Improving a website without web analytics may sound odd coming from a data analyst, but its quite a common occurrence for me, and in fact, part of my day job as a website performance consultant.

Following John Ekman’s guest post on the two types of personas he observed in our industry (Conversionistas are from Venus and Metrics people from Mars), I started  thinking about how best to illustrate these different approaches. I consider myself a HYBRID – part conversionista and part metrics person (may be 50:50), and this case study illustrates the conversionista side of my work…

To get started, I guide my approach with two fundamental rules:

RULE #1 - All data of interest should have a theory behind it to explain its significance. If I cannot explain it, or do not feel it is a good use of my time to try and explain it, then by definition that data is of no interest. This is my metrics approach.

RULE #2 - Conversely, not all theories require empirical data to support it. That is, some logically make sense. Proving it with data is a waste of valuable time (and money). This is my conversion approach.

To be clear, web metrics still plays its part in Rule #2 – it measures the before versus the after effect of changes. However, it is not the driving force for change. I do not analyse any data before recommending/implementing the change. Instead, it is an exercise in improving a page structure and visualisation for a better user experience.

The Case Study – using Rule #2 (Conversion approach)

The site in question has a common scenario for supporting customers – visitors to it can submit their support queries via an online form. Staff manage and respond to these via their online ticketing system. The page to be optimised is the “Manage Tickets” area that staff use. This is a key starting page for them before delving deeper into their work load.

The page to be optimised – BEFORE*

Click to zoom

This Manage Tickets page looks benign enough, even pleasing to the un-initiated eye. But that masks some serious usability issues…

*This page is part of the Trellis Helpdesk system. If you use a ticketing system to support clients, I highly recommend Trellis – free PHP software whose business model is to pay only if you require support from them.

The optimised page – AFTER

Essentially, I have worked with numerous HelpDesk systems over the past 14 years – managing clients support requests and billing them for this – so it was straight forward for me to put myself in the shoes of the end-user (the support staff). This is a key part of being a conversionista – its not smoke and mirrors, *anyone* can do it. Its called experience.

In this case, to work efficiently, support operatives needed a clear, well structured ticket summary layout – one that allows them to understand the situation (their work load) at a glance. The following was the result of my changes with the explanations below:

Click to zoom

Modifications explained

1. Filter area display by default
   Originally, the staff member had to click this button to bring up the filter area – a key helper when dealing with large ticket volumes (particularly search!). This now shows all the important filter options so that staff do not feel overwhelmed by tickets.
2. Colour coded ticket status – see also 5
   The filter options are colour coded to match the status colours.
3. Added user name
   Odd this was missing in the original. This change stops support staff having to drill in and out of ticket to figure out who is who.
4. Change the submitted time format
   The original was too complicated when it came to understanding how old a ticket was. This was changed to something much more reader friendly. The original timestamp is available by viewing the actual ticket.
5. Colour coded status
   The status of a ticket shows what work is outstanding. This had to stand out for an at-a-glance comparison.
6. Better visual clues
   A common mistake many (many) web designers make, is to have all text appear uniform i.e. the same. Whether it is plain text, a hyperlink, or an important-call-to-action – it looks neater, right? WRONG! It leaves no clue as to what the reader should do i.e. “What do I click on to get more information?”. By modifying the style sheet it is now obvious what is clickable text and what is not – without having to read the entire page to figure it out. Compare that with the original.

If you are a Trellis Helpdesk user, this is all achieved by modifying one file = ad_tickets.php. Feel free to use mine. You can just upload it to replace your existing file (keep the original for backup!)

The results (metrics)

The Martian inside me of course needs to measure the impact of these changes. Putting qualitative feedback to one side, a key quantitative metric is the Time on Page. Normally website owners wish to increase this – the hypothesis being that a longer time spent on a page (or time on site) equates to greater engagement. However in this case it is the opposite – a longer time means confusion, misunderstanding, laborious calculations (“Is that ticket old?”), bordom etc.

So the object is to decrease the Time on Page i.e. a negative goal. The interpretation is, a lower value means it is easier to understand your ticket workload – the support guys/girls can look after their customers more efficiently.

And that is what we found.The time on page almost halved…!

Concluding thoughts

When approaching a website optimisation project for a client, start by considering my two rules:

1. Does the visitor data have a potential theory behind it to explain its significance?
2. Can you improve the user experience significantly by changing the design and structure of key pages?

