Given how popular these media sites currently are, and how I continue to work very closely with media related websites, I thought I would write a brief guide on how to kick start your media website analytics. And by media website, I mean a website whose primary purpose is to offer content to visitors (articles, videos etc), and is usually supported by advertising, or premium (paid) content. Examples of media websites are CNET and MarketingSherpa.com.

Ready? Lets get your website kickstarted…

1: Develop KPIs for your Media Site and Trend Them
First things first, look beyond pageviews and unique visitors, and create some more meaningful key performance indicators. Afterall, because of ajax and flash built websites with dynamic content (that don’t require to reload pages as much), pageviews are no longer a good barometer for success. Here are some valuable metrics that you should pay attention to, and monitor trends for over time.

- Average Time Spent. This is important to monitor because the longer the amount of time a visitor spends on your site, not only the more engaged they are, but they are likely to consume more pageviews, and therefore more ad impressions (watch for pages with un-naturally high average time spent though, this could be an indicator of a problem with the page).

- Repeat Visits. The better your media site content, the more likely your visitors will return. You could be spending considerable amounts of money attracting site visitors, and this could look great in terms of your pageviews going up, but if your return visitors aren’t also increasing, this is a sure sign that you site is not offering very good content.

- Amount of video starts per unique. If your website offers videos, the more videos watched per visitor the better, particularly if different ads are being rotated while the visitor is watching. And if you can get this information, try and track auto plays versus user initiated video plays. This will reveal the most popular videos on your site that you aren’t necessarily promoting heavily by starting automatically for the user (on the home page for example).

- Percent Video Completion Rate. A good indicator of the quality of your website videos (if you offer them), is percent completion rate. In particular, look for videos with high completion rates, note the types of content in them, and do more like these. In the same respect, videos with low completion rates are signs of poor video content, and these should be improved or not promoted as much.

- Ad Impressions Per Visit. If you can get this ad impression data from another system, you can get this great metric! All you need to do is find your average pageviews per visit, and multiply that by the number of adverts shown on average on each page.  For example, if a visitor on average consumes 4 page views per visit, and each page has on average 2 ads on it, that totals 8 ads ’seen’ in theory. Therefore, thats an average of 8 ad impressions per visit. Obviously you want to monitor this to get this as high as possible (without putting too many ads per page of course and risk annoying your visitors). And if you are really clever, you might be able to get the average revenue per ad shown, which would then give you an average revenue per visit. Using that metric could certainly be a great way to impressive your boss!

- Average amount of comments per article. If the articles on your media website allow comments (and believe me, they should because they are great drivers of repeat traffic!) this is an important one to monitor. This one isn’t always easily found in web analytics tools, but its fairly easy to calculate and monitor yourself by looking at your blog posts and monitoring the number of posts for each, and working out an average. The higher this average is, the better your articles are likely to be.

2: Survey The Visitors to your Media Website
Next: There are two extremely important things that you HAVE to know about your website visitors if you are going to improve your media website, that regular web reporting won’t reveal. The first thing you need to know are the primary reasons visitors are coming to your media website for (news, advice or tips etc). And you will be surprised, many reasons are not often they ones you would expect. Secondly, you need to know whether they are successful at the reasons why they came to your website. Because, if they are not successful, you are more likely to have lost a potential repeat visit - which is much cheaper than spending money on attracing new ones!

And what is the best way to find this valuable information? Simple. Start using a cheap, simple survey tool like 4Q (which is actually free!) or Survey Monkey. Its best to use multiple choice answers, so you can analyze and group the answers better, with one or two open ended questions to gain more detailed insights from your visitors. Another good question (in addtion to the two above) is to ask is whether your visitors would recommend your site to friends - this offers a great way of rating your site. No more guessing what your visitors really want (or listening to your overpowering HiPPo, who is often wrong), and guessing whether your website visitors really are happy or not!

And you really need at least 300 responses to make this survey data worthwhile and statistically relevant, and its best to leave the site survey on your website the whole time, so you can continue to gather data, and see how your responses change over time.

So, once you have developed your KPIs and surveyed your visitors, you need to create benchmark reports with all these metrics and survey results. The reason you need to do this is that you can see how your website currently fairs. Not only is it important to monitor these initially, but its very important to use these to see how the initial benchmark evolves after making site improvents and optimizations (more on this in an upcoming blog post!).

