VijayWeb.com

For the last 10 years, the business owners and marketers were quite busy in moving or starting a web channel for their existing off-line businesses. And, even the new business models have come up on web. It was the case that they were paying a huge amount of effort in building web applications with innovative features to reach their prospects and clients in real-time and in fast. It is also true that a majority of web masters invested huge amount of $’s and building really some interesting web experiences but very few web masters are focusing on optimizing or even working on maximizing the return on web investment.

Though there is increasingly more marketers are turning to the web metrics data which has opened a new era in online industry, as the above graph from Google Trends depicts that there are more people started looking at Web Analytics very seriously after Google has rolled-out a FREE Web Analytics Tool to industry.

We have made significant shifts from working with the server administrator for getting the log files to working with the their-party vendors like Omniture (ASP Model) who provide real-time web analytics data.

We have moved from Log File Analyzers to sophisticated analytics systems which operate on page-tagging (cookie-based) technology.

We have moved from counting Hits for the site to behavioral pattern recognition for better optimizing the website investments.

We have moved from standalone KPIs to Integrated Web Analytics.

And, the best part is - Real-time Behavioral Targeting using web analytics data.

Today, I was talking with someone who is a webmaster managing various kinds of web sites. He has one specific question for me which I thought I should talk about it in my blog post.

“How do I Measure the success of a web page?”

I was a bit paused when I hear this question. And, that’s really an excellent question that should be looked into.

Well, when doing SEO I always see, though there are many common characteristics among the web pages, they always have a unique personality like individuals. Because of many uncontrollable parameters, a web page has unique personality which is what a web page with the same kind of content and links can be treated differently in search engines, even by the users sporadically. Perhaps, I will speak more on Web Page Personality in my future posts, now I really want to deal the question I was asked on “Measuring the success of a web page”. Please note, I am not talking about success of a web site but success of an individual web page.

Let’s take a real case as an example, have you ever advertised on Google, Yahoo or any other publisher’s sites or you might be getting some traffic to your website thru whatever source. Do they enter your website thru one of the web pages from your site which we call as entry page or gateway page. When the web site visitors land on one of your campaign landing pages or website gateway pages what would you expect them to do?

1. Buy a Product - Do you agree with people buy products/services as soon as they land on your website?

2. Fill-in a Questionnaire/lead generation form - Do you agree, people drop their email addresses and other personal info. as soon as they land on your website landing page.

3. Explore the website - Do you agree, visitors land on your campaign landing page and enjoy the user experience of your website or is it that you expect them to do?

Pls. ask the above 3-questions to yourself, the answers slightly vary based on what you are trying to achieve with your online campaigns or your website.

But, as soon as visitors land on a landing page or a website gateway page - within the first second they try to ensure themselves they landed on the right page. And, try to smell the scent that was lured them to come to this web page i.e. find the relevant text, links or images that help them to ensure themselves. If they can’t find the relevancy to their need of visiting your landing page…the best they will do is “Abandon Your Website Landing Page” and move their journey back to search engines.

So, the success of Campaign Landing Pages and Other Website Entry Pages is purely depended on how many people clicked on and get-into the next page of your website. These pages are typically I call as “Directional Pages”

A majority of the landing pages and gateway pages are “Directional Pages”. The primary duty of these directional pages is to direct visitors to the right section or source of information on your website. These pages include Home Pages, Site Maps, Product Listing Pages etc., The goal of all these pages is not to “Sell the products or services” but direct visitors to the right section where they find information or even buy something. Hence, the success of the Directional Pages is measured by no. of people getting into the websites. I use a metric called “Committed Visits” which is Total Visits to the page subtracted by exits at the page.

That is all about measuring success for Directional Web Pages. Now I will talk about another kind of web pages - Descriptors.

