Recently in Optimization Category

Testing websites are becoming common as more companies adopt web analytics into their website development cycle. A/B or Multivariate tests allow companies to decide which designs contribute higher conversion rate, and lift the bottom line to better achieve online business goals.

If you ever visit the web analytics vendors's roadshow regarding optimization tools, it is common for them to publish case studies showing huge lift in conversions. Do not expect your site's test result to see similar lift by just implementing the tool. You need to understand what you'll be testing. Not only to plan what to test, you need make that testing into a process rather than ending at a project based testing.

Think about the resources, time, budget, and efforts that'll need to go into executing the A/B test or Multivariate tests.

• In order to create creative assets for testing, you'll need a designer to pump those graphical elements.
• You'll need to set up meetings to bring in people you'll need to share learnings, and key stakeholders who'll create a budget to perform your tests. Tests are never free as long as someone's time is involved. Including yours.
• Web programmer will need to implement that javascript code into the test pages.
• Depending on the landing pages you'll be testing, you may need tons of traffic. So you may need your SEM expert to pump some traffic after that budget is approved.

Once you hammer out these issues, and acquire key stakeholders buy-in, its time to go at it.

Start simple and start breaking it down. Consider testing these basic test cases.

Layout A vs. Layout B: When the call to action (CTA) are hidden below the fold due to layout constrains, or simply want to avoid long meetings and argue about what looks nice, layout tests are great way to start testing using A/B/n test.

Colors to Call to Action (CTA): Colors do matter when it comes to click-thrus by consumers. It may go against company's branding guide line, but it could be a great test to raise your voice about what works and don't work.

CTA and message: Messaging and CTA of them key URL links do matter, and you could be surprised how little differences that you didn't think of could lift your conversion rate significantly. 1% lift in conversion rate could mean X more million dollars in sales. Test it.

Size: Font size, image size, product size, you name it. Prominence of key elements fonts or images could mean significant lift in conversions because consumers could value something more than the other.

Traffic Sources vs. Landing page: A/B test or MVT may sound like you're only testing landing page only, but your test may yield different results by different traffic sources. Different acquisition channel may bring different persona, so results could look different when serving a content to banner traffic vs. SEM traffic.
Here is a great article that speaks to it: Maximize Your Google Website Optimizer Wins with Traffic Segmentation

There are so many data elements to test, it gets pretty overwhelming. That is why you need committed resources for testing and make sure that you have testing/optimization part of the process rather than a project.

In preparation of website optimization, the success metrics are not always increase in conversion rate or lift in sales. Perhaps, if you company spends a lot of hours in deciding the creative (e.g. home page banner), then doing the test could prove that testing helps reducing the time to decision. Those reduction in hours spent to decide could be a key indicator to a success in website optimization.

Enjoy testing!!

There is a cool tool offered from Google Labs that allows you to visualize browser window sizes for people who visit Google. Using your web analytics tool, you could know the percentage of visitors who are able to view key elements on your site when they land on the site.

For example, Google's browser size will show you a line with "90%" contour, which means that 90% of people visiting Google have their browser window open to at least this size or larger.

With more internet users' attention span and focus getting narrower, these tools are very useful to optimize your site to improve the outcome.

Here is what it looks like when you use it on Amazon's Kindle product page.

My screen resolution was set to 1280x800, and the page with Google Browser Size resolution marks account for browser and my Windows vertical toolbars.

What's interesting is that according to this overlay, it tells us that with this browser size setting, 50% of the Google visitors who visit this page will see partial "Add to Cart", "Add to Wish List", and "Add to Shopping List" buttons.

Using your web analytics tool (Google Analyitcs, WebTrends, Omniture, etc.), you can gain additional perspective on what your visitors will see for your site, including visitors who come from Google. Your web analytics data will allow you to understand where your visitors are likely to fall under in these marks accounting for Google's visitors who are likely to be more a major contributor of site traffic.

Taking this page as an example; hypothetically, let's say the majority of Amazon's visitors set their browser size to 950x500, that means, according to Google's data, 90% of the Google's visitors set their browser at least in this resolution.

Another example, if the majority of Amazon's visitors set their browser size to 1280x800, then 50% of Google's visitors will at least have this browser resolution.

At the end of the day, your site visitors and their screen resolutions are what matters the most. However, considering that Google is one of the most visited site in the world online, that is also telling you what resolutions are likely to be optimal. And that should matter to you if you are trying to acquire more visitors to your site.

Segmenting your resolution size data by traffic source could give you different perspective as well. Reason why we should take these different perspective into consideration is; consumers could and most likely start their search from Google (or other search engines), go directly to your site by typing the URL directly into the browser, to research before purchasing your product on your site, or follow the links thru various sites starting from search engines.

This Google tool can give you additional view on what general audience have their browser resolution set, and give you a good sense on how optimal your key call-to-actions are positioned within the site to search general mass online audience.

With more and more consumers going online using browsers thru mobile or iPad like devices, the resolution size is likely to get smaller. Taking screen resolution into your content layout strategy will be even more important than before.

Here is the link to Google Labs' Browser Size: http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/

I love looking at landing pages, especially segmenting the report by conversion. When visiting a site, we all land on a page via search engines, external sites, email, banner ads, bookmark, facebook, etc. Regardless of where site traffic come from, if the landing page is an optimal page that speaks to people's needs, eventually people may convert on that site.