So there you have it, some tips to help you get started with gaining some great web analytics insight for your media website. And I would sure love to know what Avinash thinks of this guide!

Like this post? Digg it/Stumble it/Email it

Alex Cohen is an interactive marketing generalist at Commerce360 (and blogs for them).  He does a bit of everything: web analytics, multivariate testing, paid search, SEO, and account management.  He also has his own optimization blog, Digital Alex. Anyway, on with the interview…

Q: Great to interview you Alex! Can you tell us a little about you and what made you get into the web analytics field?

Alex: I got into the field by accident.  I was working at a direct marketing agency on pharmaceutical clients and I was recruited by Refinery (now G2 Philly) to do web analytics for pharma websites.  I knew nothing about interactive marketing or web analytics.  It was months before I even found one of Eric’s books.

Q: What is your web analytics tool of choice, and why?

Alex: Well, you have to pick the question you want to answer before you pick the tool, right?  For paid search, I recommend ClickEquations (watch them for news and thoughts on PPC).

I’m often limited to using what my clients have available.  That often means Omniture or Google Analytics, which are just fine depending on your needs.  Personally, I don’t much care for WebTrends, but I haven’t had a chance to customize it myself.

Alex: Action.  Measurement without action means nothing.  Multivariate testing has started to bridge the gap between data and action.  The best tools will help you filter out the signal from the noise. 

We’re also facing a lot of data quality issues.  Web analytics tools are rife with bad math and, as we mature, that’s going to have to change.

And we all know mobile is going to be huge.  It’s the area for pioneers right now.

Q: What do you think of the ludicrous things that have recently happened between Yahoo, Microsoft and Google?

Alex: Microsoft has bungled search at every opportunity possible.  I think this is terrible news for the search industry.  We really need a diversity of search engine/advertising providers to keep the competitive pressures on.  Google isn’t as forthright with their data as they ought to be (take search queries for example) and we could all start paying more.

Alex: Hmm… I’m kind of obsessed with form abandonment.  I love conversion rate optimization.  Small changes can have profound effects on your bottom line.  There is always room for improvement.

Alex: It helps.  Twitter is a way for me to help people and network with them.  I link out to many of the articles that I find most useful.  All of the executives at my company read my tweets and I actually get more opportunities because I understand social media better! Follow me on there! 

Alex: Avinash Kaushik (famous web analytics author/blogger) told me to!  I’m not kidding.  Avinash is on the board of directors at Commerce360.  He visited the office and said “You should all be blogging and have an ecommerce business.”  I did the first one and I’m working on the second.  I also saw how Li at www.SearchMarketingGurus.com advanced herself with her blog.  Plus, she invited me to write there (Thanks Li!) And there are tons of great bloggers out there.  I couldn’t pick one.  Avinash is a good example.  Eric always has very authoritative posts.  June and I have a dorky blog friendship

Alex: Delegating!  I have 8 clients and there’s no way I can possibly do everything.  The good news is that I work with some smart people, like Matt. 

Teaching is also important.  Lu (our CEO) and my coworkers make fun of me all the time for being hyper-analytical and asking tons of questions.  I try to teach people how I dissect things and my expectations about analysis so we can find a good middle ground.

Well thanks Alex for some great insight, and some good blog links! I look forward to reading more of your blog posts and twitts! And if anyone has any questions for him, he can be contacted at alex@alexlcohen.com.

Like this post? Digg it/Stumble it/Email it

Look and Feel - 8/10
The good: As soon as you visit dominos.com, you are presented with modern-looking stylish website, one that matches Domino’s regular branding. And a big picture of a tasty Dominos pizza, even though it doesn’t actually tell you what the pizza is. Some nice button rollovers too.  

The bad: There is surprisingly little usage of flash and no videos on dominos.com, which was a little surprising, given their trendy image. A nice flash intro area on the homepage would have been nice for example.

Intuitiveness and Usability - 7/10
The good: Its a fairly simple site to use, with simple, logical navigation items, like ‘order’, ‘menu’, ‘locations’ and ‘tracker’, so it gets bonus points there, as its essential for users to be able to easily find ‘where’ to order their pizza on this website, and to find the menu.

