Zanka Consulting

Web Performance Measurement and Improvement

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Performance Analytics – Part 1 A Website Journey to Website Optimization – Part 1 Getting Started

Starting the journey to improving website performance

Web-Insight provides consulting services to large and small organizations on how to improve and measure their website performance. We have been involved in just about all of the stages of website redesign from full web redesign frameworks, information architecture to home page benchmarking. Our clients range from the Canadian Federal Government to associations and small business. So far all of our clients have been located in Ottawa, so using our website was relegated to a simple brochure or business card site.

Times have changed and the Internet is a much more sophisticated marketing medium and essential for any business to have a presence where it matters.

This blog is an attempt to document this journey and to see what impact one can have and what can be learned. At the time of the writing of this entry, we haven’t reached the end so I don’t know the outcome. That we will learn over time.

Scenario:

  • Our website is several years old and needed a freshening up.
  • We are using Dreamweaver to update the site but it is getting very cumbersome and takes far more time to update than I have to do it
  • Other people also want to update their section but have to go through me to do it and I can’t always respond in a timely fashion
  • We need a simple yet full featured Content Management System that is cost effective and has all of the features we need.
  • Website should be optimized for SEO
  • Our business focus has changed
  • Need to focus on inbound Marketing to drive more traffic

Solution:

The web-hosting and CMS part were very easy to resolve since we already use 1&1 and have been very pleased, so when they came out with the 1&1MyBusiness offering it was just what we needed. So I configured the site (www.web-insight-ottawa.com) as the test site before I redirected our www.web-insight.ca. I immediately ran into conceptual design problems with content, layout and Search Engine Optimization as well as marketing the site through social networking.

The old site was just not doing its job so I decided to improve my website conversion rate by following a plan to design an effective website and use social networking to build traffic and customers. Our current website is www.web-insight.ca and it has been used simply as a brochure site providing some information mostly from the blog entries that I have been writing and little else.

The starting point: decision to place effort on this medium to:

  1. Attract and connect with my customers
  2. Convert these visitors to leads and then to customers
  3. Measure the success of these efforts

This certainly sounds simple enough, but the very first question is where do I start and what are the next steps.

What I am planning to do is to document my experience with building a new website that is focused on inbound marketing and geared to generate customers that are not just local.

Topics that we will cover:

  • Where to start
  • Website objectives
  • Benchmarking the performance measures
  • Audit the website assets
  • Website business measures
  • Home page and landing page layouts
  • Website content and architecture
  • Performance analytics to measure success
  • Monitoring website

I am sure as I go through this process I will digress and go off on tangents which hopefully should be interesting. At least you may partake in my rants and raves.

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Taking Control of your website – another design myth?

Web design is for professionals – how many times have you heard that? As a small business with limited budgets and lots of competition and minimal expertise with web design, can you really afford a professional web design service and are there better ways to get a professional website on line.

When you scan the Internet the incredible variety and costs are overwhelming. You can find  the $199 website – a highly competitive area in terms of pricing, but caution must prevail – you will get what you pay for. A full professional design for a simple website can cost upwards of $1,000 and more depending upon the effort required by the designer to build the right look and feel as well as a few pages of content for your basic presence. The tough part is knowing what should you spend to get what you really need.

Many people and businesses really just want a website presence or as it sometimes referred to as an online business card or yellow pages listing. For this application what you need is a professional looking easy to manage website with some core features that allow your visitors to complete some key actions that you need them to do. Such as contact you, download information, location and specific web usage information.

One of the biggest mistakes one can do is to not be prepared when you engage a web design company or even more serious is to not dedicate the time to work with the design company to determine what you want the website to do. Guaranteed method of inflating cost, dissatisfaction and delays is to expect the design company to know everything about your business.

Having been involved in numerous small business and association websites over the past 15 years, the most frustrating part was trying to get the client to articulate what they really want and when they see the design it invariably is not what they thought it would be. This iterative cycle is very time consuming and expensive.