Which one of these you prioritise depends on what “low hanging fruit” is available. Everyone wants to demonstrate quick wins, and invariably, improving the user experience (rule #2) provides the greatest opportunity – as was the case here. If you use Rule #2, ensure you measure the before and after effect with your web analytics tool.

In a future post, I will describe  a metrics approach case study…

What do you think of my rules for approaching web analytics?

(please note the Trellis modification is not a supported hack).

Related posts (automatically generated):

1. Conversionistas are from Venus and Metrics people from Mars

© Brian Clifton for Measuring Success, 2011. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: conversion, conversionista, John Ekman, personas

Collecting data is very straightforward – you simply paste a few lines of JavaScript to your pages and data will start to stream into your account. I am specifically referring to Google Analytics here, but the principal is the same for all the main web analytics vendors.

Superficially that’s all there is to it. If you just wish to view visitors and pageview counts you don’t need an analytics specialist to help you – all you require are basic webmaster skills. However, products such as Google Analytics have 100+ reports so that you can analyse much more than these – in fact, regardless of how much traffic you receive, those can be covered in a handful of reports.

So why so many reports…?

If all you require are traffic volume graphs and a site-wide conversion rate (i.e. the number of transactions divided by the number of visits), then you don’t! That’s the point. Traffic volumes and site-wide conversion rates tell you very little about the success or not of you website. They are blunt metrics, as Neil Mason recently wrote. In order to be effective in optimising the performance of your website – be it in how you acquire visitors, or what happens once they are on your site, you need to be able to answer two fundamental questions:

• What is the value of a visitor to my site?
• What is the value of a page on my site?

Being able to answer these two innocuous questions opens the door to the world of insights. That is the role of a web analysis – to provide you with insights so that you can continuously improve.

For example, the value of a visitor allows you to determine which medium/channel provides you with your most valuable visitors. Be it AdWords advertising, organic search, email marketing, social media efforts and so forth. You can then take action on that information such as increase or decrease your activity in those channels to gain more high value visitors or become more efficient in acquiring traffic.

Taking this further, you can drill down into a specific campaign, keyword or even a tweet to access its individual impact on your site’s performance.

The value of a page allows you to identify your best and worse performing pages. Your best performing pages are great targets for A/B and multivariate testing as they can give you the greatest impact. Knowing your poor performing pages allows you to fix errors, improve content or even cull the page in order for you to focus your web efforts more effectively.

Dave Chaffey posted recently on the use of “value”  in web measurement and the 3 key value measures within Google Analytics.

Why is this hard…? Because users just have the basics…

The hard part is going beyond a basic install of your web measurement tool so that you have a more complete picture of visitor activity, that crucially, includes value. This is not rocket science, but it does require product specific expertise and experience. A best practice installation of Google Analytics for example, requires a knowledge of what can be achieved “out of the box” and what requires further thought.

Non-standard Google Analytics items:

• Data Structure
  If you own more than one website domain or subdomain e.g. mysite.com, mysite.co.uk, myproducts.com, store.mysite.com etc. How best to structure the data so that reports are easy to interpret? separate profiles, separate accounts, roll-up reporting…?
• Tracking File Downloads
  e.g. PDF, XLS, MP3, DOC etc. are not tracked by default.
• Tracking Events
  In-page actions that are not a pageview. Many add-to-basket, blog comments/ratings, fill-in forms do not generate a pageview.
• Tracking Flash
  Interactions with product demos, videos etc.
• Defining Goals & Monetising these
  You need this to determine value.
• Tracking E-commerce Transactions
  Often these take place via a third party payment gateway and you will wish to track this as one continuous session.
• Page and Keyword Grouping
  Rather than look at reports on thousands of URLs or thousands of search engine keywords, you can group these along a theme e.g. all pages from section1, all brand search keywords etc.
• Labelling Visitor Types
  Differentiating visitors who are members, subscribers, customers etc. from other anonymous visitors.
• Segmenting Visitors
  Sub-sets of related data e.g. social media visits, different levels of engagement, geographic regions etc.
• Tracking Error Pages
  These are not tracked by default
• Tracking internal site-search
  Sometimes tricky if the visitor’s query term is not contained in the URL. Also tracking zero results (a very important KPI…)

In the book, I devote 26 pages to getting the basic setup right. The above, more advanced implementation considerations are covered in 96 pages – and the other 400 pages on all the other things you should be aware of if Google Analytics is your thing!