The bad: I wasn’t too impressed with the ‘menu’ page though and how it worked though. Its not obvious where the list of actual pizzas are. It just shows you the pizza bases, and when you click on one it starts the order process, which was unexpected - I wasn’t ready to order yet! To actually find the pizza menu, you have to click on ‘feasts’, which appears in the sub navigation at the top, (next to ‘pizzas’ which would have been the more obvious choice). Not only was this not very prominent, but how was I supposed to know what ‘feasts’ meant? Sounds more like a page that would list combo deals to me, not the actual specialty pizzas. Also, the website doesn’t really explain what the ‘you got 30 minutes’ promotion is about. Does it mean you get your pizza in 30 minutes? Or they make your pizza in 30 minutes? An explanation would have been nice.

Sticky/ Web 2.0 Content - 7.5/10
The good: One of things that I was most impressed with at dominos.com was their great pizza tracker. This appears once you have completed your order, and gives you an auto-updated real time status of what is happending with your pizza, like ‘Joe just put your pizza in the oven at 7.32pm’. This really made you feel part of the online pizza ordering process, and gets you excited when it hits the final stage of ‘pizza on route to be delivered’. This was much better than the other online pizza ordering systems like papajohns, where you just get a email estimate of delivery. Boring.

The bad: An online community at dominos.com for pizza lovers seems to be strangely lacking. You get an account when you login, so why not build on that, and have a profile? And why not be able to meet other pizza lovers online, rate and review pizzas, and share pizza creations? Seems like a prime candidate to build in some web 2.0 and online community features.  In terms of the great pizza tracker page, it seems like it would have been a great place to put a ‘recommend a friend’ link, especially how likely I would have been at that point to recommend them (I was very impressed!).

Overall Rating - 7.5/10
As an online pizza ordering experience, I would have given this higher (like a 9), particularly for the pizza tracker idea, but the rest of the website could be improved and bettered further still. And as I mentioned, surely dominos.com should try and build an online pizza-lovers community into dominos.com… if they don’t, I think its just a matter of time before Pizza Hut or Papa Johns does.  Overall though, thumbs up Dominos, you have a much better website than your pizza rivals, particularly papajohns.com!

Analytics/Testing Ideas (non-geeks can avoid this section!)
Surprise surprise, upon looking at the source code, I see dominos.com are using Google Analytics as their analytics tool. This seems a little strange, given how highly trafficked dominos.com is, surely they would gain more insight using a more advanced tool like Site Catalyst. In terms of things to test, I would definitely make changes to their ‘menu’ page, and test making it easier to find the actual different specialty pizzas they have, and use another name to clarify what ‘feasts’ are. This would surely decrease the abandoment rate from the ordering process (that it puts you in without you expecting). In terms of their ordering process, I would test adding a ’steps’ status bar, so you know exactly how many steps it is going to order, and how you are progressing. This is a very common online shopping experience, and helps set expectations, and should increase help increase conversion rates (i.e. more pizzas sold!).

>>>> Well thats my review of Dominos website. Hopefully you liked it! Feel free to make your own comments about the Dominos website too, or improvements and ideas for what websites you would like to see me review in the future. Thanks!

Like this post? Digg it/Stumble it/Email it

1: ‘Big Picture’ Thinkers
A sign of a great web analyst is someone that can look beyond the reporting. Web analytics does not live in a silo - it blends very closely with many aspects of online business, particularly online marketing and the creation of sites. A great web analyst will also understand ROI and how online marketing and web analytics work hand in hand to improve this. Go ahead, get to know the folks in these departments. Its easier to get them to listen to you and your insight and recommendations if you understand the basics of online marketing like SEO and how sites are built too. That way you don’t go making unrealistic and unreasonable requests either!

2: Customer Centric (Not Reporting or Developer Centric)
Just remember. Without website visitors, then there would be no need for web analysts, and you would be out of a job. And a sign of a good web analyst is someone that is always concerned with the needs and expectations of their website visitors. Its easy to get lost in page views and average time spent without remembering who causes these metrics to appear. So whenever a good web analyst creates insight and recommendations, they think in terms of what would be best for the website user - a great web analyst will also understand website usability issues and how they relate to making great analytics insights, and ultimately a wonderful customer centric website. 

