WEB ANALYTICS Where to Begin e-book SPOILER ALERT! People love the Internet. A lot. In fact, 92% of online adults rely on search engines when looking for information 1. That means your audience s first interaction with your organization will be online. The first question you need to ask is, Can they find us? The second question is, Does our website provide the information they re looking for? The answer to both questions lies within your website s analytics.
WHAT ARE WEBSITE ANALYTICS? Web analytics refers to the measurement, analysis, and reporting of data collected from a website. The purpose of which is to assist in optimizing a website s content and user experience in order to achieve an organization s online business goals. HOW CAN THEY HELP YOU? Web analytics provide you with a better understanding of how visitors are finding your website, how they interact with it, and ultimately, how effectively your website is contributing to your business goals. This ebook will provide you with a better understanding of what web analytics are and how you can use them to achieve your business goals. 2 1 http://www.pewinternet.org/
GLOSSARY of terms Key Performance Indicator Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are the crucial data points that help you measure the success of your website. They are often specific to each organization, but include things like: Site visits, conversion rate, newsletter subscriptions, and contact form submissions. Micro Conversion Micro Conversions (MCs) are similar to KPIs, but refer to the data points which aren t viewed as determining factors in the success of your website, such as: PDF downloads, video views, or blog comments. Again, will most likely be specific to each organization. Metrics A Metric is a specific data set, typically a number. For web analytics, you ll have a different metric for total visitors, page views, link clicks, etc. Campaign A Campaign refers to the grouping of specific metrics that will be analyzed. For example, June Email Campaign, would monitor all traffic, clicks, and submissions linked to an organization s monthly email. Events Events fall under the Campaign umbrella and refer to the ways in which visitors interact with content on your website without navigating to a new HTML page. This includes downloading a document, watching a video, or filling out a form. These events can be tracked in order to isolate specific metrics. Category Categories refer to the very basic family to which your content belongs. For example, a Video category could be used for any videos on your website. Action Actions refer to the way in which a user interacts with the content on your site. For a video it would be play, for a link it would be click, for a document it would be download. Segmentation Segments break down large amounts of data in order to make it easier to analyze and use. These can be as broad or as specific as you d like. For example, USA web traffic > California web traffic > Los Angeles web traffic. 3
GETTING STARTED With any good analytics framework, there are some key things you can do to begin making meaningful changes to your websites based on data. To get started, there are five things every web team should do: Identify Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and Micro Conversions (MCs) Utilize Events in order to track KPIs and MCs Make Campaign Tracking part of their outbound marketing process Utilize Data Segmentation Generate reports in which action is recommended based on the data and set goals IDENTIFYING KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS AND MICRO CONVERSIONS ON B2B WEBSITES The most important elements of your analytics framework are: Key Performance Indicators and Micro Conversions. These are the elements that you determine based on your business and website goals. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are specific metrics that help determine how your website is performing toward your organization s business objectives. They can be anything that your business deems valuable to the bottom line, from sales and site traffic, to newsletter subscriptions or contact form submissions. Google evangelist Avinash Kaushik, hits at the heart of what good web analysts strive for: Finding the specific pieces of information, buried in a sea of data, which indicate whether your website is performing well or dying a slow death. These metrics aren t always easy to find because they require that you know what you re looking for ahead of time. Why do we have a website, and what do we expect it to do? The answer to this question is ultimately what determines the KPIs in your analytics tool. Once you have a concrete answer, you can devote the majority of your attention to evaluating these numbers each month. Answers like We have a website to showcase our branding, or Our website serves as a tool for prospective customers are common. While they both seem vague and unmeasurable, they re enough to get you started. If you can get something more specific, like We need the website to be a lead generation tool, then you really have a head start. For most B2B firms the validation response is very common. For example, a prospective customer may meet an employee at an event before heading to your website for some further information, and then decide if they want to reach out to discuss an opportunity. 4
