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Web Performance Measurement and Improvement

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7 Steps for developing a Persona for a Website Redesign

by Peter de Gosztonyi

As part of the Govcamp exercise that I participated in on June 1 2010, one of the sessions the question of using persona’s came up. See the discussion.  Although it can be a complex undertaking, in many instances a quick development process can be very useful as an enabler in understanding a user of an application. This process is specifically used for a website redesign but can be adapted for any use.

Step 1.    Review Desired Business Objectives

  • Describe the Vision and Mission of your website.
  • Describe the objective or purpose of your website.
  • What are the Business objectives of your website Measures
  • What do you want users to do on your website?

Step 2.    Identify and  prioritize Website Target Users and Stakeholders

Definitions:
Stakeholder is anyone who has a vested interest in the success of the website. Includes employees, management, etc
Target users are your current customers or people you want to do business with.

  • Who are you doing business with?
  • Who is vital to the success of your organization?
  • Why are these stakeholders vital to the success of your organization?
  • Which stakeholders are your target market
  • For your Organization?
  • For your web channel

Step 3.    Research target users using either quantitative or qualitative methodologies. Which type of research methodology is best for you  to complete your understanding of the target user groups:

  • Qualitative
  • Quantitative

Definitions:
Market Research
Is either quantitative, qualitative, or a combination of both. Qualitative and quantitative market research methods each provide different insights into customer behaviour. Normally, research results are more useful when the two methods are combined.

Qualitative research
Is a research method that measures information based on opinions and values as opposed to statistical data. It investigates the why and how of decision making and is typically performed through face to face or other interactive sessions and is not structured in approach, use of small-scale samples or small numbers of observations.

Quantitative research
Is a research method based on collecting statistical data through questionnaires or surveys or similar methods to help researchers determine the public opinion. It measures the what, where and when and typically has little direct interaction with users, use of large samples; results subjected to statistical analysis

Step 4.     Segmentation

Segmentation is the process of dividing a market into distinct subsets (segments) that behave in the same way or have similar needs:

  • Look at data gathered for each target user group
  • Look for trends or natural groupings
  • Group brainstorming session
  • For each grouping identify
    • Goals
    • Behaviors
    • Attitudes
  • Regroup based on findings ( between 3 to 6 groups)
  • Establish segment based on the above groupings
  • Rank Segments
    • Primary, secondary,  unimportant
  • Test Segmentation
    • Does this meet your business objectives?
    • Match expectations?

Step 5.    Develop Scenarios based on each Persona

  • Set the scene
  • Establish the goal or conflict
  • Overcome crises along the way
  • Achieve resolution
  • Reach a solution or conclusion

Step 6.    List Actionable Insights and develop an implementation plan and assign a prime for each action

Step 7.    Do it again

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Building the Foundation for a successful Social Media Marketing Initiative

by Peter de Gosztonyi

I don’t know about you, but this entire social media wave has at times completely overwhelmed me, the pace at which this whole trend is moving and changing is breathtaking. Yet as a business owner I know that one can’t ignore this and it certainly is not going away, so you have to get on the train or you will be left at the station wondering what happened.

Being a very logical and process oriented individual (OK I admit I am an engineer) , I approached this whole social media thing in a logical, one step at a time, process. What I quickly learned that this is not a linear process, in fact at first glance, anarchy and chaos seemed to be a fitting description of the way things happen.

Of course the most frustrating part is the “all you have to do is …..” recommendations, Even the first step everyone seems to recommend of setting up a “listening post” for your organization or  a Google alert for your key words is not trivial for the first timer. Unless your key words are so unique that they rarely show up, you can expect having thousands of alerts to go through on a daily basis, similarly if you are following lots of tweets and news feeds (RSS) the volume can become unmanageable. Finding and setting up a common feed can also be confusing, so a good social media adviser is a huge time saver. If you are under 30, you’re probably wondering what all the fuss is about, however those of the boomer era are techno immigrants – we didn’t grow up with this stuff so it is sometimes harder to comprehend why one would do certain things. I digress.