My point is, if you wish to go beyond the basics of web measurement, either get a Google Analytics Certified Partner to help you, or, if you prefer to do-it-yourself, read the book Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics. That way you can stop counting and start analysing!

No related posts.

© Brian Clifton for Measuring Success, 2010. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
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Tools and helper applications I have come across as a practitioner come in two flavours: those that help you with your administration of Google Analytics – install, setup and configuration, and those that help you use or interpret reports – visualisation aides, third-party integration, segmentation help, and so forth.

Often these two scenarios overlap, and marketers frequently find themselves using the same toolset as webmasters and web developers. This post is a compendium of useful tools I have used for GA administration. Regardless of your job role, all the tools listed here are straightforward to use.

[ This page is an edited version of Appendix B, taken from the second edition of Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics. The new book is due March 2010 ]

Tools to Audit Your GATC Deployment

The key to being able to improve your website is having good, solid, accurate data that you can rely on. A fundamental step of implementing any web analytics tool is getting the data in – there simply is no point investing in analysis if the data is flawed. After all, garbage in equals garbage out. Maintaining data integrity is key. Adding page tags, the GATC, is therefore not a one-time, “set it and forget it” process. It requires careful deployment planning and regular maintenance checks to ensure data holes do not appear.

[ For background reading, see "What is the Xth thing to do when considering a web analytics implementation?" ]

The following is a list of site scan and site audit tools that can verify the completeness of your GATC:

• 1. SiteScan by EpikOne free and paid software as a service (saas) vendor. Performs a text search and regular expression match for the GATC: www.sitescanga.com
  
• 2. WASP (Web Analytics Solution Profiler) is a Firefox plug-in that detects the setting of the GATC cookies plus 100 other vendor tools. Works on a page-by-page (free) and site-scanning (paid) basis: www.webanalyticssolutionprofiler.com
• 3. Statistics Detector is a free Greasemonkey script for Firefox. Performs a text search and regular expression match for the GATC plus 34 other vendor tools. Works on a page-by-page basis only: http://yoast.com/tools/seo/greasemonkey/statistics-detector/
• 4. ObservePoint is a paid software as a service (saas) vendor. Detects the setting of the GATC cookies plus omniture’s. Works as a site-scanning and monitoring/alert tool: www.observepoint.com
• 5. Accenture Digital Diagnostics (formerly Maxamine) Paid software as a service (saas) vendor. High-end site diagnostic tool: www.accenture.com

As an example, a typical report from the above listed tools would show the following (in addition to the individual URIs):

Pages scanned = 548 (100%)
Pages with correctly functioning GATC = 522 (95.3%)
Number of incorrect GATC = 14 (2.6%)
Number of pages not found (error 404) = 12 (2.1%)

How Often Should I Audit My GATC Implementation?

The main factor to consider here is how often your content changes. If 10 percent of your website content changes each month, then by halfway through the year the majority of your website will have changed. The greater the change, the higher the possibility of errors. Even non-humans such as CMS, CRM systems, and web servers can, and do, make errors. And because page tags are a hidden piece of code, errors are not visible by simply visiting the page in your browser. The result is that page tag errors easily go unnoticed and build up rapidly on your website.

In the early stages of a GATC deployment (or redeployment) I recommend you scan your pages weekly. Assuming there are no holes in your data collection, or they have been fixed, move to a monthly scan after eight weeks. Again, assuming data holes and anomalies have been ironed out, you should be able to move to quarterly scanning frequency by Q3. Maintain quarterly scans until your next major site redesign or a replacement CMS comes online, and then increase the frequency again.

