7 Ways To Measure and Improve Your Website

Taking your site from good to great isn’t easy. Fortunately, there are experts willing to teach you how to accelerate your website and marketing to great faster.

There’s no bigger collection of experts than at the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit.

Read on for the top 7 most informative and applicable tips that I picked up from the summit to help you measure and improve your website.

7. Understand Your Market and Competition Better
6. Integrate Industry Trends
5. Listen To Your Customers More (and With Better Tools)
4. Testing Is Required to Kick Butt
3. Use Technology to Save Time
2. Be More Persuasive
1. Process Produces Better Websites

7. Understand Your Market and Competition Better

“All of your problems will be solved if you buy this web analytics package.” It’s a phrase not explicitly said by any web analytics company.

However, the implicit message is that web analytics tools are a turn-key solution that provide you with the exact data you want in a conveniently arranged dashboard.

The reality is anything but that. As every major web analytics guru will tell you, you need to explore other tools and methods for getting the data you need to develop real insight and improve your site.

Incorporate non-traditional sources to improve your website analysis. Mike Grehan pointed to Google Webmaster Central as a source of data related to your SEO efforts.

Several presenters highlighted the importance of incorporating competitive data and industry trends in a dashboard on a quarterly basis.

7 Competitive Intelligence Tools

For business with a big bank account, there are tools like:

1. Hitwise
2. Nielsen NetRatings
3. comScore MediaMetrix
   

If you’re looking for competitive data on the cheap, you’ll have to turn to the likes of

1. Compete
2. Quantcast
3. Fireclick
4. Alexa

The goal integrating these data is to help you benchmark:

Yourself vs. Yourself

Yourself vs. Your company

Yourself vs. Competitors

“Is that good?” is the most common analytics question. Combining outside perspective against your site will help you get perspective. Knowing your competitors strengths and weaknesses vs. your own helps focus your analysis and action.

6. Integrate Industry Trends

Rachel Scotto recommended weaving in recent trends that relate to your customers, business and marketing in 2 steps:

Step 1- Find The Trends

Press releases from companies like In-Stat and Leichtman Research can often have free information or stats.

Media publications like ClickZ, AdAge Digital, Mediapost and iMedia Connection regularly produce industry news and commentary from emarketing veterans.

Vendors, such as Omniture or Hitwise, will sometimes put out good content or webinars.

Step 2 – Spread the Knowledge

Successfully acting on what you learn means spreading the knowledge. Track various topics and create a paper and online library (ex: Mobile, Games, Internet Usage, Web Analytics, etc.)

Once every 3 to 6 months, create a dashboard of external data (ex: industry media spend, online population data, mobile, online video). It will help you and your company keep a pulse on the industry as a whole.

5. Listen To Your Customers More (and With Better Tools)

Measurement is simply a tool to help you determine whether you’re successfully helping customers and prospects to achieve your goals and their goals.

Conventional web analytics is one tool to do that, but there are others.

Annette Priest of Dell stressed the need to “move from data to empathy.” That means you have to increasingly move toward talking with individual people using multiple methods:

1. Web analytics (base)
2. Survey responses
3. Clickstream data
4. Usability testing
5. Ethnography

Obviously, big companies have a lot more budget than most to do this kind of stuff. At the very least, you can start with a survey and usability testing.

1. Launch A Survey – Create a free Survey Monkey account. Write a 3 question survey. Send it to your email list and/or put a pop-up on your site. Listen, learn, improve.

1. Usability Testing – Buy Steven Krug’s book Don’t Make Me Think from Amazon for $26.40. Read the chapter on usability testing and make your money back times 5 in the first 30 days.

Worry about the rest of the measurement after you do those 2 things.

4. Testing Is Required to Kick Butt

Stop guessing, start testing. Everyone is beating the a/b and multivariate testing drum these days.

I think it’s with good reason–you can launch new versions of your site and let actual customer actions decide which one is best. No opinion matters more than your customers.

A speaker from Optimost recommended targeting your experiments to specific groups: personas, keyword groups, new vs. repeat visitors, visitors at different times of day, etc.

