is clicked, it then does infer an open for that recipient.

Sent to opens gives us an idea on whether the recipient is engaged with our emails. If this number is too low, a separate, custom email might be in order for those subscribers. Bounces are caused by various issues, such as non-existent email addresses, block, vacation/out of office messages, mail box full, etc. Spam reports should be zero or very low. Otherwise, you're not doing something right. Opt-outs are a sign of not getting what the expected. Remember, you must meet the subscribers expectations with each mailing, otherwise they will opt-out. Clicks refer to the number of items clicked. This number tends to be lower than the individual numbers below, due to multiple opens by some subscribers. Forwards tell you how many messages were forwarded to other email addresses, a sign that viral marketing is alive and well.

Now let's take a look at what Google Analytics gives us.

Once logged into Google Analytics, if you select Traffic Sources > Campaigns, you can select the desired campaign, based on the Campaign Name you gave in the Google Analytics URL builder. Some basic information initially appears, such as the number of visits, pages per visit, % of new visits, time on site, etc. By filering down on the segment Ad Content, we can see how productive each link was per clickthrough.

This is a high level view of the capabilities available by tying in your email and web-based metrics programs to provide a big picture of the entire user experience.

*Client prefers, event after many attempts at persuasion, to manage recipient list manually, outside of email providers system.

I generally have an excel sheet set up that contains all the historical data for these metrics. Additional metrics can be created by applying calculations to the original metrics with simple Excel formulae.The new data can be added as a new line in this spreadsheet with charts updated accordingly.

The report items that are required for this report is as follows (in my preferred viewing order):

• Unique visitors
• Total visits
• Total page views
• Average duration per visit
• Page views per visit
• New vs returning visitors
• Unique visitors per entry type

These report items have different default time intervals. As we are only looking here at single time periods, the time interval for each report item should be set to "Full period".

If the data is going to be transferred into Excel, there is no need for charts, additional statistics or descriptions and as such, these options can be deselected. There is no harm in leaving them in the report but I generally like having the report simpler and cleaner.

The report item "Page views per visit" is used to calculate the bounce rate for the website. It is a frequency table containing the number of visits during that time period per each number of page views e.g. number of visits with 1 page view, number of visits with 2 page views and so on. As a bounce can be defined as a visit with only a single page view, the bounce rate is the percentage of visits where only a single page is viewed. Therefore only the top line of data is required and the "Maximum number of lines" can be reduced to 1.

This report can then be set up for either a weekly or monthly report (or daily although I would question how valuable this is) using the time periods "Last week" and "Last month". At this stage, you should now have a nice report containing all the relevant report items to get a quick overview of the performance of your website.

If this data is being captured and trended in an Excel file, some basic calculations need to be performed to get all my basic site performance metrics. Frequency (visits per unique visitor) and page views per visit can be calculated by dividing the appropriate metrics. The bounce rate calculation is single page visits divided by total visits.

I would recommend calculating the proportions of new, returning and unknown visitors and the proportions of the different traffic sources (entry types). An understanding of the reason for a change in the traffic levels for a website can be gained from looking at both the absolute numbers and the proportions for each of these metrics.

So that's the basics, I feel everyone and every website can benefit from looking at this data. For real insights, more detailed reports will be required but this should tell you if you need to look further and where you should look first.

As a quick summary, here are the metrics you should have if you have transferred the data to an Excel spreadsheet:

• Unique visitors
• Visits
• Page views
• Frequency
• Page views per visit
• Duration per visit
• Bounce rate
• New, returning and unknown visitors (the number of visitors and proportions of each)
• Entry type - Clickin, Search engine, External referrers, Direct Entry (the number of unique visitors and the proportions of each)

If we look at online behaviour, user paths give us a solid idea of routes to content, where they return to and where they tend to go next. Human behaviour tends to follow patterns, see this article about mobile phone usage for an example of how predictable we tend to be.

Engagement is Conversation

This pattern of behaviour is something that good web analytics managers can see by interrogating their data. Alec Cochrane and I recently presented on the subject of building and measuring engagement and he summarises our talk here.

Metrics can tell you the most popular paths to frequently visited pages and we can change the interface accordingly. This can help us formulate our persuasion architecture but of course there are other things to consider...

No place like home

The homepage on a site suffers in a different way as it’s a starting place, a returning place and contains areas created as a diversion (meant for conversion) by many different stakeholders.

Add to this the fact that many users from search, email or RSS may never see it and it is an area that seems to be in a state of struggle. Serving the purpose of communicating a message from the site owners as well as serving the user.

Of course the more routes you have to your content the better the overall measure of the engagement your site has with your community of users.

Elements of engagement

A concept model can describe elements of engagement that need further exploration

But if we look at this in another way and think of the home as a place that should react to user’s wishes regularly, then it would be far easier to create an engaging experience.

Personas can help here but going back to the concept model would bring the greatest clarity about what needs to be presented. The concept model describes the whole site but also captures the key elements of engagement, and the parts that need representation on a homepage.

Taking this into account a typical homepage needs to offer;

1. Fresh content that is regularly updated with visible changes aided by the use of images. (Users check back frequently for news)
2. The use of themed areas and a cluster of stories around a subject area
3. If Jobs are offered they need a better promotion with an idea of the amount of job types displayed to the user
4. A consistent placement of sign-up areas throughout the site, this will enable conversions to occur and conversations to begin between you and your users.
5. An improvement of the graphics and images used on the site needs to be made to convey quality and of being a trusted authority. (Maximise promotional areas and do not give too much emphasis to 'most popular' widgets. These regions can take up large amounts of screen area and though they drive some traffic, without accurate measurement we can never be sure of the effectiveness of these devices)
6. Research material (white papers or case studies) need to be placed in an obvious position with more ‘evergreen’ content in the form of useful research that is graphically promoted.
7. Use blog content in a way that enriches themes or offers other angles on an existing story (also helps in changing of content on homepage). Opinion pieces also help in conveying authority and tone at the place where some users are visiting for the first time and also engage with returning users looking for an opportunities to converse.

Context, placement and pathways

The points above are based on news sites that offer different elements and in turn different modes of user engagement. Obviously looking for a job is not the same as researching and looking for case studies. So context is always the major factor when we think of what elements to display.

Put together the user's path through the site, the context of where they have come from and what they are interested in and you have the ingredients to build the best engaging experience. The tricky part is to have an adaptive interface that will allow you flexibility.

By being aware of context, placement of content to reflect interests and user's paths it will give a road map for engagement success.