3: Excel Super Users
You can have the all the data and insight in the world, but if you can’t convey this in an understandable, easy-for-your-boss-to-act-upon-way, then its like trying to sneeze with yours eyes open (try it - its impossible). A sign of a great web analyst is someone who knows all the tricks and bells and whistles in excel, like pivot tables, advanced graphing abilities (see my recent post about creating great excel charts), and use these to influence their boss and colleagues to the full extent. For example, have you tried building interactive features like drop down menus into your graphs and spreadhseets that let users change the information presented to them? Try it. It works wonders.

4: Innovative, Curious Thinkers
The world of web analytics is constantly improving and changing. Those web analysts who keep their eyes fully peeled on the web analytics world (web analytics news and blogs), are more likely to try out new theories, develop new KPIs to track, and test and adopt advanced analytical tools, like Google Website Optimizer or ClickTale. Their innovative and curious mind for new tools and ways of thinking therefore give them a greater chance of being successful than most web analysts who simply stick to basic reporting. If you haven’t already done so, sign up for some blog updates for some of the best web analytics blogs out there (see my post on this). Also having a curious proactive mind rather than a reactive mind really helps - don’t just wait for your boss to request a standard report. Go ahead, think of a new way of doing things, or do some analysis on a problematic area of the site you have noticed. Believe me, your analysis will be appreciated.

5: Great, Diplomatic Communicators
There is no room for mice in the world of web analytics. Sure you can be a geek and a nerd, but a successful web analyst will have a great communication style, particularly when it comes to diplomacy. The insights that you present can often have the potential to make tremendous impact to the business. If you can’t communicate these ideas in a persuasive and passionate form, and you don’t know how to carefully explain your recommendations without treading on other departments or managers toes, then you are destined for mediocrity as a web analyst. Often HiPPOs (highest paid person’s opinion) will shoot your ideas down - and its important you learn how to be diplomatic and work with them. I recently wrote a blog post explaining how to influence HiPPOs too. 

6: Actionable Insight Driven
Its so easy to just crank out reports that your boss or other departments want to see, that you have no real say in or don’t care about. Unfortunately, data squirrels like this (as Avinash Kaushik so eloquently calls them) who actually enjoy just doing this, will never be a successful web analyst. Instead of just building reports with hundreds of metrics, use fewer KPIs but actually offer insight into why these trends are occurring - and then make actionable recommendations based on these insights. A great web analyst also looks beyond the clickstream quantitative data, and understands the need to analyze and develop insights from qualitative data which can be derived from surveys and testing.

7: Amazing Sense of Humour
Okay, just joking around here a bit - this one isn’t essential to a web analyst, but I find it definitely helps change the atmosphere in your department to a more lighter one. There are far too many serious people at work (which are needed on occasion though), who take their jobs far too seriously. So why not inject some humor into others day to make their days more enjoyable?

So there you have it. Some habits to try and live by to become a succesful web analyst. But i’m also curious to know what other good web analysts think their habits are? Go ahead and comment below and let us all know

Like this post? Digg it/Stumble it/Email it

Great Web Analysts who are on Twitter

Eric Peterson
http://twitter.com/erictpeterson

Marshall Sponder
http://twitter.com/webmetricsguru

June Dershewitz
http://twitter.com/jdersh

Jim Sterne
http://twitter.com/jimsterne

Manoj Jasra
http://twitter.com/waworld

Dennis Mortensen 
http://twitter.com/dennismortensen

Linda Bustos (Get Elastic)
http://twitter.com/roxyyo

Bryan Eisenberg
http://twitter.com/TheGrok

Rich Page (shameless plug)
http://twitter.com/richpage

Chris Grant
http://twitter.com/cgrantski

Digital Alex
http://twitter.com/digitalalex

Bobby Hewitt
http://twitter.com/Bobbyhewitt

Chad Parizman
http://twitter.com/Whodini

Luc Arnold
http://twitter.com/purewebanalytic

DWP Shields
http://twitter.com/dwpshields

By the way… Avinash - why arent you using Twitter yet?