A conversion could be anything, it could be an instant that defines the moment of success.
Here are some examples:

• Orders
• Subscribed for blog feed
• Email subscription
• Clicked on twitter, linkedin, about us link
• Generated product review/testimonial
• Shared content (advocated)
• Clicked on on-site ads
• Acquired a lead

When you segment your data based on a specific conversion, you will find various segmented data sets yielding different results in KPIs. Assessing landing pages based on conversions are great because it allows you to focus on the first page that convinced your site visitor to complete a desired action/outcome.

Looking at this example chart, you can definitely see the head and the tail, which is based on the cut off you define. Let's say 50% of the revenue was contributed by top 5 pages. Given that there are total of 35 landing pages that contributed to conversions, it is insightful to know that these 5 pages helped you generating 50% of your revenue!!

Biggest question is, what strategy are you going to introduce to optimize the other 30 pages? Even if you improve (theoretically) all of these 30 pages to convert better, the likely hood for you to see this curve from head to tail will always exist. However, it is very important to continue and set goals > measure > report > analyze > optimize > set goals (repeat).

What you need to look at when you optimize the long tail pages are:

1. How much did your optimization plan and action supported improving the number of orders in the tail segment, and revenue growth from these long tail landing pages.


2. Engagement and visitor type difference in head vs. tail. How did your optimization impacted these visitors.


3. Bounce rate improvements based on your optimization to these critical and key pages.

You may ask, what about the pages that aren't showing up here in the landing page's long tail chart? If those pages are so important that you think it should contribute to your site's success, then it is a clear indication that the page is very ineffective, and it is a call-to-action to do something about it.

It is imperative to take these number of entry pages (segmented by orders) and divide it by overall number of entry pages served. For example, if you had 100 pages on your site and 90 of them were your entry pages, then we can say 39% (35/90) of the entry pages are contributing to conversion or your desirable outcome. This is a good metrics to see the allocation of effective entry pages that are supporting your site's goal. A great bench mark to gauge after executing your optimization strategy.

The most important thing is to see how your campaign and optimization strategy impacted the landing pages, and I am sure you'll see some difference in this data matrix.

Good luck analyzing your landing pages, and I'd love to hear your thoughts. If not on my blog, maybe through Twitter.

I was thinking about customer satisfaction through e-commerce sites lately, and wanted to share you my thoughts around measurement points from web analytics point of view.

One of the ultimate outcomes for a website is customer satisfaction. First site I think of e-commerce site with great customer satisfaction is Zappos.com. It is one of the ultimate models to service and satisfy customers. Zappos definitely made me think about customer satisfaction more than before. Before we think things in complicated manner, I think we need start somewhere and understand the measurement points for web analytics, because web analytics is the bread and butter of this blog.

Check out this diagram I made. Apologies if it is not pretty...

When a business owns an e-commerce site and deals with web analytics, we (web analysts) need be mindful of the key points that support and complete the e-commerce service. Allow me to share you my idea around three web analytics action and measurement points:

Point 1 (Website and Customers)

This point shows the interaction between customers and the website. In other words, it is the "experience" part for the customers going through your store. From web analytics point of view, we would measure and assess:

• Pages that the customers viewed that contributed to completing a key event.
• Entry pages with high bounce rate to understand what to optimize.
• Conversions.
• Visitor types and their behavior differences, and outcome analysis.
• Advanced segmentation analysis on various dimensions of data against outcome.
• And many other fantastic data we get out of web analytics applications.

These are typical metrics and KPIs that are available straight out of the web analytics applications, which requires customized tracking and set up for key events on goals. The business should know what KPIs should be gauged to understand how their site is doing against their goals.

Optimizations and testing will impact this area (point 1), so customers' interactions with the site will give us actionable data that supports decisions to improve customer experience. Measured and assessed data should tie with customer satisfaction because your website has to serve your customer with products/services/content they are looking for, and have your site optimal so that customers can convert with ease.

Point2 (Business and Website)

You are wondering what does business or website owner got to do with the actual site that relates to customer satisfaction. To be honest, after going through many websites, I've seen many situations where I doubt site owner's care and ability to maintain the site to serve its customers. (Maybe I am shooting my own foot here... lol)

Some of the actions taken by business owners could be adding/updating content, executing promotions, supply inventory info in e-commerce database, etc. All these actions could lead to customer satisfaction. Taking the supplying inventories as an example, I've came across sites where when I put an item into cart, it'll show "out of stock". Leaving me with no choices, but to leave the site.

From web analytics stand point, we would love to measure everything that impacts the bottom line, but here are examples of metrics and actions pertaining to customer satisfactions:
Inventory availability vs. demand orders, Promo response and application/redemption, site optimization A/B or multivariate test, fresh content uploads rate vs. avg. visitor frequency, applying SEO best practices, etc.

Point3 (Customers and Business)

I believe this is an important point as well as other common web analytics involvement affiliating with customer satisfaction. After customer purchase items from the website, orders have to be fulfilled, issues have to be solved; direct marketing may take place online or offline, etc. The speed and timing of fulfillments, customer supports, and customer communications are pretty critical to customer satisfaction.