Guess what, the bubble bursted, many years ago. Like many things in life, it all about the bottom line, the almighty dollar. Businesses don't thrive on lookie-loos. Would Macy's stay in business if people only window shopped, or if they came into the store, just browsed the counters and racks, then left?

I run into people all the time with a "hit counter" mentality. So many site & business owners proclaim "Our website receives thousands of hits." Yet, whether they currently know it or not, their online business is failing. It's failing because they are unaware of what is really happening on their sites; what their site visitors are actually doing.

I have a client who, in the past, would exude a mood based on the number of inquiries that were coming from the website. Some days, when several inquiries came in, life would be good. On others when, no inquiries were received, a fire alarm was raised, questioning whether the web-based form was working. When I looked into the situation further, I discovered that we were losing 95% of inquiries as part of the form submission process. Through tweaks to the form, we've made positive progress. However, without this type of business knowledge, how can you possibly know the level of success you are obtaining?

To remain relevant, whether you have a business to support, or just a personal blog, you must have access to the intelligence to understand what is happening on your website, what people are doing, are interested in. The only way to do this is via a web analytics program.

A Web Analytics program can create awareness about your site. Usability issues can be uncovered, design issues can be exposed, you name it. Recently, why looking at metrics around submitted requests for information, I determined that over 80% of request submissions were never completed. That can impact someone's bottom line significantly.

You don't have to be a scientist, computer geek or statistics guru to get valuable information out of a metrics program. You only need to use one and review it regularly.

There are several types of web analytics program out there:

• Server-based, log-file analyzer: These programs that you usually install on a local computer or server process the log files from the web server to report on information from each request to the server.
• Web-based Analytics Service: These system leverage the display of a tiny, transparent graphic on the web page to generate metrics that are sent back to the central service.

Getting Started

If you're without many resources, you might consider using one of the several free tools available. Google Analytics is a surprisingly simple, yet robust system, and best of all, it's free and easy setup. By signing-up and copy/pasting the code snippet on every page you want to track (your entire site), you can view information like

• What sections/pages are most popular?
• What time of day do most people visit your site:?
• Where are most visitors coming from?
• What search terms where used to find your site?
• What sites are sending referral traffic?
• How many conversions are taking place?
• What is driving my conversions?
• ...and so much more.

Best Practices

• Determine your site's goals / KPIs. Without a purpose, there's no need to have an online presence. If you do have a purpose, how are you going to measure how successful you are? You must determine what you want people to do, then track & measure it. In Google Analytics, you would setup conversions based on predetermined tasks, then track them. For example, below is an example of that conversion, the inquiry form mentioned above. Note that this metric shows that the majority of people who navigate to the form leave the form before actually submitting their information (92%). Not good, but thanks to the analytics system to expose the issue so it can be fixed. Anything can be viewed as a goal; request for information, requesting a brochure, downloading a file, viewing a video, etc.

• Make sure all metrics / KPIs tracked at actionable, then take action. It's "kool" to track a bunch of datapoints, but if you take no action on the metrics, you're simply a geek. If you care about your site, your track metrics. If you care enough to track, then you'll take action to improve your site.
• Look at trends, not just a isolated timeframe. 100 form submissions might sound good, however, if you look at the past 12 months, you may notice that trends show you're down an average of 20%. Make sure to compare the current with last quarter, last year, etc.
• Never depend on metrics from any one system. As every system generates its metrics differently, consider using a variety of information from multiple systems to come up with guided numbers.
• Extend your analytics to email. Do you distribute email with marketing messages or promotions? Think your limited to whatever metrics your email program provides? Guess again. You can easily tag the links to your site with attributes that Google will track. Then, you can filter reporting to just that email campaign and see how people responded.

Have any others? Have a tip or trick to share? Contribute to the discussion below...

The various marketing methodologies and formulas that isolate human behavior, web analytic applications measuring performance and click streams, and forums to understand attitude and reasoning of why users make the choices they make, help better classify the "most likely" approach taken by web users, or most likely reason for approach not taken.

The irony of user communications steps from the complexity of user behavior in person versus online, and to capture situational understanding of behavior trends, likes and dislikes, and the most probable cause for their desire to do business with you, may also be as simple as as asking them in the midst of their web journey: Everything Okay? Feedback? Thoughts?

When survey companies began to create platforms to engage users postpartum of their online experience, the validity of the survey platform is dependent on the recollection and patience of the customer's experience. What if your site frustrated them?...is it likely that they will take additional time to tell you this? How much time would they devote? Would they entertain questions that had nothing to do with their frustrating experience?

For Example: Bob comes to your site to check into pricing on cell phones. He finds one that he really likes and begins to search by product type through out various sites to find the most cost effective deal. He ultimately finds it - and the price level is $34 less then the next, due to a special offered, but the picture of the phone is not working, and the link to purchase the desired phone will not work either. Automatic feelings of annoyance begin to brew a frustrating image, and experience.

Bob is faced with some choices:

• Keep looking for another deal
• Go with this one and try "Contact US", or
• Just give up.

Bob decides his experience was too uncomfortable, and decides to leave the page, when a survey pops up...

Do You Mind Taking a Short Survey?

If you were Bob - would you fill out this survey? or would you walk away. I personally would have left. My intuitive feeling is that the site is not looking out for my best interest, and the survey wants my happy testimonial. Good bye!

What if a survey did not pop? What is all along a Feedback button stayed off to the side, just waiting for me to say something. It's presence like a CS Rep waiting for me to ask a question. Last night I was trying to fix my wife's very slow Dell, and I was presented with this feedback guardian all along through out my technical online FAQ's. I was able to fix my problem, and I left feedback saying - thank you. If my experience was less than successful, I probably would have been more negative...but! I would be providing user feedback - in real-time, on the page that made me mad.

Now, if you were the Marketing Manager, Analytics Pro, or Customer Manager, could this give you actionable guidance on how to make this or the next customer happy?

What about the sale that you didn't get?

EPV is a powerful metric because it helps you determine the cost effectiveness of marketing campaigns. If you're spending $500 to receive 1,000 visitors then your costs per visitor (CPV) for this campaign is $0.50. If your EPV is considerable less than $0.50 then you're losing a considerable amount of money on advertising. If you're EPV is considerable more than $0.50 then you're receiving a bargain on marketing costs.

Knowing your EPV and CPV enables you to compare costs per click for traffic from Google Adwords and/or Online Marketing and determine which marketing campaign is more cost effective.