Descriptors receive visitors from Directional Pages. The goal of the descriptors is to talk to the visitor on your products, services or support in terms of giving an overview about your product, talking about the product features, provide the pricing, how your product works, how is it different from your best competition etc., Each descriptive page has one call to action (infact, several in many cases). On product overview page, you may call the visitor to read about benefits of the product, on the benefits page - you may call the visitor to learn about how is it different from your competition and testimonials. You would need to find out on which point you would need to call the visitor to make the ultimate action i.e. “Click Here to Buy Widgets Online!”

The success of these Descriptors is measured on No. of times the website visitors have taken the action on “Defined Call to Action”. For example - No. of times viewed the product flash demo, no. of times people clicked on Benefits link in Product Overview page. You can mix and match while defining these call to action even combine a few of them for each descriptive web page.

Lead Generators/Converters are the web pages whose responsibility is to convert the prospect into the defined goal. These are the  web pages that generally upsell your products or services, these are the web pages that pitches about the benefits of your product, offers, testimonials etc,

The success of these web pages is measured by associating the visits to these pages to the no. of goals achieved. For example, out of 100 orders that you made today check how many of them visited these converter pages prior to their purchase at your website.

I was recalling myself when I was learning computers, the teacher was telling computers is all about taking Input from the users and Processes (CPU) to give a defined Output. Similarly, we do have a list of pages that come into this category “Processors” (let me know if I could coin a better word

Processors are the web pages whose sole responsibility is to receive the information as Inputs and process it and give the defined output to the users. These are the pages typically we have in any website like login forms, registration forms, shopping carts, payment forms etc.,

The success of these processors is measured by no. of people started the process and completed the process successfully. The best example is web site shopping cart funnel. The success of shopping cart funnel is measured by looking at the people started adding products to cart, to checkout to payment information to our best friend thank you page or order confirmation page.

Similarly, we can measure the success for a registration form, login form etc.,

Have you ever wondered how much marketing $ are going to drain?

Have you ever thought if there is a way to pay publishers on Cost-per-Action in place of regular Cost-per-Click?

Whatever would be your online campaign goals, have you ever considered in reducing the click volume based on the results for?

JupiterResearch says “The U.S. Online Advertising will continue to grow to $18.9  billion in 2010, Cost-per-Click advertising being the largest contributor which includes paid search marketing, the average CPC will also have steady growth. What does that mean to marketers is an increased Online Marketing Budgets with higher competition for your bidding campaigns.

It calls for an action to optimize your campaigns from many perspectives.  For any campaign optimization the better start point is to look at the bounce rate.   Bounce rate is the ratio between no. of visits to the landing page and immediate exits from the landing page.  The bounce rate is also called single page access or landing page abandonment rate.

For example, you have $10k budget for this month’s campaign which you want to invest in Google, Yahoo, MSN and few more local search engines and publishers. Assume you are paying at an average of 50 cents per click for each of these publishers which typically convert to 20k visitors to your web site.

Now , the deal is how many of these 20k visitors buy your company product or do action that you would want them to, which is a visitor conversion on your website.  The conversion can happen on the lading page or on subsequent pages, if your campaign goals are sales related, it typically happens in the subsequent pages and if it is lead generation or branding related goals it can also happen in the landing page itself.  There is certainty that your landing page will receive 20k visitors from the publishers you paid for, but there is no guarantee that all these 20k or at least a majority of them convert at your website.  Any efficient campaign marketer is not only look at higher ROI but also an optimum ROI. 

You are paying $10k in the above example to drive 20k visitors to your website landing page, if visitors are just exiting as soon as they land the web page without making the action you want them to perform, all your campaign $ are just going to drain.  You can look at below why visitors abandon the landing page before u talk about how to convert them.

Reasons for Landing Page Abandonment:
 1. Content Irrelevancy
 2. Design Issues
 3. Untargeted Traffic
 4. Improper Call to Action
 5. Incorrect Content Positioning
 6. Repelling Offers and Incentives
 7. Trust and Information Security Issues

Fix the above issues to retain the visitors on your landing page after they arrive and always make it obvious on the landing page for your website visitors to make an action that you would them want to.