Many of the really inexpensive solutions will not do much to help a person develop their website purpose and content. If you do need that, then extra charges could grow open ended as well as occupying your time on the website rather than focusing on your real business.

So what is the solution to building a simple professional website, under your control that doesn’t cost the world and minimizes your time involvement?

The answer is to use a Content Management System being offered by large Hosting companies. We use 1&1 hosting and have had very positive experience with their service. The tools and intuitive user interfaces have come a long way and many of the newest applications out there have very easy interfaces and updating and adding lots of advanced features is very easy.

So far I haven’t really provided any practical or useful information, but hang on – the next posting will help you decide whether you should use this approach or opt for the web designer option, or both.

However the basics of setting up a new website still remain – you need to understand what you want from your website and be willing to spend some of your valuable time to work this through either by a “self help” approach or with a savvy web designer.

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Business Process and Web Analytics – measuring your success

Web analytics has always seemed to be a source of mystery and confusion for many people. As always to the non technical person, it is a morass of meaningless numbers that seems to have no relation with the business, but have this nagging feeling that it really is important. The technical types who enjoy digging into numbers – and I am one of them – can find all sorts of fascinating information from these metrics but  can rarely link them to the business processes that they describe. The real danger is in letting the numbers person determine the web analytic parameters to measure. There has to be a balance between the business and web analytics components so that the numbers will produce viable results.

Managing a successful business means that there are key performance measures established, tracked and most importantly acted upon to improve the business. If your business has a dependency on your website to promote, sell or otherwise improve your bottom line, then linking your business measures to web analytics is critical.

No doub Google Analytics has come a long way in allowing the lay person in delivering meaningful ( or a at least pretty) set of numbers regarding your website performance. Unfortunately unless you customize your reports to meaningful measures, it is very difficult to implement actions and improvements from the generic Google report.

So what can one do? The steps are

  • Know what your objectives are for your business and  how the website will contribute to that success.
  • Identify the business processes that link to the website and your overall business success.
  • Establish business measures that link to that success, such as increased revenues, more sign ups etc
  • Establish a benchmark so that you have something to measure against
  • Then extract the numbers that will reflect the desired performance measure ( needless to say this is the hard part)
  • Start tracking, establish patterns and then
  • start innovating and changing different elements of your website, marketing strategy or usability of the website.
  • Optimize your website and business processes to meet your business objectives.

I am sure that this appears to very high level and begs the question how do I really do this, and there is no easy answer other than follow a successful process and persevere. The end results will be worth it.

Zanka Consulting has been involved in website redesign for many years and applying a well defined and tested process for web strategies including business performance measures. Our experience has shown that much of the problems that organizations have is by skimping on the front end strategy and analysis part and going directly into the  web coding and visual design.

You can avoid many problems by linking your business process to your web analytics and benefiting from your website.

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Measuring Social Networking Performance

The new direction today is Web 2.0 and Social Networking. You now need to be on Facebook, linkedin, twitter and a multitude of other networks. But how effective are they? Can a business benefit from these channels and which ones should you try?

First of all dismiss the perception that these social media tools are just for the kids, these kids will become customers, and as Obama said you have to be where your constituents are, and this is where they feel the most comfortable, the techno natives as they are sometimes referred to.

What about us techno immigrants  (those who adopted technology later  in life) to say even less about those techno luddites (all technology is evil). We have issues with privacy and sometimes don’t even see why anyone would want to use these tools or what reason. The bottom line is that if there is a valid application then the tools become an enabler.

So one needs to look at an application such as collaboration with clients and team members (wikis) or getting to where your customers are (facebook) or disseminating bits of information to a broad base quickly (the blackberry phenomenon) – critical for election campaigns, or keeping in contact with a mobile  work force.

It doesn’t take much to find the right application, as long as you have defined objectives for your organization. Look at what you are trying to do then see if there is a match to the Social Media tool kit and try out some of the tools that are available for that application. Most important at this stage is to identify why you need this tool and establish some metrics to see the impact. This can be increased visits, participation, downloads or whatever is important to you. Using Google analytics for example is a useful tool to help in this area.