From web analytics stand point there quite a few measurement points. Here are some examples.

• Direct Marketing (online/offline): Delivery, Response Rate, Conversions, etc.
• Fulfillment: Ship to order ratio, average order to delivery time
• Support: Customer response, incident reduction, support forum usage
• Direct testimonials to business, survey request to customer and analysis

Hopefully, this article gave you different take or angle in viewing customer satisfaction relating to e-commerce. Some of this concept may apply to non-commerce site, too. I guess having a creative mindset in web analytics field does not hurt. That's what I believe in.

What is your site visitors' screen resolution? With an increase in sales for netbooks and laptops, your site might be experiencing an increase in site visitors with smaller screen resolutions.

I hope you don't underestimate the impact of screen resolutions to the conversion rate. I have seen many sites where the call to actions or the important messages are under the fold.

Notice that height with 768 ranks second for this one site. (I have seen 1024x768 rank first for some sites)

Here is an example of a CPG site. Perhaps selling is not their main goal, but they have a call to action "Buy Online", so let's assume that is their main site objective for this case.

Notice that the red box (call to action) goes away when I changed my resolution to 1024x768. They are increasing the chance for visitors to bounce, because it makes the gap between the customer intent and that landing page's objective to widen.

1280x800

1024x768

I have seen cart add ratio decrease tremendously when call to action to buy is under the fold for specific screen resolution. I guess it's time to review your screen resolution and make sure that the drop off is minimize by a simple redesign.

I would also have to mention that not only people adjust their screen resolution differently, but browsers can also allow users to set different zoom percentage. That also affects your site's performance, but at this point, it is probably wise to test and find out. Good luck!!

In web analytics especially for eCommerce, we tend to discuss within the context of the web analytics tools that we use. Other than measuring the click-stream data, a lot of the web analytics tools are capable in integrating external data into the web analytics application.

I am not sure if there are a lot of companies out there that relies on the web analytics applications to integrate external data and report it out of the web analytics application other than the Business Intelligence tools.

The idea of integrating and assessing offline metrics to web analytics data is nothing new, but I feel like I don't hear much about offline metrics that impacts online business and strategies.

In this post, I would like to talk about some of the key operational metrics that web analyst or eCommerce managers should look at when assessing the success of your eCommerce business.

In web analytics, we focus a lot on marketing, traffic source attributions, conversion rates, etc. It is vital to also think about your customers' experience beyond the website or after they completed the transaction. In eCommerce, there are a lot of things happening even after customers completed purchasing. Orders have to be processed, transactions will need to be settled, products need to be wrapped, shipped, confirm delivery, subtract inventory, process returns, etc.

All of these required actions or processes correlate to customer satisfaction. Sure, you can improve your traffic by 200%, and increase conversion rate by 300%, but if your customers aren't receiving the products within promised timeframe, then they will not become a repeat buyer or even advocate your service. Here are some of the metrics you will need to take into consideration.

Shipped to Order
For a given time range of data, it is the percentage of shipped orders per total orders. If one of the weeks in previous months show less than 100%, then maybe something is wrong with the fulfillments or the orders aren't getting processed.

Duration between Orders to Delivery
If your slowest shipment option in your eCommerce service is 5 to 7days, you definitely don't want to see seven plus days for this metric. Your customers do expect to have their product delivered on time.

Number of return orders and percentage of returns
So you have increased your conversion rate and successfully optimized the campaigns to drive higher revenue, but you didn't realized that more products are getting returned due to whatever reason. When you're working with a great eCommerce solution, you should be getting back the number of returns. Make sure to gauge this key data.

Percentage of in-stock per order
Maybe your site is selling hot out items quickly, but the orders surpassed the amount of units available in inventory. You want to know what percentage of orders are actually available for delivery. If its below 100%, you might want to double check which products are short on inventory, and for what reason is it short. (sky rocketing number of orders for particular item?)

Remember, that one of the key desired outcome of websites is to "increase customer satisfaction and increase loyalty". Make sure to close the loop in your supply chain/logistics/fulfillments by taking action upon these key metrics.

How many analysts are actually looking at the landing page and optimize the content or tags to make it work better for your site's goal?

I'm not sure, but it is definitely an important aspect if you really want to maximize your traffic. Even if you're acquiring qualified traffic to your site, if your landing page is not effective, then you'll end up sending them back to where ever they came from.

I'd like to re-introduce to you Landing Page Optimization or LPO. Reason is, I feel like minimal effort can go into LPO, and make your site even more effective. Some of the key areas of what you'll want to see from LPO is reducing bounces, stream line traffic to high performing pages, and increase conversion.

Here are some of the key techniques and data points to look for in your web analytics tool, to make your landing page more effective.

I will use Google Analytics for my examples.

1) Top Landing Page vs. Bounce Rate (Avg)

For a data from x date to y date, select the top landing page report. Then click on the "camparison" view, which is on the right of the four view selections. Select "Bounce Rate", to see the bounce rate of each landing pages against overall bounce rate average.

This example tells me, 58.4% of all entrances occur from the top 10 landing pages. In other words, the top 10 landing pages, out of 144 landing pages contributed 58.4% of all site entry.