After a lot of web cruising and blog reading plus reading books by the thought leaders of our time (Trust Agents by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith is one of my favourites) an underlying theme actually did start to emerge – quite a relief to a logical mind.  This may not be an epiphany to most people but it put everything into context for me.

Essentially your website is the focal point of your marketing efforts; consider it as the hub and social media as well as your traditional marketing as channels bringing interested people to your website. These channels include search engines, links from other sites and thousands of mentions of your organization in the mediasphere.

Of course managing these channels is a challenge and it requires discipline and time management to ensure that your day is not totally caught up in just monitoring the social media channels to the detriment of your business.

What this does mean is that the time has passed when all you needed to do was to put 90% of your efforts towards making your website work well, now you should spend 75% (leaving 25% to your website) of your marketing efforts on building communities of interest, and awareness of your organization in these different spaces that will bring interested visitors to your website. In order to retain their interest and keep them coming back you need to also build a dynamic content rich, collaborative web space.

At the moment, the common belief is that you also need a blog to build relevant content as well as a website which provides the means to convert visitors to customers. This is the foundation that needs to be in place before you really get your social media activities going.

How then do you know if your current website is capable of meeting your social media needs? Perform an audit – have a close look at your organizational objectives and tie them into what you expect your website to deliver to meet these objectives. Then you should analyze your visitor behaviour by looking at your web traffic statistics – assuming that you are not already managing your website through critical business metrics. This establishes your benchmark for comparing the impact of your social media efforts.  There are also a number of other tools such as which websites are linking to yours (backlines), traffic ranking and so on which add competitive information to your arsenal.

What is interesting is that you really don’t have to toss out the old and completely redesign your website, after all a successful organization has built a lot of assets into their websites and customers recognize that value, so it is important to determine what those assets are ( e.g. content) and dispose of those that don’t bring value to your customers or you. That is why a good comprehensive audit is necessary at the onset.

The other key element is to establish effective business measures. These are based on the web statistics ( visits, duration, pages viewed etc) and other inputs ( calls, inquiries, orders, etc)but only the relevant ones are identified as key performance indicators ( KPI’s). These of course need to be linked to your overall organizational objectives. You don’t need many but you need to make sure that they are sensitive enough and relevant to identify trends and patterns so that further investigation can be taken to understand why certain trends are happening so you can take action ( the most important criteria for a metric – will it result in an action that improves your ROI).

Even if you already manage your website this way (congratulations! you would be surprised how many organizations large and small don’t) and knowing that your website will deliver once the word gets out is critical in making your marketing efforts worthwhile. That is why an audit and strategy review is an essential first step – even if you are well on your way with your social media plan, it is a smart move to ensure your website foundation can support your objectives.

 If you have built a solid foundation in your website, then you can turn your efforts in bringing the right traffic to your site and keeping your visitors coming back and building that ever so important relationship.

Peter de Gosztonyi is a long time quality practitioner and web strategist. He spent many years in a customer focused environment which translates well into today’s customer driven websites. His analytic background combined with the customer comes first philosophy yields some interesting insights on what drives visitor behaviour on websites. He is currently a senior associate with Web-Insight.

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Part 4 Conducting a Website Performance Audit

Now is the time to introduce the performance analysis element to the process. An audit can be a scary concept especially when one considers the association with taxes. Fear not this is not even remotely the same, it is really a complete review of what you have and what you are doing with it so that you can use this information and components to improve. If you are interested in having Zanka Consulting do it check us out.

