Is Your Website Too Fat?

Measurement is like exercise. People often only think about it after they have a problem. And by then, it might be too late.If you don’t want flabby marketing and and out-of-shape website, then you need to plan your website analysis.

Here are 4 quick tips to keep all of your internet marketing healthy:

1. Question (Almost) Everything
2. Know Your Limits
3. Identify The Moving Pieces
4. Separate Needs from Wants

1. Question (Almost) Everything

The purpose of site analysis is to answer questions, such as:

• How many people are viewing our videos?
• Is this the best landing page for paid search?
• How many questions should I ask on this lead generation form?

Getting the actionable data you need means you have to start your website analysis plan by asking yourself:

What do I need to know about my site and marketing to run my business?

I’ve found that business questions about website analysis usually fall into one of four camps:

1. Whatever Costs the Most

Follow the money. The bigger the investment, the greater the scrutiny and the more people who are going ask about results.

Different stakeholders are going to have different needs. It’s best to ask them what they care about well in advance of the project. Doing so helps you map out a measurement plan while managing expectations.

photo credit: Neubie

2. Something New or Risky

People love and fear experiments. They’re entirely unpredictable. That’s exactly why everyone wants to know results as soon as they’re available.

Get ready for the onslaught before it happens. It’s also important to establish a reasonable time period to get meaningful results. You need to understand and communicate what’s normal variation vs. warning signs that something could be wrong.

3. Anything High Profile or Controversial

Anyone’s pet project or anything that stirred up a lot of debate will command extra scrutiny. What makes these situations more challenging are that the attention often comes from those least familiar with measurement.

Documenting key questions in advance is great. Thinking about an executive summary measure will also help.

4. Overall Health / Benchmarks

Everyone wants their website and marketing to be bigger, faster and stronger. It’s less common, however, for these hopes to be conveyed in numbers.

When “as much as possible” is the hope for website success, you need a reality check. This is usually in the form of forecasts or benchmarks.

This means you need to gather internal or external data to figure out what’s realistic. Experience and industry averages are a start, but I find benchmarking against yourself is the most valid.

2. Know Your Limits

Every measurement tool is limited in one way or another.

Take Google Analytics, for example. It has 2 potentially crippling limitations:

1. You can’t get data historically when you make changes.
2. It doesn’t allow you to see full paid search ad variations.

You have to plan your tool implementation and website analysis around these problems, or risk being left in the cold when you need a key piece of data.

Often, this knowledge is a result of trial and error. Defining your business questions during the vendor selection and implementation process will help you avoid as much of education by pain as possible.

It’s best to push the limits of your tool early and often. The sooner you can identify the weaknesses and missing bits, the faster you can get them resolved.

Saving that, consider:

* Attending vendor or consultant training early in the process

* Subscribing to noted web analytics blogs

* Negotiating free “Best Practices” hours as part of your contract

3. Identify The Moving Pieces

Just like cars, maintenance is always better than a trip to the mechanic. In planning your website analysis, it helps to know where things can go wrong or suddenly become urgent.

For better analysis, map out the following four thing:

1. Deadlines - How fast you need the information often dictates when you need to start planning your implementation.

If you have a marketing or editorial calendar, you can bet the questions will follow about a week after everything drops. That means you need to start planning at least 4 weeks ahead.

2. Inputs - There are critical points that determine how reliable your data is. It’s important to understand where they are and have a system of checks and balances to validate them.

The most obvious are:

- Administrative settings in your tool

- Tags on your destination URLs, e.g. www.alexlcohen.com/?utm_source=email

- Page tags

Addressing all of these could fill an entire post. Just ask yourself this: How well do I understand these? Who has made sure we’re using them right?

3. Outputs - The way you want to see your website analysis can often influence your measurement choices.

Take a site overlay, for example. This is a visual that displays where people clicked on a particular page. It’s not uncommon for 2 links to point to the same place. If you don’t tag them separately, you may be losing insight.

4. Owners - Most businesses don’t have the luxury of a part or full time web analyst. This begs the question: Who’s going to do the work?

It’s especially critical to know who owns the Inputs you figured out above. Garbage in, Garbage out. If you don’t gather the right kind of data the right way, then your website analysis will suffer (or be nonexistent).

4. Separate Needs from Wants

If this all seems a bit overwhelming, just relax. You’re not going to get there overnight and that’s okay. You have to prioritize. Separate the information you need vs. the information you want.

Let’s put it this way:

If you had to make a compelling story to investors about the health
and future of your website, what information would you need to
tell that story?

Think of it another way. If you only had 2 months to prove your website’s value, what are the key pieces of data you’d need?

Once you can get all of the issues with those points out of the way, you can move onto the nice to have.

Conclusion

You have to plan your website analysis. Figuring out the best way to measure depends on how you want to use the data, how the data will be gathered and handled and what is critical to your business.

With a little discipline, you can keep your website and marketing slim and healthy.

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