Obviously, you would want to concentrate on your top 10 landing pages before you even jump into optimizing other pages.

2) Set a Goal to reduce the bounce rate.

Currently, the overall site's bounce rate is 63.5%. Say you want to reduce that to 50.0%. Let's do the math.

Bounce Rate = Total Bounces / Total Entrances = 1,794 / 2,824 = 63.5%

Desired Total Bounces = (Desired Bounce Rate) x (Total Entrances) = 50.0% x 2,824 = 1,412

Amount of bounces required to reduce = 1,412 - 1,794 = 382 OR 21%

This will give you a clearer picture for the actual amount of bounces you need to reduce in order to achieve the desired overall bounce rate.

Just looking at the top 10, here, we have the opportunity to optimize 5 landing pages. Because we know that these 5 pages are performing worse than the overall bounce rate (63.5%), we have the opportunity to reduce 393 bounces.

393 bounces = [(231+109+100+99+81) x 63.5%].

This 393 bounces are around par to the amount of bounces I would like to see improved.

3) Why are people bouncing from these pages?

This is a very broad topic. Every pages are probably unique, and users arrive on that page differently. So I'll introduce few tactics in approaching what to think of before tackling out your page optimization.

a) Traffic sources

Look at the traffic sources of each landing page by drilling down to each individual landing page and select "source".

• Is it the search engine driving traffic and causing bounces?
• Is it other referring sites driving traffic to this landing page?
• Is the campaigns that you're investing in to drive higher traffic to these content causing high bounces?

If the majority of users to a landing page are arriving by a specific phrase or keyword, maybe there is something about the page which is not relevant to people's search.

Also, what is touted on the referring site is not relevant to the actual landing page.

One you get a firm understanding of where users are coming from, you'll getter a better sense of what users are experiencing.

You definitely don't want users landing on the page with KPI definition when they have intended to learn about "how to come up with KPI" or "KPI to make money". Double check your content, and page title to see if you're serving the right descriptions.

Apply the findings to your optimization.

b) Page layout and creative

Since every content is unique, going through every single content on your page is pretty painful, if you serve thousands of pages. That is one reason why I looked at the top 10 landing page.

Now, after looking at the traffic source, other area to look at is your actual page. Your page may serve the right information, but it doesn't necessarily address and represent the information in a user friendly manner.

You might want to ask your self the following questions.

• Does the page has a exit link towards the top? If the page has an exit link (or any links to other sites) towards the top of your page, then users may leave your site even before they finish reading and click through to other page.
• Is your page too wordy? Obviously, people may loose interest when they see a page full of text. You might want to consider breaking out the paragraph and put some image if necessary. Give your users' eyes some break.
• Are the color, layout, text size, or creative causing a bad user experience? Might want to consider testing these elements as well. I definitely don't want to read a blog with a background of shocking pink or neon yellow.

4) Optimize and Test

Once you have identified the areas of improvement, you may want to consider executing your changes and test it.

I recommend using Google Website Optimizer since it is a free tool and you'll acquire just enough learnings from doing an A/B test on your old vs. new page.

Optimize, Test, Optimize, Test.... Basic fundamentals of web analytics.

Note that, in order to test it is not going to happen in over night. You might have to give it a few days for the site to acquire significant amount of traffic data.

Enjoy optimizing your landing page !!

Site optimization related article: Tip: 4 steps to site optimization

Google Analytics, Google Website Optimizer and Google Ad words – these three are critical in promoting/optimizing your site. Here, their combined power lies in providing us with the most valuable and effective information. They maximize our "Right" decision making power which is the most important in the internet marketing field. All these three applications combined can answer most of your queries and concerns relating to your website. Thus, they provide you with the best sort out options to improve your website performance.

This may give you a clear picture of the power that you will possess if you will combine your Google website optimizer and Google Analytics tools. In this article, we'll talk about things to consider for such a combination.

Overview - Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a robust analytics application, which reports key information of your site traffic and their behavior. It will provide you with this information in the form of a variety of easily understandable reports. Thus, Google Analytics gives you an insight into the user behavior on your site. The information that we obtain from Google Analytics will be helpful in making the right decisions to maximize the website performance. The best thing is that you can open a Google Analytics account absolutely free. You can perform your analysis on the visitor data this tool provides according to your online business needs.

Overview - Google Website Optimizer

Now let us look at what Google Website Optimizer has in store for you. Google Website Optimizer helps you to conduct statistical tests on your sites' pages that enhance the effectiveness of your site. Every site has a goal to achieve. It may be to purchase a product, donate to a cause or take a survey. The goal of your site depends upon the nature of your website. Website Optimizer can track the nature of visitor performance by virtue of Google Analytics. It gives you information about the conversion rate i.e. the number of visitors behaved according to your predefined goals. The tool is primarily focused on giving analyst the solution to conduct A/B tests or multivariate testing on your site's layout and designs.

To make best use of the valuable data obtained from Google Analytics, it is necessary to utilize it together with Google Website Optimizer. Google Website Optimizer will empower you to create and run specific tests regarding the website content in order to increase the conversion rate and thus improve your visitor satisfaction. All of us are aware of the fact that an improvement in visitor satisfaction is the highlighting point of the best performing websites. Thus, Google Website Optimizer helps you to convert the information provided by Google Analytics into action, which guarantees the best result. Website optimizer is accessed through the Google Website Optimizer (http:www.google.com/websiteoptimizer).