In order to identify the correct KPIs, you need to review what actions on the website correlate with prospects contacting you. So, when leadership said the purpose of the site was validation of the sales cycle, that ultimately means the purpose is lead generation. Many people would like to take it even further and track whether their website actually closes business, but realistically, a website can only do so much to facilitate that. Ultimately, the final sale will rely on your employees connecting with customers in order to discuss the product/service provided and answer any questions. Because of this, the data within a web analytics tool can help identify KPIs, but the standard out of the box information generally isn t what you need. In order to be useful, analytics programs have to be customized to your particular needs. For example: if you can see that people who click on a vcard are more likely to schedule a meeting, then vcard clicks is a KPI. To track the KPI, you need to be able to track clicks to vcards (this is called Event Tracking, which we ll cover in detail soon) and then also see the identities of the people who clicked. Once you can see all the relevant organizations who have clicked on vcards within a given time period, you can determine how many of those the firm has been able to do business with in the same time period. That gives you the correlation you are looking for. If you want to test whether this is a good KPI, then do the same exercise with other interactions on your website (clicks to pdfs, clicks to email employees, clicks to videos, etc.) and determine which interaction correlates with the most sales. This is an example of tying an action taken on your website back to an actual business objective. At the very least, it gives you some information you can take to the leadership in order to help you collaborate with them to determine what other metrics could be KPIs. Once these are established it goes a long way to you being able to recommend what initiatives to undertake in order to increase your website conversions (visitors who act on your KPIs). In order to keep your reporting manageable, keep the number of KPIs low. I would suggest a maximum of 4 KPIs. In order to help you trim your list down, Google s Avinash Kaushik states that the traits of a good KPI are as follows: 1. It s simple 2. It s relevant 3. It s timely 4. It s instantly useful If a metric is missing even one of these criteria it s not a good KPI it s a Micro Conversion. 5
It would be great if all your visitors took action on one of your KPIs, but that s just not the way the real world works. In fact, according to a study done by Marketing Sherpa in 2012, only an average of 10% of visitors on a professional services website will convert. So what are the other 90% of your visitors doing?? Source: 2012 MarketingSherpa Website Optimization Benchmark Survey Methodology: Fielded April 2012, N=167 This is why you also need to identify Micro Conversions (MCs) on your site, actions that are valuable but not valuable enough to be KPIs. If you went through the exercise mentioned above to identify your KPIs, then there should be some metrics that didn t make the cut. These will be your MCs going forward, and knowing these numbers will help you recommend what changes to make in your digital processes to help move people through the sales funnel and either take action on a KPI or convert offline (schedule a meeting). Key Performance Indicators and Micro Conversions are moving targets, as there will be different initiatives throughout the year geared towards developing additional business. When those come up, you should evaluate your KPIs and MCs to ensure that they re still viable. Analyzing your website is not something you do just once it s an ongoing process. One way to monitor the effectiveness of your KPIs and MCs is through Event Tracking. 6
How to track Key Performance Indicators and Micro Conversions with Events Website technology has evolved so fast that tracking meaningful interactions can be difficult: White paper downloads, form submissions, and even watching informational videos can all be seen as KPIs and/or MCs, but are often impossible to track with the out of the box functionality of most web analytics tools. If you want to track these critical data points, you need to customize your tracking code a seemingly daunting task. Let s take a look at how to track those interactions within a web analytics tool with Event Tracking. If the thought of tracking the success of KPIs and MCs sounds overwhelming, rest assured, all hope is not lost. In many cases all you need is to begin tracking Events. From a strictly technical standpoint, Events are ways which visitors interact with your website without going to another HTML page on your website. For example, watching a video or clicking a link to another website are both instances of events: someone clicked something, and something happened that didn t involve loading a new page. Setting up all of your KPIs as Events can be incredibly useful when it s time to report your analytical findings to leadership. Many people are unaware that this functionality is present in any analytics tool worth using. Siteimprove Analytics, Google Analytics, WebTrends, etc. all have the ability to track Events. Therefore, when evaluating tools for your organization it s important to find out how Events are set up