As you learn which messages resonate with prospects, customers and segments, you can highlight those messages in other channels. Reinforce the key points that prove persuasive, such as “Cancel Anytime”, in other marketing tactics.

Google’s Website Optimizer costs a whopping $0, so there’s no reason to wait.

3. Use Technology to Save Time

Like it or not, Excel and PowerPoint are the basic tools to analyze and spread ideas among key stakeholders.

Jennifer Veesenmeyer reminds us that we can easily link PowerPoint to Excel with the paste special function. Doing so dynamically updates your presentations when you change your spreadsheet.

Rachel Scotto advised creating formatting guideline for charts. Guidelines make it easier to consistently communicate insight and trains people on how to interpret the data.

The folks at Juice Analytics taught the audience how to setup a chart that scrolls through rows and columns of data. It’s a nifty idea that I could see being applicable to things like Ad Groups.

I would add that Excel 2007 has some pretty slick conditional formatting features built in. If you’re using Omniture, make sure you investigate the Excel Toolbar:

Excel Integration—Excel Integration’s robust API allows users to access all SiteCatalyst data in an Excel environment. Using Excel, users can combine their Web analytics data with operational and financial data, create custom charts and graphs, use pivot tables, or build dynamic forecasting models.

2. Be More Persuasive

We measure to improve. In many organizations, improving usually means persuading others with your analysis.

As Annette Priest put it, “My job is telling people that their babies are ugly.” Obviously, this is either a talent or a learned skill.

Jennifer Veesenmeyer draws an important distinction that can help you present your analysis:

Separate your business drivers, that is

Do you need to make a change?

From some diagnostic metrics, that is

Where do you need to make the change?

When putting text and bullets with your charts, avoid narration–using words to describe your charts. Instead, use analysis—it makes connections, talks about implications and answers the “So, what?” question

Know Your Audience

Different people need different things to be convinced. Jennifer reviewed 5 personality types and the best way(s) to handle them:

1. Followers
   1. Like: Comfort and reliability
   2. Persuade: Show them how others made a similar decision
2. Charismatics
   1. Like: Bottom line results and think visually
   2. Persuade: Focus on results, diagrams and visual metaphors; Provide detailed leave behinds
3. Skeptics
   1. Like: Want to see data. Demanding, disagreeable, and self absorbed.
   2. Persuade: Establish the credibility of information sources (cite them); co-present with a trusted source.
4. Thinkers
   1. Like: Detail; hardest to persuade and read
   2. Persuade: Present market research surveys, case studies, cost/benefit analysis; explain your data gathering methods
5. Controller
   1. Like: Certainty; To guide the process
   2. Persuade: Focus on the facts, convince them it was their idea, go to them early and ask for some advice and incorporate it, avoid aggressive advocacy

1. Process Produces Better Websites

Perhaps more than anyone else, Eric Petersen is championing web analytics process. The benefits of process for analysis are that you:

1. Reduce bad data caused by bad implementation
2. Minimize disruptions from staff turnover
3. Increase understanding and decrease mistakes
4. Reduce your dependence on specific people

Every company goes through an evolution in the use of analytics:

Ad Hoc -> Employee Centric -> Process Centric

There is power in process. In my experience, that power is rhythm and efficiency.

Rhythm is the opposite of fire drills. It means everyone knows what to expect and when. Instead of reacting to questions about improve your website, you’re anticipating them.

Efficiency means you create a report or dashboard once and reuse it. Instead of reinventing the template each time, you just tweak and improve it.

Check out Eric’s white paper.

Conclusion

There is a wealth of advice out there from experts who’ve already done it. Pick any one of these tips today to start to improving your website. Don’t forget to attend the next eMetrics.

You can read my full coverage of eMetrics DC ‘07 over at Search Marketing Gurus.

Tagged as: Annette Priest, emetrics, emetrics-marketing-optimization-summit, emetrics-summit, excel, hitwise, Jennifer Veesenmeyer, Mike Grehan, Rachel Scotto, Steven Krug, surveys, testing, Web Analytics