The variables on which you can conduct experiments through Google Website Optimizer are innumerable. You can run tests on the variables such as changing the page background color, testing different ad copy, different images, different headlines, different positioning, and different layouts and designs to the combination of size and location buttons, trust logos, affiliation links, etc.

Basic combination of the two powerful web tools of analytics and optimization:

By integrating Google Analytics tool into your Website Optimizer, you will get a rich data and will give you insight into the progress of your tests. To cut the matter short, while Google Analytics inform you about what is happening on your site, Google Website Optimizer gives you the power to change your site for increased conversion rates.

To get the best results out of the two, you should combine both the tools in the best effective way. Here are some ways to do it.

• The landing page content definitely creates a positive or negative impact on the visitors. It plays an important role in determining the visitor activity. If your landing page provides what the visitor needs then it can result in an increase in the conversion rate. If you optimize your website's low traffic pages, it will not give you any positive outcome. You should optimize a high traffic landing pages that show a high bounce rate. Google Analytics will help you in this task. For this purpose, analyze the "Top landing pages" report within the content section of Google Analytics. Pages that have the high bounce rate and the highest percentage of entrances should be redesigned. Bounce rate is the number of visitors who retract their steps within a short time span. Thus, from the data obtained from Google Analytics use Google Optimizer to redesign your site and help to increase the web traffic.
• Focus on your funnel pages: Funnel pages are those pages that lead your visitors to your goal pages. Visitors finally will enter the goal page, once they have completed the desired steps such as registering on your site, a purchase or a download. In Google Analytics, you can determine up to ten pages in a defined funnel depending upon the path you want them to take as to reach the goal page. The "Funnel visualization" report within the goals section of Google Analytics shows you the trend of the visitors who have excited in between on the path to the goal page. Thus, pages that lose a high percentage of traffic on the path towards goal should be the next perfect part on your site to conduct optimization test.

These steps will definitely provide a good working of both the tools, Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer combined. If you work according to the information and take necessary steps by using both these tools, you could expect a better web traffic and high monetary gains.

Possible testing strategies you can consider conducting:

• Time on page as a conversion goal


• Advanced A/B Testing


• Experimenting with dynamic content


• Tracking all movement past the landing page


• Improve your newsletter subscription rate


• Fractional versus Full Factorial analysis


• Experiment with site-wide changes


• Comparing old vs. new website designs


• Testing the same section across many pages


• Testing many sections across multiple pages


• Counting a conversion when a link is clicked


• A simple solution to cross-domain tracking


• Counting a conversion when a form is submitted

WARNING!!!
What you need to aware of when installing Website Optimizer code when you have Google Analytics code already set in place.

According to Google (in website optimizer help):
If your web pages are tagged with Google Analytics' ga.js tracking code, we suggest modifying that code for use with Website Optimizer, rather than adding a call to urchin.js as well. Calling two essentially similar JavaScript files to be downloaded onto the user's machine is inefficient, and can slow down loading of your pages (although only very slightly).

Note that Website Optimizer doesn't currently validate pages using ga.js, so you'll either need to skip validation for multivariate experiments, or validate your A/B experiments with the urchin.js tracking code before switching to ga.js. Also, any modifications to the tracking code (such as those required to cross domains) increase the level of complexity, so we suggest that less-technical users continue to use urchin.js for both Google Analytics and Website Optimizer.

You definitely need to consult with your tech team and make sure that implementing Website Optimizer won't affect your current trackings or metrics data.

Additionally, there may be issues around integrating Website Optimizer when you're tracking an e-commerce site using Google Analytics. Website Optimizer may affect your e-commerce data and pollute your numbers. Check out the Google Website Optimizer Forum (http://groups.google.com/group/websiteoptimizer) and scope out your requirements prior to making tracking changes.

Site traffic from search and content network aren't comparable in terms of click-through and conversion rate. Key difference is that users approach ads differently on content than those who search online.

The important aspect when comparing two of these users is their intent on the content or for search. It is likely that users on a site for a specific content is consuming the information and observing what he/she wants or wanted to know. For users searching with keywords in hopes to find the right content or information that is relevant to their search.

Understanding that there are differences in users' persona, ways to optimize the ads on search and content network will be different. Let's breakdown the key differences in optimization strategies for each of these network.

CONTENT NETWORK
Click-through rate (CTR)
CTR on content network will not influence your quality score. CTR is not a great indicator for measuring the success of content network, since CTR can vary widely on the content network.

Conversion Rate (CR)
CR on content network is also not a great KPI to gauge the success, since content doesn't produce as much conversion as search network does. It is recommended to gauge "Cost per Conversion". Google has a smart pricing feature that automatically adjusts the cost of a content network click based on its effectiveness, which is done different from search network.

Just because I mention that these metrics are a great KPIs, it is still good know by how much your content network is performing differently from search network. So please don't be discouraged to monitor those metrics. Content network is great for gaining exposures for your ads, so let me point out the optimization points.