Initially we started out having the website as an online business card or brochure website, simple a place on the web where people can go to find out more about us. For a long time that was about it and we felt that was all we needed, until we looked at our success rate. Our performance measures were very simple

Time period

Nov to Dec 2009

Metric

Total

Conversion rate

$ value

Number of unique visitors

413

100%

Number going to our “contact us” page (page visits)

29

7%

$150k

Number of Calls/emails from web page

1

0.2%

$5K

Number of sales

0

0%

$0

Some assumptions: $ value per customer is $5,000. This amount is only used as an example

Date was taken from Google analytics

Our conversion rate of visitors to leads to calls were basically 0 that is, it was an abject failure as a separate sales channel. This fortunately was not our only sales channel and as we tracked visitors, we were able to see an increase in visits when we made contact with potential clients, of which many did convert to sales. That was then and this is now – SEO, inbound marketing, social networking, iPhones (which I love) have all matured and evolved to appoint where if you have a business your success will depend on how well you use your online channel. So what to do.

The methodology is to first perform a review of the current assets of the website. Identify what is working and what is not, what content to keep, identify back links, page url’s that draw visitors, what the weblog files are telling you, and what performance metrics are being used today. Additional information can be gathered about the website such as user’s perception, usability, consistency in message, and so on.

Start with your Website Assets

Most organizations are in their third or fourth generation websites and they have built up assets on their websites Assets include:

· Content

o How many pages do you have?

o How many will be removed?

o Will pages move to a new URL?

o How many new pages will you create?

o What is your most popular content?

o What is your most powerful content?

· inbound links

o How many inbound links are there to my entire site?

o What inside or landing web pages have links?

o Where do my links come from?

o Which ones are the most powerful links?

· keyword rankings

o What are my keywords rank for today?

o What are my competitor’s keywords rank?

o What keywords should I want to rank for?

o How has my keyword rank changed over time?

· conversion tool

o What page or link generates most of my leads?

§ landing pages

§ shopping carts

§ “Free” white papers or other items of value to target customers

o What are my best conversion methods?

o How can I increase these conversions?

It is important to determine what assets you have and keep them, what doesn’t seem to be working or have much interest, then remove them ( but don’t throw them away, they may be useful just not the way you were using them in the past).

Measuring Website Assets

If you are using Google Analytics, you will need to look at a bunch of options, the first step is to set your date to cover the past 6 months if you have a lot of traffic or 12 months for smaller sites.

Use the content option to see which pages have the most visits and analyze these to see why would some one go there, usually the home page or “/” gets the majority of the visits but not always. On one site that I manage the job posting page usually exceeds the home page in traffic.

Check also referrals to see where traffic originates and also who sends it to you. Have a look at Google’s webmaster tools to see who is linking to your website and how many of those actually refer traffic. What this tells you is that you should keep the URL intact and analyze the page content for key words and how it reflects your website objectives.

You can also  see the path that users take to get to this page.

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Part 3 Establishing your Website Objectives

If you don’t have a clear website objective statement, or is not well documented.  Then one can use the same approach used for the organization objectives in the previous post ; however this is a lot easier when an organizational vision exists. Again a brainstorming type session is the best approach where the organization’s executive ( usually the one responsible for the website) and the web development team work out a stated objective and identify the key performance objectives that the website needs to achieve that will meet the overall organizational objectives. For example the purpose of a bookstore website is to sell books on line. For a volunteer or nonprofit organization it is to recruit members and donations.

Zanka Consulting provides a structured facilitator led website objective discovery session that has proven very successful in getting to the key elements. We have also used this successfully in a remote environment where participants were in another location and conferencing facilities were used ( e.g. Skype). In small organizations this method is used in a one to one session and is very successful.

In some cases, like Web-Insight, it was not as obvious what our primary objective was, so a lot of thinking and discussion needed to be done to clarify the purpose of our website. Then this needed translation into how the internet can be used as a key communications vehicle.

First of all it is important to establish the type of business you are in and the potential. Here are a few check points that may help. When answering ask yourself what I do now and what can I do using the Internet.