Below is a sample of EPVs for a select group of business types on Bizak

• $0.03 Blogs
• $4.92 Consulting Services
• $0.02 Content Sites
• $0.82 E-Commerce
• $1.90 E-Learning
• $0.01 Mapping
• ($0.02) Photo Sharing

One of the things that struck me about the experience is how once we got to the Labor and Delivery room at the hospital our lives revolved around a monitor that displayed three critical pieces of information:

1. The baby's heart rate
2. My wife's contractions (not that she needed a monitor to let her know when she was having those!)
3. How dialated my wife was

It's unusual to be focused on so few pieces of information. Usually our attention is divided between so many things: email, voice mail, meetings, what to get/make for dinner, news, weather, family, friends, etc. It's hard to keep your eye on the ball.

It's different when you're in that L&D room though. Not that nothing else mattered. But being basically isolated in that small room and knowing the significance of what was about to happen has a way of making you focus on what's really important.

So we focused - on those 3 critical pieces of information flashing on that monitor.

You're probably wondering what on earth this has to do with internet marketing.

The lesson is this: Stay focused on your key metrics.

We knew why we were there and stayed focus on the few key pieces of information that told us how close we were getting to that baby coming out.

You have a goal (or a few of them) for your website. It may be generating a mailing list, selling a product or service, or getting people to sign up for your newsletter, whitepaper, or special report.

The key is to know what that goal is and find the few key metrics that will tell you if you're reaching that goal (or at least headed in the right direction).

While you won't have anything as wonderful as a baby to show for your efforts, focus on your website's key metrics and you'll be well on your way to marketing online successfully. With a lot less screaming involved than in a L&D room.

So what does everyone else compare against?

For weekly or monthly data, the commonly used comparison periods are the previous period and the same period in the previous year. By comparing against the previous period, you can quickly see if things got better or worse or even just stayed mostly the same.

I am less sure what a comparison against the same period in the previous year is meant to show. This may have been good in traditional industries but the internet changes too fast for this to be useful in my mind. Your website or traffic mix will change and suddenly you are constantly around 20% off last year every single week, making that comparison just additional numbers on the report.

So what should I compare against then?

The point of a comparison is to aid in understanding if the performance for that time period was good or bad. Therefore, logically, the best comparison to be made is against the expected or forecast performance for that period.

This forecast should have been created using the data from recent periods and using the data from last year, taking into account known or expected website and traffic mix changes. Once you start setting goals through forecasts and targets, you start becoming accountable.

Now this is slightly scary, it is so much easier to say 'hey, we are up 20% on last year, we must be going well' (ignoring how you were 40% up two months ago). But when you are admit that 'hey, we are down 1.5% against where I thought we would be', you can start to investigate the reasons why and see what is and isn't working.

Anything else?

While I don't like comparing against the same period last year, the trend or % change for the same period last year can be useful. This can show you if a change this year is merely a seasonal effect or something that should be investigated further.

Targets are slightly different from forecasts and not as useful for short term comparisons. They are where you want to be longer term, something to keep an eye on but not a call for action if not at that level immediately. And like everything else, they should be one of the factors that are used in developing the forecasts.

Summary

Give your data company. In order to provide it with a meaningful existence, it should be compared against other numbers. The most useful comparison is against a forecast as this is the true measure of whether performance was above or below expectations. And the forecast should draw on the knowledge of all other numbers that could be compared against.

Note: I will be writing some posts about forecasting in the future. If you need a forecast to understand performance, you need to know how to forecast (ideally with some degree of accuracy).

The set of metrics that I listed in the post last week (visits, visitors and interactions) could be described as the basic traffic metrics. Each are absolute numbers as opposed to a percentage or ratio and each can be used to describe the popularity of the website during the previous period.

The following set of metrics are what I describe as (for want of a better term) as engagement metrics. I do not claim that they describe completely that mystical experience known as a user's engagement with a website but I believe they give an indication of the level to which people are engaging. All are ratios calculating by combining two other metrics.

Frequency - Visits per Visitor

This is the average number of visits each visitor to the website made during the specified period calculated by dividing the number of visits by the number of unique visitors for that time period. It reflects whether the users of a website are interacting with it on a regular basis or only ever visiting once. The minimum number for this metric is 1.0 - every visitor must have made at least one visit.

Interactions per Visit

This is the average number of interactions made with the website during each visit during the specified time period - calculated by the dividing the total number of interactions by the number of visits for that time period. Again, the usual type of interaction that is used here is page views.

It is an interesting metric in that there is no good or bad result, it all depends on the context. For example, a higher number of interactions per visit may suggest a greater level of engagement but it could also be that the user was having to search through the site in an attempt to find the information they were after.

Duration per visit

Similar to the previous metric, this is the average time a user spends on a site in each visit. It can provide additional information about the average visit regarding the length of time people spend on the website.

A key point to remember though is that web analytics packages can only work off known measurements and there is generally no measurement for when a user leaves a website. Therefore the duration for each visit is typically under reported and cannot be measured at all when only one measurement is received.

Bounce Rate

This is a measure of the number of time a website is visited and the user leaves immediately without engaging with it at all. The simple method of judging whether there was any engagement is to assume that the user has to have more than one interaction. Therefore bounce rate is commonly calculated as the percentage of visits with only one page view.

A website that is used as the user's home page (portals, google, news sites) would have a high bounce rate for all visits where the user opened their browser but then immediately went to an alternative site. Also, it possible for a user to get all the information they need from a website from a single page - high engagement but only a single interaction. Basically every site has a certain level of bounce rate, it is how it changes over time that is important.

What Next

So these 7 metrics would be your basic set of traffic and engagement metrics, and the basis for any investigation into the performance of a website. From here I am going to go into some methods of how to look at the numbers and how to understand better what they are telling you.

Note: we are dealing with the average in all the engagement metrics and this could produce some misleading results unless you think through what the change actually means. For example, a influx of traffic from a new source may lead to a drop in the overall site frequency as the new visitors have a lower average frequency than the current average average, not that people are less satisfied with the site.

While I will cover this specific concept further in a future post I think the key point I wanted to make is that numbers should not be just taken as black and white, you need to do some thinking in order to understand a change. And you need to understand a change in order to do something about it.