And, also keep monitor the Bounce Rate along with the Conversion Rate to optimize the publishers list and keywords.

In the above example, we can optimize the landing page for reducing the bounce rate for the keywords “cheap widgets” and “widgets online” and “discounted widgets”. For the keywords widgets and $10 widgets can likely to be removed from the campaign so that these $ can be reinvested in the keyword that performing.

In the above example, we can optimize the landing page for reducing the bounce rate for the google, yahoo, epinions.com campaigns and allocate more funds to widgets newsletter.

There are ways to check where your website ranks compared to your competition or in a panel of websites thru alexa or compete.com… But, do you know if there is a way to check what’s your website reach over total internet traffic.

Right, there is a simple way to calculate website reach on our own. For this purpose, we would use two kinds of data. The first one is your website yearly unique visitors count which you can get it from your log file or analytics system you are using and the second data, we would need is the Internet Usage trends which you can get it form http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

All we do is, relate the Yearly Unique Visitors to the Global Internet Usage to get the global reach of your website. We can also do this simple calculation for knowing region wise reach or even at the country level. For that, we may need to do a little research locally to find out the Internet Audience count in the country you are targetting.

Just to illustrate better, if widgets.com is targeted for NA and we could get the overall NA internet audience count from the above site, which is 232,655,287 for the current year and imagine your website gets about 2.5 million unique visitors in the same year. That tells us the reach of widgets.com in North America is 1.07% We could show the same graphically as below:

1.06% People out of 232 million internet users from NA Region visited widgets.com

What is Clickstream Analytics? 

Clickstream Analytics  deals with understanding the behaviour of web site visitors.  More formal definition of Clickstream Analytics..is a process of collecting, reporting, analysing the visitor behavior on the web for the purpose of optimzing the web user experience and online marketing initiatives for maximizing the ROI.  Clickstream Analytics is also referred to as Web Analytics. Check http://www.webanalyticsassociation.org/ 

 FREE Clickstream Analytics Tool from MicroSoft - Gatineau

Finally Microsoft is getting ready to combat Goolge on Analytics. It is readying the first limited beta of its forthcoming Web analytics tool for release, it hopes, later this summer.

Interesting thing is, this tool will allow users to segment Web traffic by both age and gender, Microsoft will get the demographic data from users’ Live ID profiles. “I would stress that we get this information anonymously, and there is no use of personally identifiable information, such as name or e-mail address in the product,” as Thomas who works for Microsoft and incharge of the project, wrote on his blog.

Gatineau project is based on technology Microsoft acquired from DeepMetrix Corp. in 2006. The target audience for the project is similar to the target audience for Google Analytics though it’s emphatically not our intention simply to replicate the functionality within that product. Microsoft is aiming to release Gatineau this year.

Screenshots that are surfacing on the internet on Gatineau Clickstream Analytics Tool:

Check this page for getting a login for this free click stream analysis tool - Microsoft Project Gatineau Web Analytics Beta Invite Request

You may be wondering what happens if the web pages are dead. The excitement is on for Web 2.0 user experiences. Web 2.0 experiences are not limited to blogs, wikis, gadgets and other user generated content sites but also the regular portals and other shopping sites, and we are seeing a tremendous growth in marketers turning to web2.0 interactions.

Now, the greater deal for the marketers is to measure the web2.0 interactions. As most of these web 2.0 user experiences don’t necessarily load a new web page in the browser. Or the interaction, it used to happen before by going to a new page, now it can happen without leaving the current page you are on.

The current way of doing cookie-based page tracking may not be adequate to measure the complete activity on the web site. For example, if one can complete the entire shopping experience without leaving the store home page, there is no scope for measuring page level activities. We will only end up having one page view in this case. And, since many other metrics like stickiness, abandonment’s, entries, etc., are calculated out of “Page Views” metric, they all can not be calculated for the web 2.0 web sites. Here, the metric “Page Views” makes no use.