Great Internet Marketing Who Are on Twitter

Rand Fishkin (SEO Moz)
http://twitter.com/randfish

Andy Beal (Marketing Pilgrim)
http://twitter.com/andybeal 

Seth Godin
http://twitter.com/SethGodin

Search Engine Roundtable
http://twitter.com/seroundtable

Mike Buonomo
http://twitter.com/SearchBuzz

Search Marketing Gurus
http://twitter.com/smgurus

Fumi Mastubara
http://twitter.com/newmediazoo

Copy Blogger
http://twitter.com/copyblogger

Eric Friedman
https://twitter.com/EricFriedman

Danny Sullivan
http://twitter.com/dannysullivan

Duct Tape Marketing
https://twitter.com/ducttape

Barry Welford
https://twitter.com/BWelford

Search Engine Guide
http://twitter.com/SEGuide

Craig Ritchie
https://twitter.com/craigritchie

Doug Hudiburg
https://twitter.com/dhudiburg 

Gator Herb (Marketing Sherpa)
https://twitter.com/gatorherb

The Product Guy
https://twitter.com/theproductguy 

Search Marketing Gurus
http://twitter.com/storyspinner

DJ Francis
http://twitter.com/DJFrancis

Newspaper Girl
http://twitter.com/NewspaperGrl

Just go ahead, create a profile on Twitter (if you haven’t already done so), and click ‘follow’ on any of the people in this list. And feel free to ask them questions - including me! Its pretty addictive when you start twittering…

Like this post? Digg it/Stumble it/Email it

So without further ado, heres the pick of my favorite web marketing/analytics blogs and the combined RSS feed for it…

1. Occams Razor by Avinah Kaushik
   Being a web analyst, I would have to say this is the blog that I couldn’t survive with. And its not bogged down with news - its a great way to learn more about hot web analytics topics. It also covers a lot of the material that is mentioned in his great web analytics book.
2. SEOmoz Blog
   This is one of my favorite blogs, all about SEO best practices. Its great because it doesn’t simply just report on every SEO related news item that other SEO blogs like SearchEngineLand. It has some very interesting original content (plus some great free SEO tools on their site).
3. Web Analytics World
   This blog by Manoj Jasra, is perfect for keeping up with the latest news and events in the big wide world of web analytics.
4. Future’s Now
   This is a blog dedicated to website optimization (different to SEO). Its by the Eisenberg brothers, and its full of tips and advice regarding improving conversion rates and making websites more usable.
5. Web Metrics Guru
   A good web analytics blog written by Marshall Sponder, full of news, reviews and videos. Definitely worth a read.
6. Web Analysis & Behavioural Targeting
   A great blog from Anil Batra, all about behavioural targeting for websites and website optimization. A higher level of web analytics…
7. Seth Godins Blog
   This guy is a marketing genius. While not everything relates to the web, he talks about some very important fundamentals of marketing and how they are changing.
8. Get Elastic
   This is a great blog for anyone who is interested in ecommerce analysis. Offers some great advice and insights for improving ecommerce websites.
9. Visual Revenue: Web Analytics & Online Marketing
   The owner of IndexTools, Dennis Mortenson, also has a fantastic blog all about web analytics and online marketing.
10. ReadWriteWeb
    Even though they dont particularly focus on online marketing or web analytics, this blog is great for providing the bigger ‘internet’ picture, and what is going on out there.  Better than TechCruch and Mashable in my opinion, and has more original blogging articles. Not just news.

An honorable mention goes to Marketing Sherpa’s blog, but for some reason they don’t offer an RSS feed of it (anyone listening over there?). Its pact full of internet marketing case studies and best practices.

Anyway. To sign up for the feed containing all these feeds above (plus my blog feed), simply click on the link below and add the feed to your feedreader of choice… enjoy!
http://www.feedblendr.com/blends/27839

Oh, and feel free to comment on your own favorite web marketing and web analytics blogs! I would love to know what you all think.

Like this post? Digg it/Stumble it/Email it

Q: You are obviously very passionate about web analytics - how and why did you decide to get into this field?

Linda: I’ve only actually worked hands on with free tools - Google Analytics of course, also Feedburner, Facebook Insights, Wordpress’ default stats and some of the old school free hit counters.  It was a big deal when Google Analytics was released. I was doing contract work for a PPC management firm at that time and was one of the first to get access to GA because it was rolled out in phases.  It was a very fun tool to play around with because it just did so much more than logfiles!  You could actually track goal conversion and ROI.  It was also essential for me as an aspiring web marketing professional to understand how to use analytics effectively.