If you follow a defined process such as the one’s Zanka Consulting uses, you stand a much better chance of selecting the right tool that will make a difference in your organization.



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Developing an Effective Web Strategy

Consider how important your website really is to your organization.
That small real estate on someone’s browser means instant exposure to
new or existing customers anywhere in the world!!

So what you may say:

  • I am a local business, who doesn’t need access to the world (local
    customers use the web too)
  • I tried and maintaining a website is costly and takes too much of
    my time from my primary activity. (When your business dries up it
    may be too late)
  • I am a small business and I can’t afford a dedicated design company
    (Have you seen the latest in Content Management Systems?)
  • We are a large business and our IT department/marketing department
    manages the website. (Passing the buck will bite you in the end)
  • I have managed well so far without a strategy (The news ain’t good)

If your organization does not have a strategic plan or include the
website as a critical success factor in the plan, then in these challenging
times your competitors who do, will have the edge and guess what – survival
is at stake.

How should one approach the website strategy?

First of all if your organization has an up-to-date vision or mission
statement then this is the starting point. If not or, if it is not clear
then your organization direction must be reviewed and updated. This
exercise is a senior management responsibility as well as the communication
of this vision to all of the organization. One can find many different
methods to develop or improve on the organizational vision, choose one
that fits your organizational culture and build a vision that everyone
can relate to.

Once an organizational vision/objectives are established then you can
build your website objectives to meet that of your organization.

5 step process to develop your web strategy:

  1. Set up your plan
    • Organize an internal team
    • Establish a schedule
    • Engage outside facilitators if required ( using outside facilitators
      helps focus the group and minimize internal politics)
  2. Develop a clear set of objectives and outcomes for your website
    • Build on the organizational vision mission ( see this is where
      it comes in)
    • Solicit the input from your stakeholders, get them involved
      early on in the process
  3. Collect your data – Discovery Phase
    • Perform a web audit
    • Understand how your users are using your website today
    • Obtain user feedback from direct and indirect sources
  4. Define your audience
    • Interview survey or talk to your customers to find out what
      they want
    • Develop and categorize your target users
    • Build a persona (characterize your users by developing a needs,
      wants and goals)
    • Develop scenarios that your persona would most likely do
  5. Develop your plan
    • Use the input plus the knowledge of your team/organization to
      develop a website plan
    • Validate against the website objectives you initially developed
    • Document the plan – what you can do now, what can be implemented
      later and the long term vision for the website
    • Identify critical success factors and metrics to measure the
      success
    • Outline the next steps for implementation

At the end of this process you will have:

  • Input and buy in from the key stakeholders on your website direction
  • A sound documented plan that will guide you for several years
  • A check point to see how well your website is achieving the organizational
    goals
  • A means to improve on the website
  • Guidelines for your web developer who can build the applications
    you need
  • Input from your users so that you can develop the appropriate applications
    such as dynamic database access, social media, user focused designs
    and focused content.

Should this be done internally or externally?

This very much depends on the size of the organization and whether
specific facilitation and project management skills are available. If
not available, developing these skills may not be the best use of your
resources and the learning curve may be too long. Bringing in specialists
for this one task may well be your best option, in particular someone
who has done this for other organizations.

Check to see if the consultant has a well defined process that clearly
marks out the sequence of steps. A solid web strategy can be delivered
in about 8 weeks, which will save considerable time when the actual
web design is being implemented. Although many people refer face to
face contact in this type of strategy development, with today’s collaboration
tools, much of the work can be done remotely. Most importantly check
the references and make sure that there is compatibility between the
consultants and your team, often the best work is performed in a smoothly
functioning team.

The most successful organizations pay heed to the planning process and
can act quickly to the rapid changes in the market place positioning
themselves for the future.
If you’d like to talk to someone about whether an external facilitator
makes sense for you, or how to develop a web strategy that would be
the best fit for your organization, contact Zanka Consulting

Peter de Gosztonyi