The common theme that runs through any discussion of web analytics is that the industry needs to move beyond a focus on metrics and simply providing reports to instead focusing on the provision of insights and recommendations. I totally agree, in order to add value to a business and justify our salaries, that this is what we need to be doing. But the other point that is often raised is that web analytics is really hard - it is the identification of these insights and recommendations that is the really hard part. I believe that everyone needs a starting point, some simple metrics that may not provide any real insights but give the reader a quick overview of performance. While simple and possibly not insightful in themselves, these metrics do indicate if some aspect of performance has changed and they can also give some hints about the areas that should be examined in more detail in order to do that adding of value.

Traffic Metrics

The starting point for any review of the performance of a website must be the level of traffic that it has. That is the number of visits to the site, the number of people making these visits and the level of interaction they had with the site. These really are simple metrics but they instantly tell you if something has happened to your site performance. An unexpected change to any of these metrics would usually be the first indicator that something has broken or that the new marketing campaign is having an impact.

Visits

Even I find it weird that I am starting with Visits ahead of Visitors but my gut instinct feel that this is an under rated metric is constantly growing stronger. I am starting to think that the visit, that is a sequence of one or more interactions with a website ending with a period of 30 min of inactivity, is actually the foundation metric for web analytics. From a user point of view, it covers all interactions they have with a website during the period they have engaged with it. Understanding user behaviour during this period is a key element of developing websites and/or marketing that meet customer requirements and expectations.

Traditional offline marketing has a big focus on the importance and value from segmenting customers. The online world can take this a step further by segmenting at visit level. For me, the best type of segmentation is based on customer needs/thoughts/actions. Now a person may have many reasons for visiting a website and to assign them to a single bucket reduced the understanding that can be taken from segementation and an investigation into user behaviour. This is improved by segmenting at visit level, placing into different buckets based on method used to get to the site and actions taken once there.

Visitors

Quite simply the number of people who accessed the website during the period specified. I do not agree with the concept of there being two metrics, visitors and unique visitors, where visitors is the number of people accessing the website per day totalled for the period specified while unique visitors is the actual number of people for that period. Adding visitors up over a number of days and calling it a total is not mathematically or logically sound nor does it provide useful information. Instead, for me, it is unique visitors at daily, weekly, monthly or campaign level all the way.

This number is useful in understanding if more or less people are accessing the site and how many people it actually is who are looking at all these pages, placing these orders, clicking out to other sites. There are issues with the accuracy of this metric due to cookie blocking, cookie deletion and multiple computers but the solution is to accept this fact and move on.

Interactions

Traditionally this metric was the number of page views and it indicated how much visitors were navigating through the site. This concept is changing due to the introduction of so many new ways of presenting information on a website, many interactive and not requiring a page to be viewed. Hence my use of the term 'interactions', suggesting this could measure the level to which visitors have clicked on or viewed multiple elements of a website, whether this is a page or something else.

For simplicity, I think many sites can still start with using page views as a measure here. In my previous role at Ask.com, we used the number of queries made as our measure of interaction as that was more relevant than the number of pages viewed. Another alternative could be clicks or screen views viewed - the key point is that it should always be an action that every visitor with even minimal engagement with the website performs at least once. More detailed (and insightful) metrics will cover areas that only a proportion of visitors perform, such as placing an order or viewing a certain type of page but the number of interactions gives the brief overview that is a good starting point.

In my next post, I will go on to describe the other simple metrics that I believe are a good starting point for examing the performance of a website.

Esta alteração já há muito que devia ter sido feita, mas mais vale tarde do que nunca. Outras duas alterações que gostaria de ver o Alexa a fazer é passar a descriminar subdomínios, e alterar o método de apresentação de dados já que a forma actual de reach ou pageviews por milhão de utilizadores não é intuitiva e impede comparações com outras fontes de informação.

Taxonomies on business-to-business websites are industry based around the communities that interact with their content. The problem that many sites find is that the content can evolve and the taxonomy can not adjust to changes in what the content creators produce, or with what advertisers wish to sponsor, with regards to useful popular content.

Taxonomies should not be a snapshot in time but should be a living reflection of the markets they represent.

Taxonomy creep

This ‘taxonomy creep’ can only be combated by frequent reviews by people who have most contact with the site content. Usually this would be the website manager working with the site content creators and other specialists.

Taxonomy creep inevitably occurs to all sites and there is a need to be able to monitor and adjust the taxonomies without impacting on the user experience or the workflow of the content producers.

Here I propose to set out a process that businesses can employ that will ensure their taxonomies are accurate. That they reflect the industry, user groups and business objectives of the site and will utilize their web technologies and people available.

This process recognizes the evolving nature of what we produce  and ensures that the users will find the content, enhancing their experience on sites.

Benefits of a search technology

Various types of software can automatically search a site’s content and map it to nodes in an existing industry taxonomy. This taxonomy is has been built primarily for the global search engine crawlers and so has a generic take on industry topics.

This forms a good basis for industry taxonomies within business to business websites and from there we can take research findings, personas, keyword research and the product team’s industry knowledge and any future content proposition plans, to inform the site specific taxonomy.

This bespoke taxonomy, with a targeted categorization rule base, allows the content to be categorized in a manner that is accurate (using a categorization tool) and automatic.

Many search technologies are designed to work so they operate globally, categorizing and indexing millions of pages to robust taxonomies, to enable users to find information from around the web. Using this feature within a site enables the search engine to aggregate content around topic areas that can be used to provide users with extra valuable information.

With a site specific taxonomy (SST) and a search engine taxonomy (SET) combined, extra features can be employed onto the site.

1. Landing pages can be automatically created on agreed terms that have been highlighted by site owners.
2. Pages can be tagged using contextual links to point to these pages automatically, using words or phrases pre-determined by the SEO team and the site managers.
3. There is an ability to list articles by author and show related content. By displaying tags alongside an article that points to a landing page or takes the user to specific search results pages on that topic - relevance is increased.
4. The SET is also enhanced as it can take the new categories back to the global indexing engine.

With this increased level of user interaction the amount of pages that will be viewed will rise.

However, the key qualities in this assumption are relevancy and timeliness.

Different situations will require a different weighting but relevance will always be the key to a serendipitous user experience.

The relevance, or ‘aboutness’ of a page is driven by the ability of the website CMS to categorize content automatically and accurately and in some situations extra coding will be required for the formulation of rules (within the classification engine) to be able to do this accurately.

The review process explained

Step 1 - Look at existing taxonomy and identify gaps.

Gaps will be highlighted by documents created by specialists such as an IA, an SEO expert or a site manager (taxonomies, controlled vocabularies, content proposition plans and navigation schemes).