so you can effectively measure the success of your KPIs and MCs. It s important to understand that free analytics tools and paid analytics tools both cost money, just in different ways. If you are willing and able to pay with your time to learn the free tools, then by all means, you should use the free tools. Just know that any data collected by these free tools is technically the property of the tool, not your organization. For example, Google Analytics reserves the right to mine your analytics data and sell it without your consent. It s in the Terms of Service that everybody agrees to, but nobody ever reads. If you are unwilling or unable to pay with your time to learn the free tools, or if you want to keep your information private, then you should purchase a tool. There will always be a certain amount of work involved in effectively analyzing a website, but paid tools will offer ongoing training and support. Once you ve decided what kind of tool is right for you, it s time to get Event tracking set up! In most cases Events require a Category, Action, and Label so you can easily distinguish between 7
different Events. It s up to you (or you and your analytics provider) to determine the appropriate naming conventions for your Events. This is critical, as it will affect how you are able to use the data in your analysis. WHAT S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CATEGORIES, ACTIONS, AND LABELS? Category The first part in naming an Event is placing it in a category. Video can be a category that encompasses all video on a website. Links can be a category for your Events that happen to be links. Audio can work for podcasts, etc. It s best not to get too creative with your categories and just stick with common sense. The only reason to get creative is if you need to distinguish some sub-categories in order to better analyze your information. For example, if you re trying to track Events for different groups of customers. The Category > Action > Label hierarchy will make it easy to analyze specific KPIs and MCs without having to sift through a mountain of data. Once you have settled on the naming conventions for all your Events, you just need to follow the appropriate steps within your Analytics tool of choice to track them. If you re a Siteimprove Analytics customer, that step is to contact our Customer Success team, who will guide you through the entire process. Otherwise, consult your tool s support options and hope that it s light reading. You will then begin collecting the glorious information on how often people are taking action on your KPIs and MCs. Finally, progress! It s also just the second step in our journey, and there s so much more value ahead. Now let s take a look at the value of making Campaign Tracking a part of your outbound marketing efforts. Action Actions are very self-explanatory. This is the action that a user takes on an Event. For a video it could be play, for a link it could be click, for a document it could be download. Again, no need to get creative. Label The Label element is often the name of the Event being interacted with. The title of an individual document or the name of a video will work. This is another area that does not require much depth, just common sense. You simply need to be able to recognize individual Events within your categories and the Label is the way to do so. 8
Make Campaign Tracking Part of Your Website Measuring Process Understanding Your Website Traffic Once you ve started collecting data on your desired outcomes for the website (KPIs and MCs) you are still missing an important piece of the puzzle: a complete picture of your Acquisition Strategy, or in layman s terms, how people are getting to your website. Most web analytics tools provide a very basic overview of how people are coming to your website, which probably looks something like this: The three standard metrics included out of the box are usually Direct Traffic, Referral Traffic from external websites, and traffic from Search Engines. Understanding them is important, but they make up only half of what you ll need in order to fully measure the success of your website and other digital efforts. The missing sources are Email Marketing, Social Media, and Offline Marketing (e.g. a print ad directing people to your website). Once you add data from these sources to the standard three, you will have a complete picture of how people are getting to your site - and more importantly, you ll have the ability to determine which channels are delivering towards your desired outcomes! Use Campaign Tracking Parameters So, how do you get data from the three missing sources into your web analytics tool? By adding extra text to your links when sharing them online. This text doesn t do anything differently when people view the page, but it appears in your analytics tool and can be used to match shared links with campaigns. This extra text is called campaign tracking parameters. 9