Q: What do you think is the best ecommerce site and what makes them the best?

Linda: That’s a tough question, I don’t have a clear favorite.  In terms of usability, design and innovation I like bits and pieces from various sites like Shoebuy’s Return-O-Meter, Rampage’s use of AJAX rollovers to show product detail and Like.com’s visual search.  The perfect ecommerce site, in my opinion, would definitely include the following:

- Horizontal AJAX flyout menu that stays open after you click it (like American Eagle), this lets you scan information more efficiently.

- Filtered category navigation.

- Shop by color (Rich:I still can’t believe some stores don’t offer this).

- Customer reviews with option to filter by star rating, or sort by most helpful (Rich: I personally love sites that offer this).

- View all option on category pages.

- Show all available colors, sizes, price and stock availability on category pages.

- Multiple product views and color switching.

- Image enlarged with rollover, not click to see pop up.

- Save contents of shopping cart for 30 days, even when you’re not a registered account user.

- Offer pre-checkout tax and shipping estimates.

- AJAX rollover on cross sells that show item detail so you don’t have to click away each time (Rich: Great idea).

- Show recently viewed items upon second visit, with an option to hide (I have yet to see this done).

- Clearance section where you can shop by size.

Is all this too much to ask?

Q: Which web analytics mistake do you most often see that frustrates you the most?

Lina: A sloppy configuration of goals is frustrating for everyone.

Q: Segmenting bounce rate by traffic source in my opinion is one of the best, most revealing metrics - what metric do you think is most revealing and why?

Linda:  I like revenue per keyword, too.  As marketers we make our best guesses when building keyword lists and choosing what to optimize our pages for.  Or we rely on keyword popularity reports from less than reliable tools.  Revenue per keyword (I like to look at overall, paid and non-paid separately) tells you which keywords make you money and which actually waste your money - something intuition and third party tools can’t do.

Q: Tell us a little more about your company, Elastic Path, and what makes them stand out from the crowd.

Linda: Elastic Pathis an ecommerce software vendor. The ecommerce software space is quite fragmented, with your free, open source shopping cart products for people just starting out with ecommerce, to Yahoo Stores, to mid-market solutions, to household names like IBM, Microsoft and Oracle.  So in a way, we stand out because we fall somewhere in the middle of the free products and the big companies and offer a price point that is attractive to growing retailers.  We’re also a very flexible platform (think elastic!) and we’re all about innovation (we even have a VP of Innovation, Jason Billingsley).  Our service team can accommodate the unique needs of certain retailers that other platforms cannot. For example, one of our clients required a very customized ordering system not found anywhere else and we were able to make that happen, using our core product and our skilled services team.

Q: I am a huge fan of Anivash Kaushik’s analytics book. It really made me think of web analytics in a different light. What web analytics book helped your career the most?’

Linda: I’ve also read Kaushik’s book and agree with you! Other than his book and blog, I’ve relied on blogs and forums for information. I like the freshness of the web - books can get outdated quickly. You can also read comments from other readers and participate yourself with blogs and forums - can’t do that with a book.

Q: Who do you think will be the biggest player in web analytics over the next few years? Linda: Do you see Google continuing their internet domination and buying out anyone?

It’s interesting that Yahoo bought Index Tools, and we’re not quite sure what they’re going to do with it.  Google may look at other acquisitions if Index Tools proves to be a threat to its position. Omniture and other enterprise level solutions will not be affected unless Index Tools is offered for free, so we may see some interesting things happen in the next couple years.  But I think an analytics provider that can take analytics to the next level - that can answer questions “why” people leave a site or can measure eye movements and mouse movements could give any existing tool a run for its money. Video and rich media analytics will be important, too.  So will mobile analytics.

Q: Your Get Elastic blog is one of my favorite blogs, and I see you have been doing most of the posting there lately. What inspires you as a blogger and how do you find the time?