In publishing websites, journalists may alert editors that articles are not being classified correctly and a mapping of the SET to the SST would occur.

Mapping the SET ensures that we gain a perspective from the industry, then the content producers will align their view on the subject matter backed up by the research documents mentioned above.

Finally, by using research on the users (personas, web metrics and keyword research) we can ensure that the suggested new SST sits well. This ensures the content, users and business context are addressed.

Step 2 – Creation and consolidation of categories and rule development

After the gap analysis of the SST it may be the case that new categories need to be created and rules written for the SET categorisation tool. Bespoke channels may also need to be addressed within the presentation of the site through the UI but these areas will also be a part of the SST. This ensures all useful content will be retrievable through search and browsing.

At this stage the corpus is tested against the SET categorisation tool using existing rules. Results of the test will allow us to deem if it is necessary to create new categories within the SET and in turn the SST.

It may also be evident that certain categories need consolidating as there is not enough content to occupy these areas. This needs to be executed in a considered manner, with a view to future proof if possible, as tweaking a navigation item in the UI will lead to user confusion.

Once this sequence of work is complete the new rules can be developed (if necessary).

Step 3 – Testing stage

The corpus is tested against the SET categorisation tool using the new rules. This will result in the corpus being reclassified to the new topics in the site taxonomy.

The results of the categorisation will need to be checked by taking a random selection and seeing that they are categorised to a standard that the team is happy with.

Step 4 – Quality Assurance

If the results are judged to be inadequate the team, or a 3rd party resource, (depending on budget / complexity) refines the new rules and then uses the SET categorisation tool to reclassify documents again until the results returned are deemed satisfactory.

Step 5 – Quarterly Review

Once implemented the taxonomy will need to be revisited in three months and the sequence begins again.

Who should be involved with the process?

A review every quarter should be a key task for every website manager or product owner. They will need to set up a reporting procedure when the categorisation fails and this would be recorded and analysed as part of the review process. It may be a spreadsheet with the article ID and then the details are listed. Though this may be initially demanding on their time it will improve the classification engine and improve the workflow within the team.

The search engine technology team need to be involved at all stages of the process, to enable testing of the rules base with the content. They also need to interact with the site web developers to ensure a test environment is present and they can report results.

SEO specialists would also be able to provide the website editor with a list of top keywords from which landing pages could be built. This list would also help inform the direction of the taxonomy and the naming of navigation items.

The user experience team would provide personas and the information architect would provide any documents relating to information organisation or site structure. The web analytics team will also provide usage stats of the site and how the users interact with it. This will help the web editor make decisions around consolidation, creation or naming of the taxonomy and navigation items. These specialists should be notified of any changes to the user interface which may occur through re-ordering of site categories.

Finally, and most importantly, content creators need to be in constant dialogue with the website managers to ensure the taxonomy supports the content that they are writing.

The long term view

Benefits of a smoother workflow and a better user experience in the long term outweighs any potential for labour intensive activity in the short term. There will be some initial work to do to get site taxonomies up to an adequate standard that the website manager, the content creators and the specialist teams can be happy with.

By implementing a taxonomy creation and maintenance strategy, one can be confident that the auto categorization of content will be findable by the user and will be accurately referenced within the site architecture.

Employing a taxonomist would always be the best option if it at all possible.  But by ensuring that those who work on the website know the importance of a good taxonomy to the user experience, then that should be enough to ensure the taxonomy will be managed effectively and reviewed frequently.

"Since I've got all these things I can measure, I'm paralyzed by all the opportunities." (CEO of a service company) What do you know about your homepage? Did you ever think about defining web metrics?

Discover new paths

NetGenesis, specialised in providing web services for small to medium sized businesses, made researches about web metrics and they found out, that web systems produce a great number of data about user activity. The web managers they spoke with did not have the definitions, methods or means to use it effectively. NetGenesis also found out, that the managers are in need for common measurements. They uttered their frustration with not having the ability to get access at the information they know is sitting in their customer behavior data files, and not being able to link that information with the available wealth of off-line information. But they are also convinced about positive future developments. Each manager has clear perceptions what could be learned from the information they already had and might collect if only they had a few more resources and a little more support from upper management.

So lets speak about performance indices and what they can tell us.

Click to enlarge

• User: a customer (person) uses your Web site. He or she becomes a unique user.
• Visit: each time this user explores your site, you receive a visit from that user. Thus a user may have many unique visits to your site over time.
• page view: each visit by a user is composed of a series of pages that he or she reviews, thus each visit is composed of a time-ordered series of page views, otherwise known as click stream or click path.
• hit: each page on your site contains many constituent objects such as body text, images, and video files. Each of these results is a hit to your web site, so each page view comprises many hits. That also means, that hits are an inaccurate measure of websites popularity. (source: NetGenesis)

Another often used term is log file. It is a file that contains an automatically produced protocol of some or all of the information mentioned above, thus every request made to the server. With log file analysis tools, it's possible to get a good idea of where visitors are coming from, how often they return, and how they navigate through the site. But calculating visits and users is more subtle and complex than counting page views. As a result a large company without a standard definition for visits or users is likely to be using many different techniques for arriving at these measures. When the results are brought together for comparative purposes, it becomes especially difficult to tell what is really going on. Are the differences reflective of actual customer behavior or are they due primarily to different measurement methods? (see also article: E-metrics, Business Metrics For The New Economy, published by NetGenesis Corp. in year 2000)

Visualizing web metrics

Click to enlarge

• Stickiness
• Slipperiness
• Focus
• Velocity
• Seducible moments

Do you stick your users?

The figure stickiness is related to duration and frequency of the user's visit. Stickiness is a composite measure that gathers the efficiency of your content in terms of consistently holding users' attention and allowing them to quickly complete their online tasks. In general, sticky sites are considered more effective than sites that are not very sticky. Stickiness is calculated by dividing the average number of pages visited in a given section through the total number of pages in the section. (source: NetGenesis)

When your users should better slipper...

Slipperiness is the exact antonym of Stickiness. Some areas of your site are significantly better if they are very low sticky. One area a user should slip over is for example the Customer Support section for starters. NetGenesis found out, that "the last thing your management wants to see is how your customers have to look at lots and lots of pages and spend huge amounts of time reading about product fixes and return policies. In this case, you want the Customer Support section be slippery..." The meaning of slippery is, that the users should come in and should find quickly what they are looking for, and then go out. Analysis showed, that every additional click required to make a purchase represents another opportunity for the prospect to change his mind and back out. (source: NetGenesis)

Focus on...