· Do I sell products or services

o Can my products be shipped anywhere

o Can my services be provided from a distance

· Do I need to have physically contact with my customers

o Installation/ repair

o Direct service – cleaning etc

· Am I selling a commodity (low price, high competition)

· Do I have a captive market

o Am I reaching all of the potential customers

· Do I sell locally only

o Is this my preference

· Is it a long sales cycle ( usually to large organizations)

o Could I automate some or all of the process

· Can it be self serve by the customer ( replaces call centre or direct personal involvement)

o Would my customers prefer to have “self-serve” options

The result for Web-Insight was that as a consulting company we serviced only local clients such as government departments, associations and medium to small businesses. Typically we would meet several times throughout a contract and much of that could have been avoided, but since it was in close proximity meeting was not a real issue. The most important element was the first meeting and the last presentation meeting where the relationship was established and the results presented.

Other than the first and last meetings our customers preferred to let us do what we were contracted for and required status updates. Of which few actually required face to face meetings. In many instances time was limited and meetings brief, so conference calls and shared workspaces became the norm. Although using the webinar format for presentations can have its risks we found that customers once on board were more conscious of time and cost savings that the traditional face to face and used video and phone conferencing. Well documented status reports and deliverables including presentations are a defacto requirement.

The outcome of this analysis was that we could use online communication media to conduct both the initial meeting ( we use Skype for the visual aspect – it is good to at least see with whom you are dealing with) and the final results meeting via phone or video conference. The deliverables usually were in the form of a detailed report which were posted, with supporting documentation on a wiki.

Therefore our website objective should be to promote customers from outside of our local region and provide these services using the many communications tools available on the Internet.

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Performanc Analytics – Part 2 where to start your website optimization

The obvious place to start is how to attract visitors. First of all one must need to know how successful the existing website is and what works and what doesn’t since a lot of effort has gone into the past website design so there must be something that is worth keeping.

Benchmark

Benchmarking is to identify what you will be comparing your website to so that you can measure the improvement as well as identify what is working well and where you need to adjust your website to get the results you want. In effect you place a stake in the ground and use this as your starting point.

What to benchmark?

· Your website performance against objectives

  • What are your website objectives
  • How do you know if and when you have reached them
  • What to do to improve the performance
  • What impact did those improvements make – did they work

· Performance analytics of your existing website

  • What metrics/information do I need
  • Where do you get the information
  • Where do you start

§ a common recurring question at this stage it will depend on a lot of factors based on what you have done with your website and your organization so far.

It all begins with what are you trying to do with your website.

So start at the very beginning with the purpose of your website, ask yourself what are you trying to achieve with your website, what is the desired outcome. If that is difficult or not as crystal clear as it should be then one needs to go even further back to know what your organization’s vision and mission is. Actually that is where you should really start.

Organization  Objectives

If your organization has a clear purpose and direction then it is easy to determine what the website should be doing to help you accomplish your organizational goals. If not then this is the place to start. Although there is a lot about the precise meaning of a vision/mission/value statements and many organizations spend huge amounts of time developing these statements, but all you really need to do is clearly state what your organizations objectives are. If you stick to these then it becomes clear what you need to do for your website.

How do you know if you have a good vision/mission? Here are some examples:

eBay: “eBay’s mission is to provide a global trading platform where practically anyone can trade practically anything.”

Coca-Cola: see http://www.thecoca-colacompany.com/ourcompany/mission_vision_values.html

Web-Insight: our objective is to provide measurable performance analysis and insights to organizations that will enable them to significantly improve their website performance, enhance the visitors experience and improve their bottom line.

If you don’t have a vision statement or think you need to refresh your existing vision/mission/values statement consider the approach that Web-Insight deployed – a facilitated brainstorming workshop approach where a cross representative of an organization’s employees meet to review the vision and mission of the organization and to clarify or update the existing vision. The outcome is a concise statement that will be the guiding principle for the organization and consequently the website.

This can be simple or take a long time to work out and is fundamental to the success of any business. If you are at this stage of defining or clarifying your vision, either focus on this internally by taking everyone (for a small organization) or the key people to sort this out. The best place to find out more about this process is to visit Quality based Organizations such as American Society for Quality (ASQ), Malcolm Baldridge (US) or National Quality Institute (Canada) to develop this. Lots of other resources abound.

The bottom line have a clear statement of purpose that is measurable.

Next step your website objectives.