While you may not have heard of campaign tracking parameters before, you ve probably seen them. Parameters appear in a URL after a question mark (?) and are separated by an ampersand (&). [Fun fact: you can add a question mark to a URL and then write anything you want; as long as there are no spaces it will work normally. Go ahead and try it!] Let s take a look at what a URL with campaign tracking parameters looks like in the real world. How many parameters do you see in this URL, and what are they? http://siteimprove.com/?utm_source=siteimproveus&utm_medium=websitelink&utm_ campaign=mailsignatur There are three parameters in this URL: 1. utm_source 2. utm_medium 3. utm_campaign Here s the same URL again, with the parameters bolded: http://siteimprove.com/?utm_source=siteimproveus&utm_medium=websitelink&utm_ campaign=mailsignatur What makes these parameters valuable to your analytics efforts is how they are recognized in your analytics program. By default Siteimprove Analytics identifies five parameters as Campaign; utm_campaign, utm_medium, utm_source, utm_content and utm_term. So as a Siteimprove customer you can use them without having to do any setup. 10
Combining Traffic Sources with KPIs and MCs Let s talk about how you can use your Traffic Sources information combined with your KPI and MC data for really powerful analysis: When analyzing your data, you may find that visitors are more or less likely to do certain things depending on which traffic source they came from. For instance, let s say you want people to signup for your newsletter, and the form appears on several different pages. This form is a KPI for your organization because people who subscribe to this particular newsletter are more likely to contact you for a quote, request a demo, set up a meeting, etc. One of your goals over the next quarter is to increase subscriptions to the newsletter by 10% over the previous quarter. Your plan to do so is by promoting the newsletter in the following ways: 1. Adding a link to the subscribe page in your staffs email signatures 2. Sending an email campaign with the subscribe page as the call-to-action 3. Promoting the newsletter via LinkedIn and Twitter 4. Featuring the newsletter more prominently on your homepage For the first three promotion methods above, you ll want to use Campaign Tracking. (Assuming you ve already identified your KPIs and are tracking them via Event Tracking, as outlined in our first two chapters of this ebook). In order to get value out of campaign tracking, you need to: 1. Understand how many newsletter subscribers were added in the past quarter 2. Identify and gain approval on the naming conventions you will use for the signature link, email campaign link and social media links 3. Educate anyone who will be sending out a link to the Subscribe page on how to add Campaign Tracking Parameters to that link 4. Check in routinely to ensure that the process is being followed Evaluate Your Performance The end of the quarter is when the real fun begins. Then you can review whether or not you hit your goal of increasing subscriptions by 10%. In this example, let s say that you did achieve that goal. This is ultimately the number that leadership will want to see, but you can t stop there. As a web analyst, it s your job to provide additional understanding as to why you were able to do so. Part of that analysis will be reviewing which promotional method drove the most subscribers. This is the part where you ll be happy you went through the work of making Campaign Tracking part of your process. You ll be able look back at the past three months and have definitive evidence as to which method was the most successful, and which may have been a waste of time. In addition to making you look like a genius in front of your boss, this knowledge can be used to help determine future investments (time, people, and money). In order to truly provide value from your analytics data, there are still a few steps before you re done. You still need to add context to your data and report that information forward in a way that leadership can easily understand. 11
Adding context To Your Web Analytics with Segmentation Now that you have a better understanding of KPIs, MCs, Events, and Campaigns, it s time to dive into two key tactics for analyzing your collected data that will aid you in providing meaningful recommendations on how to improve the website going forward. Those tactics are segmentation and adding context. Segmentation is the practice of breaking your data down into common buckets, for example all people that arrived at your website via Facebook or all people that visited at least 3 pages. Using segmentation allows you to target specific groups more effectively, and better allocate your marketing resources. Think about how difficult it is to look at all of the information gathered about your website at once and do anything useful with it. Pretty impossible, right? Now think about how much easier the task of deriving useful insights becomes when you can break the data down into manageable chunks that are relevant to a particular question you are trying to answer. Better? Good. There are some good rules to follow when applying segments to your data that can help you maximize your efforts. The first rule has to do with ensuring that you utilize at least one segment from each of these three categories; Acquisition, Behavior and Outcomes (Credit again to Avinash Kaushik for these categories). Let s define these categories and take a closer look at each. Acquisition Acquisition refers to all of the strategies you have used to attract people to your website. This includes things like SEO, email marketing, social media, etc. It s a difficult task to determine which of these channels, and even options within these channels (which social network is right for us?!), deserves the limited resources you have in your organization. In order to fully understand and be able to apply acquisition segments, you need to make Campaign Tracking part of your digital measurement process. Behavior Behavior refers to all of the interactions that people can have while on your website, as well as the behavioral characteristics of visitors like time on site or pages per visit. This segment category is critical to understanding which particular behaviors lead people to ultimately take actions that benefits your organization. In order to fully understand and apply behavioral segments, you need to ensure you have Events set up if necessary. 12
