Web Performance Measurement and Improvement
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 the whole trend is moving and changing is breathtaking. Yet, as a business owner, I know that one can’t ignore this. It certainly is not going away, so you have to get on the train or be left at the station wondering what happened…….
See the entire blog at http://ow.ly/2nFRN
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.
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
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.
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:
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.
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.
At the end of this process you will have:
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
We all know how important the user experience is on your website, since the purpose of a website is to engage your visitor and to interact with them. This may sound simplistic, but is very difficult to do it well. All you have to do is do a search on “Internet Marketing” and there are over 41 million potential results on Google – which tells you that there is perhaps a need for this kind of service. The difficulty for many website owners is where to go to get the best advice.
The web experience is still a one on one non real time interaction. That is, the website needs to anticipate what the user needs are and deliver that “real time” when the user lands on the website. This of course is the crux of the matter, how do you design for the user experience and how do you know that it is optimized?
This blog addresses the many different components of developing your web strategy:
For all of these entries there is a common theme of user focus and planning as critical success factors. Currently I am pulling all of this together into a book which should be available in the new year.
Enough of the pitch!
Measuring the user experience (usability, web metrics) as well as optimizing your web exposure ( social networking , Search Engine Optimization) are all predicated on the fact that your website has been properly planned and designed for your target users and will enhance their user experience. If the website is not focused or accurately represents the organizations goals and expectations from the website, then no matter how much effort is put into marketing, the website will not reach its potential.
The answer is that you have to design your website for the user experience that you want. This design is really the strategic plan, not the look and feel or information architecture at this stage. Starting with the look and feel will only be frustrating and creates confusion that ends up wasting time and spinning your wheels. To be successful requires serious strategic planning, project management and a web design plan before any coding takes place.
So what is required to design for the user experience?
One cannot just toss all of this over the fence to your web designers ( see Your website has expired – be prepared to meet your developer) if you do the chances are your website will be disappointing and costly if you need to rework the site. Planning the right way will ultimately pay back significant financial rewards from a cost and time savings.
Good web designers, either internal or external to your organization, excel in bringing your web presence to life, that is what they do and give them a free reign to build the best website, but they can only do this if they have an intimate understanding of your business or organization and the perspective of the owners. This can happen only if you spend time and effort developing the web strategy, involve the web design team in the discovery process and be prepared to manage the project (How to Manage a Website Redesign Project) from start to finish.
To summarize, the user experience will be positive on your website only if you plan and design the website to optimize that user experience. The results will follow and if you have an effective measurement process in place, you can then improve on that experience. The bottom line is that you have to develop your web strategy and design your website in anticipation of the users needs thus providing the desired user experience. Follow through with usability testing and user feedback to optimize this experience.
Peter de Gosztonyi is a web strategy developer and information architect for Zanka Consulting He has developed user experience web strategies for both small and large organizations.
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Zanka Consulting is an Ottawa, based firm specializing in web measurement and analytics.