Page Views may be replaced with the new metric “Interactions”

With the web2.0 experiences, the metric page views sooner or later will vanish from the industry and I guess, the new metric “Interactions” will takes it place.

Webmasters and marketers are forced to measure the each interaction on the web page. In the same store example above, if we can tag each element on the store home page, we will be able to measure the complete activity like no. of interactions, average time spent on each element of the page, abandonment rate per element so on and so forth. We can convert all our regular metrics to web2.0 metrics which were previously calculated out of Page Views.

What’s the deal on “Engagement Metrics”?

Engagement metrics are typically mean “comments”,”subscriptions”,”wiki-updates”,”uploads”,”no. of times an image or video is shared” etc.,

These metrics have been in use for quite a number of years.
For example, if we go to any vbulletin forum, we can find no. of posts, no. of replies, no. of registered users reported on the forum site. And, another similar example is Yahoo Groups.

Engagement metrics are getting higher importance these days because the metric “Page View” and related metrics are disappearing in the web2.0 world.

The right metric for Web2.0 would be to measure “Interactions” in place of “Page Views”. Eventually, all other regular metrics can be calculated out of this new metric.

I was reading a recent blog spot on Offshoring Web Analytics to India

The biggest diffrence between GWO multivariable testing and the commercial MVT solutons like Offermatica, Optimost, SiteSpect is the use of Taguchi Method/Fractional factorial methods.

Taguchi methods are statistical methods developed by Genichi Taguchi to improve the quality of manufactured goods and, more recently, to biotechnology, marketing  and advertising. Learn More about Genichi Taguchi at Wikipedia

In multivariate testing….if there are 30000 combinations to be tested, using taguchi method, we can select only 10 combinations to test and predict for the rest of them And finally predict which perform the best out of all 30k.

This method has been in use in non-it industires. What people are saying on web is taguchi is an accurate method for selecting the samples, the 10 they select using this method are logically represent all 30k combinations so it is like testing all 30k but not sampling.

All we need now is to find a tool or tip to that can predict which 10 combinations need to be tested….watch this space

SEO = Relevancy + Usability + Accessibility + Popularity

RED ALERT: Don’t Optimize Your Web Site for Search Engines , But Optimize For Your Users ——Read On….

Ask These Questions Yourself:

1. Do You Know What Your Users Are Looking For?

2. Do You Know What Keyword Phrases They Are
Using To Find What They Want?

3. Are You Providing What They Want?

Answers to these three questions are the key foundation for Your Website Success !!!

That’s what I call it as “RELEVANCY”

The Next Important Step in SEO:
After you have the content ready that users are looking for,?the big challenge is providing this content to the user in a usable manner.
That’s where the Information Architecture plays a key role.

Let’s say you have developed the website with all relevant content that users are looking. When user visits your website, you have less than 1 second to tell the user that the content is there on your website what they need. How do you do that?

Place relevant titles at relevant places. Make the content look like what it is meant. And, there are many more..that’s all the job of an Information Architect.

What makes the content & website Usable:

1. Appropriate Titles
2. Indent and Bulleting
3. Font Size and Color
4. Page Breaks
5. Right Links at the right places,
6. Descriptive Link Text
7. Navigation and Site Architecture
8. Size of images and alt text
9. Design of your website and much much more….( Google says there are hundreds of factors…read here: http://www.google.com/webmasters/4.html?). Who knows all of them?

The more accessible it is to search engines, the more accurately they can predict what the site’s about.? The samething is true with users too.

To read more on USABILITY & ACCESSIBILITY, check the below link:
http://www-306.ibm.com/able/guidelines/web/accessweb.html

Hey, the last and important step in SEO is making your web site popular on Web. Don’t participate in link campaigns or submit to 1000’s of search engines and directories. Do it in an honest way…by passing on thru your friends, press releases, by providing free reports and do everything that makes people talk about your site on web.

Read more on what Google is talking about on SEO’s.
http://www.google.com/webmasters/seo.html