Linda: Thank you!  May 25th will make it one year that I have been with Get Elastic. I came on board to write some guest posts last spring/summer and by October I was full-timing with the EP crew.  My inspiration comes from the challenge of writing something new every day about the moving target that is internet marketing - social media, usability, consumer trends, search engine algorithm changes - it keeps you on your toes.  As ecommerce marketers, we are always trying to solve problems creatively and get that competitive edge - so you can never sit back and say “I’m done” or “I know everything about this industry and my customer.”  Reading others’ blogs is important, too. I’m also very fortunate that Elastic Path allots me as much time as I need to write the blog so we can keep posting frequency and content quality consistent, and hopefully ever improving.

So that wraps up my first in the series of my web guru interviews - some insightful answers from Linda. I paricularly liked her wish list for useful features on ecommerce sites. Good stuff. Thanks again Linda! Anyway, hope you enjoyed this and look for my next guru interview soon…

Like this post? Digg it/Stumble it/Email it

Recently, I read one whose title sparked my interest: ‘Web Design for ROI‘ by Lance Loveday and Sandra Niehaus. And why? Because one of my biggest pet peeves is visiting a website that obviously was built by web developers and marketers, who think they know best, without any idea how to optimize their website to make even greater profits. And this is what caused most of the websites like pets.com to go belly up in the late 90s dot com bust. They simply thought that building a website, and spending millions of dollars on cool advertising campaigns would be enough. Wrong! To succeed, they should have first built an optimized website which drives as much ROI as possible, and then begin spending money on a cool marketing campaign to generate traffic. Thats what this book is all about. Its packed with tips to help improve the ROI of your website - ‘turning browsers into buyers, and prospects into leads’, as the book tag line promises. Read on for my review…

 Why you should get this book: Plain and simple, it will make your website greater profits! One of the main areas this book focuses on is how to increase site conversion, thus increasing ROI. They draw some great analogies that really drive home the fact that spending more money on increasing conversion brings a much higher ROI than simply increasing advertising spend. First increase your conversion rate, and then spend money on the advertising - you get the best of both worlds then.

I also liked the way this book gets you to think of your website through the eyes of your visitor, and to come up with answers to key questions that a visitor might ask themselves (like ‘does this website look creditable and trustworthy’). Excellent way of thinking, which not just improves ROI, but improves the visitors website experience - which really should be the most important goal of any website. One surprising point they seemed to dismiss was the value of surveying - they claim to think that only negativer users will take surveys, thus skewing results. Interesting, but I don’t necessarily agree.

The section on designing website landing pages for better ROI is also very insightful, and includes many different things to ponder with relevant images, from simplification, to segmenting and personalizing for visitors needs. In particular, I liked their idea of adding a secondary ’safety valve’ call to action to a landing page, just in case a visitor doesn’t understand or want to follow your primary call to action. They also pay good attention to the importance of improving ‘category’ pages too - something that many web marketers and designers fail to realize the importance of.  The rest of the book is rounded out by offering great advice and tips for improving forms and shopping carts on your website - vital ingredients for helping improve website ROI.

Who should read this book: I find this book to be a great compliment to any web analyst or marketeers work - its really valuable to know all these best practices in the back of your mind, and provide a great backbone for testing ideas (even though they don’t really emphasize much on testing).

This book is perfect for ’web people’ to gain a new understanding of these web design ROI fundamentals, but for more advanced web analysts like myself, I found many of the ideas a little too simplistic and could have used a little more meat to them (maybe it could have been longer too). But overall, this is an excellent informative web analytics related book, and I strongly recommend you not only read this book, but make sure your boss and colleagues read it too, so they get on the same ROI-improving wavelength as you. They will be thanking you!

Like this post? Digg it/Stumble it/Email it

What do you do to try and communicate your ideas? Sit and wait for the designers to become available? Probably not. Chances are you will probably try your luck at designing yoursefl what you want the pages to look like. And for the vast majority of us, this is not going to work out too well - its simply too hard to convey ideas easily. Being lucky in the sense that I am a web analyst with some design skills, I previously used Macromedia fireworks or Visio to draw basic site elements and shapes and print them out - with average success at communicating my ideas. I can imagine its even harder for non-design minded folk!

So whats the solution? Well, luckily, there has been a recent rise in some great website wireframe tools that not only let you design simple prototypes of new pages and site sections using limited design knowledge, but actually let you easily turn them into working, interactive wireframes, with built in specifications - the perfect vehicle for conveying your latest and greatest idea for a website test!