Focus is another concept related to the behavior a user visits a site within a section. Suppose, there are 15 pages in a section. You can distinguish between those visits, where the users touch 2 or 3 of them - this would be called focused- and less or unfocused visits, where 8 or 10 sites are touched. If the average of users touch 3 of 15 pages you have a users focus of 0.2. Smaller values point out a more narrow focus, higher values point out a wider focus. What is better: narrow or wide focus? It depends. Narrow focus is good at a customer service area of a site, but perhaps not at an online auction section of a site. (source: NetGenesis)

Speed

How quickly a user moves from one stage of the customers life cycle to the next. The customer life cycle is a term used to describe the progression of steps a customer goes through when considering, purchasing, using, and maintaining loyalty to a product or service. Marketing analysts Jim Sterne and Matt Cutler have developed a matrix that breaks the customer life cycle into five distinct steps: reach, acquisition, conversion, retention, and loyalty. In layman's terms, this means getting a potential customer's attention, teaching them what you have to offer, turning them into a paying customer, and then keeping them as a loyal customer. Clocking the prospect qualification process gives you the average amount of time it takes for a member of a given market segment to pass from awareness to decision. With this knowledge the web designer can test alternative navigation techniques. (source: NetGenesis)

Sweet seduction

Seducible moments. Who does not know the feeling of giving in a seduction? In front of a shelf with sweets, in front of a hyper super snip... In the internet, this feeling has also be evocated. It may be the rapid purchase button next to a desired product or an up-sell offer at the moment a customer is deciding between two service choices. The right encouragement or the right graphic might just do the trick. One should avoid so called rough patches, which diminish the momentum or speed at which a browser becomes a buyer. Rough patches often appear at those places where the shape of the customer life cycle funnel suddenly gets narrower because many users are abandoning the process. (source: NetGenesis)

How many visitors become buyers?

Have you ever thought about how many visitors of your company's web page really decde to buy one of your products after watching your range of products? If not, you probably should as that can show you whether further investment in your web business can increase your sales figures on the whole. The most significant benchmark for your economic efficiency in the web is the so called coversion rate. This figure is often used by internet marketers for reviewing the success of a web site. It tells them the number of visitors that finally generate a transaction. Typical values usually range between 1 to 5 %. That means that 95 to 99 of 100 the visitors leave your page without doing a purchase, filling in of an online application form or simply ordering further information on products or services.

Of course there are some superior sites which are able to impress with much higher levels of conversion rates. Guess what online shopping portals come along with conversion rates up to 10 %? To most people there comes amazon.com to their mind at first. And they have a point as, according to a recent study by Nielsen/NetRatings, Amazon.com converts 12.8% of its visitors into sales. Huge number of course and in fact no reasonable guide line for even a multinational concern. In their case a conversion rate of 1% would be a very good value to reach and to hold. The second is the most difficult. It's not enough to increase the number of visitors, most important is to convince them to do a purchase or to stimulate their desire for more information on products or services.

Therefore, a company should at least consider further investment in their web business to attract more buyers if conversion rate is not satisfying. Afterwards, the value of sales has to be compared to the costs of those actions. When there is an excess a company's ambitions have been successful. There is no doubt that those investments have to be deliberated on the one hand, but on the other hand they are a great chance to enhance the sales figures. If you know the conversion rate of your web site you can easily calculate the number of visitors you have to attract to win a certain percentage of new buyers.

So why not just check your own company's conversion rate to get an impression of the efficiency of your web site or just to mark out your position among your competitors? It might not be uninteresting at all.

How linked are you?

Imagine the ways people arrive on your web site. Besides recommendations of others or non-web advertisement the most effective way most costumers reach a web site via links from other web sites. Do you have an image of the number of pages linking to yours? The characteristic number in this context is the "link popularity" representing the whole number of web sites that link to a single site. Developed by the google search engine founders most of the well known search engines are supposed to use this figure to calculate the ranking for the web sites they provide as a search result. Thus link popularity contributes a lot for position of a web site among the top of the findings.

To get an impression, Amazon.com inbound links reach the number of 18 millions, ebay 9 millions and wikipedia.org even obtains the record level of 42 million incoming links. This can be easily found out by doing a link research with a search engine, in this case provided by google.com. Those levels may obviously not be met by company pages but this topic is all the same very important for them. A high level of link popularity is able to enchance the traffic to a company's web site and thus this will increase benefits from rising sales. A direct comparison with the main competitors might also be useful to receive an impression whether there is need to work on the own link popularity. A recommendable solution for this survey is offered by marketleap.com which provides listed numbers of inbound links of selected companies. The following excerpt serves as an example for such a research.

How to be on the top 10 of google search results

Who hasn't already made a google research and wondered why there is always the wikipedia.org site appearing on one of the first ranks. Well, that's because of all the incoming links to this site. The google PageRank is "a sophisticated method to rank web documents", according to efactory.de. It is supposed that link popularity contributes in a huge amount to the PageRank algorithm, besides there are of course some other secret factors that also have influence. It was developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin to bring order to the Web ("The Anatomy of a Large Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine").

On the google site itself it says that the PageRank uses the vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. Every element is being weighted according to its linking structure. The more links refer to a site the higher is the weight of it and weight of the referring page has a huge influence on this effect. The rank is measured on a scale from 0 to 10 with 10 being the highest level, which is reached very infrequently. One can check the PageRank of the own web site over a function plug in in the google toolbar. As an example both Amazon.com and wikipedia.org reach the high level of 8, while BA Mosbach web site only gets a 5 categorization. So what's your page rank?

As the PageRank has a high economic importance there are a lot of people trying to manipulate the rank by linking to pages with a high level rank. There are even companies specialized in improving sites' rank by selling high quality backlinks to bypass the algorithm. Thus financially strong companies have easier the possibility to improve. By investing in the quality of the own web site, companies can improve their rank and followingly realize increasement of popularity and success.

Lessons learned?

Web metrics are obviously not only figures a internet marketer should work with. Every company should be aware of them to be able to appoint the position of their own web site and, if necessary, make improving tactical and strategic decisions. It's necessary to work with the information one can extract from web metrics. In times where E-commerce is continuously winning importance firms should not only concentrate on their commonplace business but invest in future distribution and information channels in the internet.