Firefox Add-ons

Add-ons are installable enhancements to the firefox browser. Developed by third- parties, add-ons are capable of customizing firefox by providing additional func- tionality and, best of all, the vast majority of add-ons are free to use. Because of this flexibility, I recommend firefox when viewing Google Analytics reports. More infor- mation on firefox add-ons is available at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/

The following are add-ons that can help with your implementation and usage of Google Analytics. I use all of them:

• Better Google Analytics This is the mother of all Google Analytics helper add-ons. It enhances Google Analytics with a compilation of Greasemonkey user scripts produced by various authors. At the last count, it incorporated 19 add-ons, including:
• • Automatic access to your Google Analytics account
  • Automatic navigation expansion
  • full-screen view: Removes the side menu
  • Content search direct from the side menu
  • Table sort: sort only what you see, not the entire report data set.
  • Integrated social media metrics: Includes sphinn, Technorati, Digg, stumbleUpon metrics, and several others.
  • Integrated Google Insights search: Perform Google Insights searches on keywords in your reports
  • Advanced date selection: Compare year-on-year data with one click
  • Google Docs export: Adds Google spreadsheets as an export option.
  • Plus it offers a few helper scripts to ease your way around the conversionuniversity.com content. Better Google Analytics is maintained at: www.vkistudios.com/tools/firefox/betterga/
• Goal Copy allows you to copy one set of configured goals over to another profile, and even a profile in another Google Analytics account. Useful when creating multiple carbon copies of profiles, for example, a profile for U.S. visitors separate from U.K. visitors: www.lunametrics.com/blog/2008/01/21/copying-goals-in-google-analytics-a-firefox-extension/
• Web Developer Toolkit is Firefox add-on adds a menu bar to your browser with a whole range of useful features for anyone who has an interest in creating web pages. It has an excellent browser error console and DOM inspector, as well as quick lookup tools for cookies, source code, and so forth: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60
• Firebug This free firefox add-on adds debug capabilities for Javascript, Css, and HTMl live in your browser. Currently with over 20 million downloads, it is one of the most popular firefox add-ons: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843
• Live HTTP Headers is an add-on that allows you to view HTTP headers of a page while you are browsing. All the communication requests sent and received by your browser can be viewed. These can be quite numerous and difficult to follow. Therefore, to follow only Google Analytics requests, set the configuration of this add-on to filter URls With Regexp set to /__utm.gif.*. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3829

Google Chrome is a new browser (released in September 2008) that I find myself using often. Though support for Mac computers is currently limited, Chrome uses extensions in the same way Firefox uses Add-ons. That is, allowing third-party developers to extend its capabilities. For example, the Analytics Helper extension displays a notification if a Google Analytics account code (UA number) is detected in a web page. See: https://chrome. google.com/extensions/search?q=analytics+helper.

Desktop Helper Applications

• WebBug is a Windows application that allows you to enter a URl and see exactly what is sent to the web server and what response is sent back. This is the information that your browser takes care of when rendering a page. I use this mainly to check a web server’s status code response. It is very useful for tracking redirection issues—a common problem that can result in the loss of campaign variables from your landing page URls. WebBug is free to use, Windows only, and is available for download from: www.cyberspyder.com/webbug.html
• Regex Coach is a regular expression validator. Regular expressions (regex) are snippets of pseudo code that match patterns within text. In Google Analytics, regular expressions are used for filtering – both within a report (table filter) and for creating separate profile reports (profile filters), for defining advanced segments, and for configuring goal conversions and funnel steps. In other words, regular expressions are important.Going beyond the basics, things can rapidly appear complex because regular expression often appear like algebra. Therefore, before implementing your regular expression, validate it through the excellent Regex Coach application (Windows only). Regex Coach is free to use and can be downloaded from: http://weitz.de/regex-coach/.

Have I missed any others? If you are using (or have developed) a useful admin tool for Google Analytics please let me know with a comment.

Related posts (automatically generated):

1. Troubleshooting Tools for Web Analytics
2. Google is Like a Bank

© Brian Clifton for Measuring Success, 2010. | Permalink | 17 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: accuracy, accurate, page tags, tools, trouble shooting, troubleshoot, troubleshooting, useful

I recently read an article by a friend of mine Neil Mason, called – Tackling the basics of web analytics: Getting the right numbers right . To summarize, Neil discusses how difficult it can be to install even the most simplest of tracking tags (data collector beacons) across an enterprise web site. That is, a site that is large (thousands if not hundreds of thousands of pages of content), uses multiple technologies and has multiple stakeholders – often in different countries and sometimes different companies.