Outcomes Outcomes refer to actions taken by visitors on your website that benefit your business. Once those items are identified you can look at the segment of people who have completed those tasks and see if they were acquired differently or behaved differently than others. In order to fully understand and apply outcome segments, again, you need to ensure you have Events set up if necessary. The combination of these three segments will change how you look at your data. No longer will you simply be looking at piles of information with no idea why it s relevant. Instead, you will come out armed with the information and questions that can help turn this mess of data into something useful. Say the purpose of your website is to generate leads through a contact form and you d like to determine the most cost effective way for generating leads going forward. You ve decided to test three different acquisition strategies over the course of the next month, which are: an email campaign, an Adwords campaign, and a Twitter campaign. At the end of the month you ll need to apply those three Acquisition segments to your data along with the Outcomes segment of leads generated. By understanding which strategy generated the most leads, you can make better decisions on how to delegate your resources across the channels going forward. At the same time you re also interested if there are particular behaviors on your website that lead to people filling out your form. By having the Outcomes segment activated, you can look for behavior trends like pages visited before completing the form, did people watch your most recent video before converting and other behavioral interactions like this to improve your chances for conversions going forward. 13
To set up these segments in the Siteimprove tool you ll need to use the Filters area. Here, you have several options on how you want to view your information. If you were interested in how people on your website behaved, and how many converted, that came from our email campaigns you would create the following filter: You ll now be able to look at all the information about people who arrived at the Siteimprove website by email: 14
So, you could check your Outcomes (signing up for a demo or subscribing to a newsletter) or you could look at other Behaviors (popular pages or white paper downloads). By reviewing this information, you can now understand what people who arrive at siteimprove.com by email are likely to do and then decide how to improve upon that based on your goals. You can see just how important it is to identify what to track on your website and ensure that you have the appropriate implementation in place if you want to get value from your data, but you can t stop there. You also need to add Context to your data. Context is that extra bit of information that helps the data make sense. It helps to further answer the question of why? when you are staring at a report. The hard part about context is that often times you won t find it in your web analytics tool, you ll find it when thinking about your organization as a whole. In the above screen capture, you can see the ramp up of visits to siteimprove.com via email. In looking at that picture, one of the first questions should be, why so little traffic in April compared to May? The answer won t be found in your analytics tool. You ll have to go talk with the Marketing Department to find out about your emailing habits. There, you might find out that email marketing didn t begin until late March, or that you did not have Campaign Tracking appropriately set up. You may even find out that you changed the content in the emails that were being sent which led to an uptick in traffic. All of this context would be incredibly helpful if you were trying to analyze the effectiveness of your email campaigns in terms of our website. This is by no means easy work. It requires you to know what problem you re trying to solve or question you re trying to answer. Applying the appropriate segments to your data and understanding your organization well enough to find the appropriate context that will truly help the data make sense. Once you ve gone through this process for all the questions that people are asking you about your website, you ll be ready to put together a report that is much more than just basic data. It will be a report that adds value and contains your recommendations for action! 15
GET a free DEMO go.siteimprove.com/demo Who is Siteimprove? Siteimprove is the only web governance software that helps you better manage and maintain your website through quality assurance, accessibility, web analytics, SEO, and response all in one tool. siteimprove.com ebus0914_analytics