And in the end, hopefully you will also be paralyzed by the new opportunities for your company...

reviewer: Anna Martin, Andreas Lothspeich

references:

• E-metrics, Business Metrics For The New Economy, published by NetGenesis Corp. in year 2000
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversion_rate
• http://pr.efactory.de/d-index.shtml
• http://pagerank.suchmaschinen-doktor.de/
• http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html The Anatomy of a Large Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine von Sergey Brin und Lawrence Page
• http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop/
• http://www.link-popularity.at
• http://www.nielsen-netratings.com/

I tend to agree about this, but then its because when dealing with websites, there are a myriad of elements that will ensure a successful site. Not least, good IA and interface design and of course the ability to convert your customers or users, to enable interaction that is intuitive and easy. But importantly, you need metrics to prove the KPI's are changing and that all the money spent on IA and this persuasive design is worth it. Its the clearest way to get ROI on IA.

Good IA should always include persuasion architecture within its remit. Its a part of the process. After enabling findability you then want the user to either buy, sign-up, comment, post, bid, sell in the easiest way possible. Of course this will never be straight forward and requires constant testing to ensure the funnel is doing its job.

It comes down to the user's paths through the site. For each conversion we need to look at the user flow. Wireframes should be drafted for each stage of their interaction. We need both user scenarios and personas to gain a complete picture of who we are building for. We then need to A/B test the pages in the live environment and measure that effectiveness. Google's free website optimiser is a great free tool for this.

All this should come down to a team of people;

• the UX team to gather personas and create user stories that will help inform the interaction designer
• brand marketing to help define the variety of messages that need to be conveyed and the tone of the proposition
• the IA and interaction designer for the wireframes
• the web analyst to track and monitor the A/B testing and funnel analysis of conversions and to measure audience engagement
• the web development resource to set up a user test environment with appropriate tracking

The metrics that follow will show uplift in certain areas and will encourage the stakeholders to back these projects by investing in the testing and optimisation of their sites.

In the coming month's I will, with my colleague Alec Cochrane, investigate engagement in more detail. What excites me most about persuasive design is that it is the logical conclusion to the application of the initial information design and a way of measuring that design's success. Persuasion is not forcing a user to interact but its a way of helping them make choices that the user has already shown interest in. Check back for updates and read more on the subject from Alec here.

Also try Omniture's excellent whitepapers on the subjects - well worth the read...

I just attended a webinar, and one of the recurrent themes throughout the talk is that the lack of metrics holds back advertisers from embracing online advertising. Lack of metrics? Are you serious?

No, the web metrics are not perfect, and many of them are still in flux. But label them for what they are -- complex, confusing, involved, etc. One things that they are NOT is "absent", especially when compared to data available with other media.

So why are people saying web metrics are lacking? I think there are two reasons: 1. They simply don't understand what is available to them, and 2. They want more because they expected the web to be extremely rich in metrics and completely measurable (which it is). So since the baseline for web metrics is high, people just expect more. In other words, the higher the baseline, the higher the expectation.

I think some proper web analytics education is long overdue. As a strong proponent of using web analytics to drive web business decisions, I believe the next hurdle for all of us who live and breathe the web is to educate the media planners and buyers the intrinsic power of web data.

Survival of the Easiest: The web follows a kind of Sheer Design Darwinism. As you will see, this article is about the key technique for superior customer relationship: Usability!

Why the hell is Amazon and Apple so damn RICH?!?!

Amazon’s “SECRET” to Success Amazon.com follows the path of a usable site: The site treats the users well; Searching is a breeze, they can easily find what they’re looking for. And the site is intuitive and very easy to use; almost anybody knows how it works. Furthermore, the site is available in 5 languages (English, Chinese, French, German and Japanese). They follow the 3 main factors of succeeding in international usability:

1. A computer must be capable of displaying the user's native language, character set, and notations (such as currency symbols).
2. The user interface and documentation must be translated into the user's native language in a way that is understandable and usable.
3. A system must match the user's cultural characteristics.

And they overcome switching of the customers by:

1. Easy to find item
2. Its good and easy to return, the more you have bought the better purchase recommendations you have
3. Affiliates list, user can earn money by recommending the site to others
4. Easy and fast purchase process

click to enlarge

(Taken from: www.amazon.com)

I-Joy!

Joy of use is mainly the success factor of the Apple I-pod. It sold over 110 million I-Pods (until the end of 2007) in only five years and in the following years it is expected to sell 500 million more. Again, how is that possible?

No digital music player ever before was that easy to use, so simply linked to music offered on the internet and most importantly containing such sophisticated software. I-Pod has a very attractive design, which emits “coolness” and represents a certain style and glamour. Besides that, they are also well-known for its top-quality. Its main advantage is also in the I-Tunes store (an online music store), which has sold 2.5 million songs, 50 million episodes of famous TV-series and 1.3 million movies till date.

That’s a main reason why Apple Inc. is so successful. It has got revenue of US$ 24.01 billion and a net income of US$ 3.50 billion.

click to enlarge

(taken from: http://pocketmojo.net/media/blogs/pocketmojo/ipod_sales.jpg)

What is USABILITY?

So, simply put, Usability is a skill that you adopt when programs such as websites are being used. It is an art of simplifying and improving the ease-of-use during the design process.

click to enlarge

1. Learnability: How easy is it for users to finish their tasks once they come across the design?
2. Efficiency: How quickly can they perform the tasks?
3. Memorability: After a period of not using the design, how easily can they pick up from where they left off?
4. Errors: How many errors do users make? Severity of errors and how easily can they recover?
5. Satisfaction: Will users like to use the design?

For deeper understanding, you may want to visit http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030825.html, where it is explained in further detail.

Amazon's Use-Ability

If you look carefully, Usability is always emphasizing the easiness to complete a task, or answer doubts. It can be said that, Amazon.com has achieved a high quality of Usability, achieving notably, the likes of learnability and efficiency.

Fun for others, Money for you!

Today, computers are used for many purposes, in which the main goal is to please the user rather than maximizing transactions. Making user interfaces attractive and ‘seductive’ is the ‘joy of use’ users will experience while visiting your websites! A classic example will be www.etsy.com. It is an online shopping website, but it is much more interesting to use than eBay. They categorize products according to colours and by a ‘time-machine’, very much equipped with animations. The website is so animated, that people get addicted to enjoy using it, rather than actually making a purchase.