Points of Optimization
Here are some great recommendations from Google.

1. Campaign Structure: Create themed ad groups - an ad group for each product or service that you're advertising.

2. Keywords: Choose keywords that relate closely to one another and to the ads in the ad group.

3. Ads: Write clear, compelling ad text to attract users browsing content pages.

4. Content Bids: Set a separate maximum CPC for clicks that occur on the content network.

5. Position: Monitor your ad position. You can achieve maximum exposure by improving your Quality Score and selecting a competitive maximum CPC.

6. Negative Keywords: Limit how often your ads appear on content pages with irrelevant themes.

7. Site and Category Exclusion: Prevent your ads from appearing on specific sites in the content network.

I would also pay attention to seasonal trends where you could possibly rotate budgets for content network. I've seen campaigns on content network perform extremely well, when certain news breakout during an event, and content on that specific news emerged sporadically.

SEARCH NETWORK

Points of Optimization
1. Identify your advertising goals: Your optimization strategy will depend on what your goals for search engine marketing (SEM). Is it to "gain site exposure", "increase sales", "gain site registrations", etc. Depending on what the objective is, your optimization KPI could be clicks, conversions, ROI, CTR, etc.

2. Organize your account (campaign/ad group) for maximum effectiveness: You want to be very specific with each ad group containing one set of keywords and placements. Your campaign should be defined by clear topics, locations, campaign duration, language, etc. Awesome diagram that shows how an adwords account should be structured: How is an AdWords account structured?

3. Choose relevant keywords and placements: It is very important to choose specific and relevant keywords to your ad and its landing page. This relevancy will give your ads a better chance to show up.

4. Create straightforward, targeted ads: Great call-to-action, simply and straightforward, and well targeted ads would definitely perform well. Make sure to test different ads to optimize its performance.

5. Optimize your website for conversions: Ultimately, your website determines how well your ads convert. Take into consideration of using website optimization tools to perform A/B or multivariate testing on the landing page.

6. Track your account performance and results: Set Goal -> Track -> Measure -> Analyze -> Optimize; this is a key process that defines analytics (www.zoommetrix.com). Without tracking, you can't analyze and optimize. You are spending money to market your business, you must measure the return on your investments.

7. Test and modify your campaigns to get the results you want: Fine tune your keywords by monitoring your KPIs (based on campaign objective). Optimizations should not be one time fix, it should be an ongoing process.

Useful link

New ways to look at search and content network statistics

As I've discussed in "Optimizing User Experience Using Web Analytics - Part 1", web analytics could give you a great insights to link analysis, so you'll be able to optimize user experience.

I'd like to revisit the concept of user experience before I state some other methods in optimizing user experience using web analytics. As a person/business with a site or publishing content, you need to ask yourself, what are the experience that you want your user to experience when they visit your site.

I think user experience is an important aspect prior to users converting on the web site. If usability and user experience are bad, then the users will not be happy with your site, and will eventually leave unhappy.

In part 1, I've talked about arranging links which could speak towards accessibility of useful links. Optimizing the links using web analytics could scale across navigation menu, links in drop down list, etc. Another user experience optimization point that is significant in optimizing using web analytics is the accessibility of the key pages or site sections.

For certain non-transactional sites, you would want your "Contact Us" page to be the key page in your site or business. For blogs, it'll be your content, perhaps your new articles.

Accessibility of your key pages could be assessed using web analytics. Following are the metrics to look at for assessing the accessibility to your key pages.

• % of visitors to your key pages
• Popular path to your key pages
• Popular entry point to your site, and availability of links to your key pages on those entry pages
• Custom landing page to key pages (if investing in PPC, SEO, rich media)

% of visitors to your key pages
Obviously, you would want to know how many of your entire site traffic is attributed to the key pages. If it's 20%, then 80% of the people aren't coming to the pages you want the users to visit.

Popular path to your key pages
Certain path to your key pages may have better access to it. This path analysis will show you a deeper understanding to what routes make your key pages visible. You would then be able to ask yourself, what can you do to improve access to your key pages on the unpopular route. That will be a great optimization point for you to tackle.

Popular entry point to your site, and availability of links to your key pages on those entry pages
You might want to look at the popular entry pages on your site, and assess to see if those landing pages have great accessibility to your key pages. If not, then that'll be a great optimization point to tackle. Additional criteria to look here, is where the visitors are coming from, and that could answer why those entry pages are popular as well.

Custom landing page to key pages (if investing in PPC, and banner media)
A lot of site invests in paid per clicks (PPC), and banner ads. Typically those media campaigns would drive traffic to a specific landing page, and as a best practice that would be relevant to the ads. For example, product media campaign would drive traffic directly to product section on the site.

If you're paying money to drive traffic to your site, make sure that those landing pages have access to those key pages, to achieve your web site goal and objective.

Internal site search could be very insightful when you have users searching for specific content on the site.

Some people would think having a lot of internal search performed indicates that your users are engaged with your site. To me, that will depend on what they are looking for and what their intentions are.

If people are searching your site internally, following are possible example of intentions to why they would be searching:

• The site is hard to navigate


• Users are anticipating for special offers or coupons that may reside somewhere in the site


• Users want to make sure they are not missing out on content similar to the content they already read


• Users remember the content, but forgot how to navigate to that page

When analyzing the internal site search, you may want to start laying out following metrics.