However, this fundamental step of getting the data in using page tags, is the key to everything else i.e. getting good, solid, accurate data in*. There simply is no point investing in analysis if the data is flawed. After all, garbage in = garbage out. And of course the web is ever changing, so maintaining data integrity is also key. Page tagging is therefore not a one time, "set it and forget it" process. It requires careful deployment planning and regular maintenance checks to ensure data holes are not appearing.

*I discuss this specifically for Google Analytics in a series of articles .

Six tools to help you troubleshoot web analytics

As page tag deployment is so important, I wanted to share which tools I use for troubleshooting implementations on a day to day basis. These are all free(ish) to use and are not specific to Google Analytics – they can help you sanity check any web analytics implementation that uses page tags.

• WASP

  Web Analytics Solution Profile (WASP) is a Firefox add-on developed by Stéphane Hamel based in Québec. I highly recommend this to anyone that needs to quickly check what web analytics tracking code is present on their pages. When I first tried this out it was able to track 20+ vendor page tags. Now its up to 121 and includes all the web analytics tools I ever knew of, plus Ad networks, behavioural targeting solutions and multivariate testing tools.

  WASP works by executing the page tag detecting the cookies your browser sets when you view a web page. It then matches this to a known list of providers. The downside was that it could only be done on a per page basis. However, now even this have been overcome with the latest release including a site crawl that automates the process by following links within your web site. WASP is free for scanning 10 web sites upto 100 pages each (free to look at any web site on a per page basis).

• Web Developer toolkit

  This is a firefox add-on that adds a menu bar to your browser with a whole range of useful features for anyone that has an interest in creating web pages. It has an excellent browser error console and DOM inspector, as well as quick lookup tools for cookies, source code etc. With over 8 million downloads, it is one of the most popular add-ons ever and is free.

• SiteScan GA
  This is a Google Analytics service developed by EpikOne from the US. It is used for checking the existence of the Google Analytics Tracking Code (GATC) on your pages. The methodology is to first establish what web site pages you have in the Google Index (via a Google Search API call). Then it retrieves these URLs and performs a pattern match on the HTML source code looking for the GATC "signature" code. Its a very neat way of avoiding the overhead of crawling your web site (fraught with traps that can result in an infinite loop that can bring servers down!) and it is free for 5 web sites, upto 1,000 pages.The slight downside is that if your pages are not in the Google Index, then it cannot scan your pages. This includes e-commerce checkout systems.

(...)
Read the rest of Troubleshooting Tools for Web Analytics (490 words)

© Brian Clifton for Measuring Success, 2008. | Permalink | 8 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: accuracy, accurate, page tags, tools, trouble shooting, troubleshooting, useful

[This article is part of a series entitled: GA Implementation ABCs]

So far what I have discussed in this series has been fairly straight forward – dare I say “easy”! The next step is the difficult part – not from a technical perspective, but purely in terms of communication.

To recap the story so far, the first three best practice implementation principals are:

1. Tag everything – get the most complete picture of your web site visitors as possible
2. Clean your data – apply filters
3. Define Goals – distill the 80+ reports of GA in to performance benchmarks

If you have followed these steps so far, then you have done an excellent job. However, the usual problem is that few other people in your organisation know this or even appreciate your work. You have created a set of nice charts and reports, “so what?” is a common response that is thought, if not stated.

The unfortunate truth is that you will have wasted your time unless you can get the buy-in use the visitor data in driving business decisions and be the focal point for instigating change on your web site. With your initial understanding of your web site visitor data, this is your next step – to map out the objectives and key results for your organisation’s web site. For this you need to bring in your key stakeholders from the other parts of the business. These can be marketing, sales, PR, operations, web development/design agencies, e-commerce managers, content creators – even the CEO.

Setting Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) – 4 Steps

Step 1: Map your stakeholders
Map who your stakeholder departments are from the list above. Then select one person from each as the key contact for initial discussions. They may not be end up being the right person but that can be changed later. The important thing is to get people on board from those departments.

Your key contacts are your point of contact representing the interests of that department within your organisation. They can canvas opinion from the rest of the organisation on your behalf – in other words, they do not have to be the most senior person from that department. Note you should encourage this to be a two way street – you setting the scene with your initial data and thoughts on the current situation, with stakeholders providing their perspective on how it fits with their department. For example, they may provide information from CRM systems, call centre figures, web server performance etc.

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© Brian Clifton for Measuring Success, 2007. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: ABC, ABCs, implementation, install