Another good example is www.touchgraph.com. It helps users see the bigger picture with just one simple search on Google. How? You may ask. The moment you press ‘enter’ when you try to find information on your topic, Touchgraph will automatically expand your search by showing interrelated topics via graphs. From there, you will be able to make your search broader, especially useful when you do not know what exactly you are looking for. At times, you might discover interesting patterns between the results from your topic.

click to enlarge

(Taken from www.touchgraph.com)

(taken from: http://www.fhv.at/res/uct/publikationen/schriften/VP12_2007.pdf)

Succeeding with your website

Experts figured out a formula for website success is:

B = V x C x L

Where
* B = amount of business done by the site
* V = unique visitors coming to the site
* C = conversion rate (the percentage of visitors who become customers); note that the concept of conversion applies not only to ecommerce sites, but to any site where there is something you want users to do
* L = loyalty rate (the degree to which customers return to conduct repeat business)

You can affect the success by either increasing the amount of people that visit the page (V) or the number of visitors that actually buy something (C):

When you want to multiply the numbers of visitors, it is necessary to raise the advertisement budget. That would mean: When you want to double the number of customers, you would have to double the advertisement budget. A high advertisement budget and promotional links would be useful in creating awareness.

The other possibility is to raise the percentage of visitors that really buy something (increasing the conversion rate). You could reach this by simply redesigning the website in a human-centred design process (the design is orientated on what consumer can work with and like). That is the much cheaper and easier kind because the normal conversion rate of a site is 1-2%, so there is much potential.

(taken from: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/roi.html)

Hitting Your Customers Right between the Eyes!!

Users spend 30 seconds reviewing a home page. They are a fickle bunch that does not go beyond what is in front of their faces. Therefore it is essential that a web page attracts the user’s attention instantly and is addictive to keep them reading. If visitors can't use your site, they will just scroll their mouse, click on the little ‘x’ on the top right hand corner of the screen, leave and never become customers. There are plenty of websites available and customers are not obligated to just be loyal to yours. Apart from making a site look good, it is important to know what your customers want.

Useful information: They want to know who you are, what you do and how people can reach you. Users visit websites with a goal in mind and if you can’t answer this they will move on and find a site that can. The content is more important than the design, because of that there are pages with high-quality content that are not very well designed, but gain a lot of traffic over the years.

Helpful Design: The main purpose of sites is to deliver content, so make sure fonts are clear and easy to read. And users usually scan the content for relevance before reading on, therefore large blocks of text that cannot be easily interpreted will drive users away.Including items such as bullet points, headers and highlighted keywords are great tactics to help users filter the content they read.

Intuitive usable webpage: Users in the web like to do things intuitively. So the higher the cognitive load and less intuitive the navigation of your website, the more likely it is that a customer will leave the site and search for other alternatives. As well as when a user searches for something he chooses the first reasonable option instead of searching for the easiest way. Optimizing is hard, and it takes a long time. Satisfying is more efficient.

Controllable website: Users want to be able to control their browser and rely on the consistent data presentation throughout the site. Give them a site which is easy to navigate around, and 'treats them well'. That includes respecting of common web standards such as links change color once visited and avoidance of Pop-ups, etc.

Complete Sites: Customers HATE it when sites crash the browser as well as "Under Construction" markers. Either the information is there or not. They have very low tolerance, so always give customers something for going to the page, if it is not working, then simply DON'T put it out there.

Read more about "How to make your website sing for you."

FAILURE - I can't buy anything here!!!

In the web pages of both HP and Canon, it is impossible to select an appropriate printer that caters to your needs; they provide information that is redundant. The site is not able to give the customer the information he wants. The page should offer information that would aid a customer in their decision making process for example: “When printing more than 50 pages per day, the following printers are suitable…” Evidently in the above example, even big producers have bad homepages. In reality most sites are bad, they do not have a good design (about 90% of all websites are badly designed and people only spend about 10% of their time at these pages) and they are difficult to use (over 50% of the pages are described as a failure by the customers).
The fact is: You will not have to create a perfect site, you just have to have a better page than the competitors, thus creating a better and wholesome experience for your customers.

Tools to create a top-selling page

Engaging Professionals: When creating a website, it is important to engage the right people: Experts in user experience have a good knowledge of customers' behaviour. These people are able to conduct field researches, create appropriate designs for interactions, efficiently develop rapid prototypes and conduct usability tests.
To reach the perfect goal, it is essential that these usability experts work together with a number of professionals such as graphic designers, web coders and the marketing.
So using only a graphic designer has its limitations, because he does not usually know the needs of the customer.

Market research: A Powerful tool that will greatly enhance a website is a “customer field study”, it enables a concise understanding of customers' needs and wants. To enable optimum effectiveness of the survey, the study should be conducted at places where the website is accessible to the customer. Apart from just asking questions, it is more effective to observe the customer’s reaction as words are empty without actions.

So how Usability and Joy of Use Prints $$$

When Usability and joy of use is present in your web, it will attract many visitors which might become potential customers. Revenue from advertisement will soon follow as advertisers impressed by the huge user volume will want their products to be seen in your site.

Apart from a good advertisement budget and a well-designed page, it is most important that visitors finish the purchase.

In most cases customers do not finish their purchases because:

1. They are just comparing product by dumping everything in the shopping cart

2. The process is too onerous, there are unnecessary questions, the process is a huge hassle and gets in the way of the purchase.

The buyer has to feel that this is a secure site and that his privacy is respected. There will have to be information about stock availability, shipping and other extra costs.

When they do not finish the purchase you won’t get money and that will contribute to the failure of a website.

If you want to read more about transforming a bad to a good website: http://www.informationweek.com/773/web.htm

The "GURUS"

Jakob Nielsen is the ‘guru’ of Usability as described by The New York Times, or even “the Usability Pope” as described by a magazine inventing several Usability methods. He holds a Ph.D. in human-computer interaction from the Technical University of Denmark in Copenhagen and was a distinguished engineer with Sun Microsystems. He even has his very own website, www.useit.com, which is created for a single reason, to provide solid Usability information.

Donald Arthur Norman is a professor of Computer Science, and loves products which are enjoyable to use, a feature which he places emotion and design, or heart and mind. He also co-founded the Nielsen Norman Group together with Jakob Nielsen. Their vision is to help enhance user experience and help companies develop and design corporate products and services.

Vincent Flanders is formerly a Director of Database Marketing for Lightspeed Systems and now the creator of successful website, www.Webpagesthatsuck.com, winning multiple awards including one of PC Magazine's Top 100 Websites, by commenting on how badly designed are real live sites, and explaining what is so wrong with them! He also had a live discussion with 'guru' Jakob Nielsen on 'How should websites look?"