One of the wireframe tools that I have recently been impressed the most with is Axure. They have really done an excellent job at understanding the needs of web analysts like myself. Not only do they give you some great tools to help draw the basic outlines and features of pages and sites, with standard web elements like images, tabs, buttons and forms, but you can actually annotate your ideas with pops ups and easily turn them into seperate specifications documents - making it even easier to convey your ideas details. Then once you are done, its a breeze to turn your flat wireframe design into a living breathing prototype for your boss or anyone else to click around in real time. This makes it so much easier to communicate your ideas for testing to your peers and boss!

Here is the complete features list of the Axure, so you can see just how much better they compare against using more traditional graphics or diagramming tools. And before you ask, nope, Axure didn’t pay me to plug them. I did some research into what else is out there for website wireframing and there really are very few other tools out there that compare. Tools like Oversite and Jumpchart offer a few of these features, but really don’t get the mustard in comparison.

I suggest anyone that is involved with the analytics or marketing of webpages gets themselves a copy of this software - its not just for website architects! It will make you look like a genius and will help you get your ideas tested and implemented (and hopefully a payrise or bonus from the results!)

Like this post? Digg it/Stumble it/Email it

Well, yesterday I did a search on Google for ‘omniture site search’, and a sponsored ad for Omniture appeared at the top of the search results. Now, companies who don’t deliver a seamless flow from a paid search engine click, to their sites or landing pages really bugs me - what a waste of a clicks. I see landing pages go wrong far too often. So, I thought I would see how Omniture fared. 

What did I see? Well, click on the image to the right -lets put it this way, it didnt fare to well. I got a pretty generic landing page, with a generic Site Catalyst image, with a contact form. This contains three major marketing/analytical mistakes, that could be fixed by using their own ‘Test and Target’ product.

Problem 1: They are automatically inserting whatever your search query is into the landing page text - often out of context. I typed ‘omniture site catalyst’ and it showed up in the following context: ‘Learn how Omniture SiteCatalyst, our Web Analytics solution, will help improve your Omniture Site Search and Marketing ROI, and ultimately increase your bottom line’. That sentence doesn’t make a lot of sense does it? And who says I was interested in Site Catalyst anyway? Which leads me to my next problem…

Problem 2: The landing page has very little relevance to my search term. Other than the auto-inserted search keyword mentioned in problem 1, there is no mention of their site search tool, and its benefits and features, or a picture of the tool. This immediately decreases the chances of me filling in their contact form. I know you are Omniture, and I’m sure you make a great site search product, but why not tell me about it before I complete the form?

Problem 3: Okay, so lets say I wanted to roll the dice and trust Omniture by filling in the form, hoping Omniture contact me, and demonstrate to me a good site search product. There are two further painful barriers preventing me from wanting to fill this form in - basically, the contact form does its worst to make me want to fill it in! Firstly, it is asking for way to many detailed answers from me! It had 6 fields and 7 drop down menus! Why should I take the time to enter all those details, when Omniture haven’t taken the time to even tell me anything about their Site Search product? Do they really need to immediately know things like my ‘department’ and ‘relationship to Omniture’? Surely they could get detailed info like that when they call or email me. Secondly, they use some scary language just above the form: ‘Please note: Cookies must be enabled to proceed‘. Wow. What a strange off-putting thing to say on a form. This may make potential customers think twice whether they do have cookies enabled, or simply enough, why exactly Omniture wants them to have them turned on so bad.

Sorry Omniture. But if I was a serious prospect, I would have abandoned this failed landing page. I would have just probably either gone straight to a site search competitor, or if I really was still very interested in their tool and wanted to work even more to find more info, I would have gone to their omniture.com site, and tried to find their site search product to get more information that way.

The solution: And this would have been an easy fix.  They could have used their own ‘Test and Target’ product and tested the copy on this landing page to mention their site search benefits, tested using a picture of their site search product, and tested the amount of fields on the form that resulted in the most conversions (forms completed). And test removing the weird cookies line. Call me crazy, but I would be surprised if testing those changes didn’t result in a huge increase in leads from this landing page. And lots more fellow happy Omniture customers!

Again, I don’t mean to bash Omniture, as they make great products. But everyone needs a little help now and again from friends, don’t they? Hopefully someone at Omniture is listening

Like this post? Digg it/Stumble it/Email it