1. % of visitors using internal site search


2. Popular keywords and terms


3. % of key terms used in search


4. % distribution of search result page yielding results and without results


5. % exit after internal search performed

% of visitors using internal site search
Obviously, the first thing you want to know is how many people are using the internal site search. If your site is not a search engine (like Google), and more than 50% of the users are using internal site search, then that could be an issue. Why would half of your traffic searching your site internally??

Also, tracking this metrics across time can tell you the trend in internal site search usage as well.

Popular keywords and terms
Analytics software including SiteCatalyst, Google Analytics, HitBox (also Google Mini) should be able to show you what terms or keywords users are entering. Based on these internally searched keywords, you'll be able to gain additional insight to what people are searching within your site.

Is it special offers? coupons? specific content?

% of key terms used in search
Once you check out the keywords people searched, you'll notice there will be a lot of terms that are similar. For example, "coupon", "coupons", "coupon for xyz", "xyz coupon", "xyz coupons", etc.

Looking at the list of terms, it'll be wise to query the word "coupon" and see what % of the overall searched terms consist of that word "coupon". If a specific term made up a huge portion of your internal site search, then that's one additional insight to just looking at a huge list of similar keywords.

% distribution of search result page yielding results and without results
There will be times when users will query a term that may be out of context from what the site provide. In that case, your search result page will have 0 result, and when that happens, users tend to leave/exit the site.

There could be few reasons why a result didn't showed up, and one of it may be due to issue with the internal search engine logic. Whatever reason it it, it is wise to set a page that would track as no result page, so that you'll be able to understand the % distribution of search results (no results vs. showed results). This should tell you if your site or search mechanism is doing a great job in providing a result to the users.

% exit after internal search performed
Are your users satisfied with the results? Looking at the % exit after internal search performed will tell you if user click-through or not, even after they invested their time to search. If this exit rate is high, then there is either a problem with your search mechanism in providing relevant result, or your site does not have the content that users are expecting to see.

Possible optimization methods for internal site search

• Provide content that matches what users are searching. Especially if your site doesn't have that content.


• To avoid users exiting when there are no search results, add recommended content to increase stickiness.


• Improve your search mechanism/logic if there is high percentage of no results after users searched.


• If the internal site search usage is too high, think about improving your site navigation or touting the content so users don't need to search.

I am sure there are many more methods and practices that analysts are recommending, but if there are strategies that worked out well for you, feel free to share it with us.

I hope you found this article useful.

Here is an useful link if you're using Google Analytics' site search feature. Google defines its metrics in a nice way, that could add a lot of value to your analysis.

How are the metrics for internal site search calculated? - in Google Analytics

Related Link: Using Site Search Features in Creative Ways

Using link analysis in your web analytics application allows you to perform some powerful site optimization to improve user experience.

Such optimization is very effective when you are trying to improve retention on key landing pages, confirmation pages, and thank you pages.

I've come to learn that laying out links in certain order (vertically or horizontally) do not always get that typical results people would expect.
Typically, for links vertically arranged, links on the very top would generate higher clicks, but using web analytics, you might come to discover that certain links may perform in un-chronological order.

When you assess the links on those key pages, look at the links that are popular using your analytics tool.
Ask you self why could the links be popular:
- Is it the way those links are worded?
- The popularity of the topics stated in the links?
- Is it the arrangements or order of the links?

From user behavior stand point, you may want to optimize those links so popular links are more visible buy bringing those links to the top of the list (assuming this is a vertically arranged list). That way, you are creating less chance for those site visitors to exit, increasing your retention rate in return.

Every site is unique in many ways, so continue testing these arrangements of the links to assess and optimize the performance of your key pages.

I feel like more companies are more SEO and SEM conscious now days, and every year it seems like there are more awareness around the topic of search. When it comes to analyzing "keywords" against your website, you could probably look into two different areas of keywords analysis.

1. Keywords from search engines
2. Internally searched terms

For Optimizing Your Site from Search Engines Keywords

In terms of keywords coming from search engines, it is obvious that certain keywords are going to perform better. "Perform better" has several dimensions to its definition. Possible questions to ask yourself prior to looking at the metrics, following these kind of questions could guide you to the right direction:

- Which terms are converting or satisfying the goal?
- Are there any other keywords or phrases similar to those high converting terms?
- Why similar phrases exist, but perform differently?
- Which terms are generating a lot of referrals, but have a high bounce rate?
- Which terms are generating more page views per visit?

Once you arm yourself with these types of questions, you'll get a good sense of where to start in your analytics tool. Typically, referring keywords are located in the traffic source section. Depending on the analytics tool you have, you might need to segment your traffic source first, before analyzing various metrics.

Site Optimization

Most likely you'll be looking at reducing that bounce rate or increasing the retention, since your visitors will need to go to the next step to convert. Things to look at the landing page or pages causing high exists are:

- Call to action
- Engaging content or persuasiveness of the content
- Hyperlink allocation across the page
- Font color and size
- Too much ads
- Page required to scrolling

Check out the improvement points, modify the contents, and test it. Continuously improve and optimize to better meet the goal of your site. (You may want to use Google WebmasterTools to utilze the sitemap for better indexing and crawling.)

In Google Analytics, you'll find such helpful metrics under the "Traffic Source" tab. Don't forget to utilize the "views" functions to slice and dice the data.

The ultimate goal for any websites is to convert. An entire book can be written to cover how to increase conversions on your website, but I would like to start off by reviewing where to start and take the first step.

1) Define what is the conversion
This is very important since every site is unique. Some sites are blogs and it may not generate money. However, conversion for such non-transactional site could be to have visitors to leave a comment, read as much contents, etc. What ever your site is, make sure to define the goals and understand what the conversion is.

2) The path to conversion
I was about to say point of traffic drop off, but you just have to step back and realize that every action of conversion needs to start somewhere. Path for a conversion could be a check out process for transactional sites. However, keep in mind the options that your site visitors have to convert. Rather it is a necessary path they need to take from page to page, or navigate within a single page, understand the experience of the visitors that they will take to convert.

3) Retension / Drop off / Bounce
Obviously, diving into these metrics and associating it to the path, you'll come to realize the point of opportunity for an enhancement to increase conversions. It is important to understand your analytics tools and leverage the feature to find the improvement points. Typical metrics and analysis methods are conversion funnel analysis, bounce rate, single access page, path analysis, etc.

4) Optimize
Once you have the metrics and path or points to associate it, it is time to take an action to optimize. Like I've said earlier, every site is unique so there is no one solution to optimization. However, typical method to test out which optimization worked is to use A/B test. i.e. Google has a solution called "Google Website Optimizer". Do what ever it takes for better conversion process; modify the page, test different form entry process, colors, navigation, make call to action bigger, etc. A lot of it would probably based on user experience. Make sure to test the results.

Everybody who owns a web site should have a goal to achieve. For non-transactional sites, the types of KPI and metrics will vary depending what the objective of the site is. Obviously, for non-transactional sites, you're probably not looking forward to convert for a higher sales (there are exceptional case, but out of scope for this article).

Some of the typical site objectives could be the following (not limited to):

- Increase exposure to certain contents, articles, products, information, etc.
- Sign up for newsletter.
- Register or opt-in for services.
- Acquire survey participation.
- Participate in online tools or games.
- Acquire traffic to landing pages and convert (register, participate, etc.)

Once you are clear at what objectives to tackle and measure the performance. Here are the typical KPI and metrics used to improve the site.

- Page Views: Popular pages and contents could be measured using page views. It is a count on how many times the page was requested from the server. The more the better.

- Page Views per Visit: Page views per Visit is a popular metrics to use to measure the site's content consumption per single visit. If it is only 1 page views per visit, obviously visitors are leaving after looking at one page. I would also recommend using this metrics across content areas to see which section of the site is more engaging than others. Good example of this is to measure difference between different article sections.

- Bounce Rate: You can measure the stickiness of the site/content and utilize the data to optimize the content to better serve what the visitors. I would recommend using it in combination to the keywords used to land on that page to better understand the intention of the visitors (if that is available and possible).

- Averag Time on Page/Content: Average time on site or page is not really an accurate metrics, but it could be used to gauge the difference across various parts of the site to see the trends. This data could give you a better insight to which contents aren't popular. Make sure to understand the time relevancy the actual time required to consume the info on that page.

- Retension and Funnel Analysis: Looking at the drop off from one form to the other could give you a good indication to where the conversion process is unsuccessful.

- Interaction Rate: I will avoid defining the exact calculation since this could vary on what interaction to measure. If it is for games or tools, it could be an [initial interaction count / total content impression or page views]. The data would be more useful when compared across different time and tools or games.

- Referrals: Where the visitors are coming from is an important data to utilize in improving the site. You might find certain visitor sources to convert more than the other. You can ask your self why and tackle the optimization and strategies.

- Keywords: I like this because it will tell you a lot about what the visitors are looking for. In combination with other metrics, it can tell you which pages are successful in terms of stickiness or popularity.

There are so many other methods and KPI/metrics to gauge, but these data points could be good place to kick off your analysis to improve your non-transactional site.

Businesses are hungry to know how to make site analytics data into something that is actionable. Actionable could mean differently depending on how you want those data to serve the objective of the site. Some business wants to drive increase in sales, site engagement, awareness, and registrations.

There are few places to start when looking at the metrics data. Especially, before answering how to make the data actionable.

1) Number of traffic to the site across different time frame. You want to see how your site is acquiring traffic by specific initiatives or events that occured.

2) Where are your traffic coming from. Search, media, other sites, direct, etc.

3) What are your visitors looking at. Popular contents, entry page, content groups, etc.

Once you get these basic understanding of your site traffic, where do your business goals reside or considered as success?

For example: If you are running a media campaign, how many traffic had generated from the campaign and how many had bounced or converted. Those 3 points mentioned above will help you understand the situation, and will help you take it to the NEXT analysis point.

Once you run through the basic metrics, then the next approach is to answer a granular questions such as:

- Where did the traffic drop out and how you can improve it next time?
- Was the conversion rate good or bad?
- Did the metrics results meet the initial target and expectations?
- What did the other metrics look like that make the traffic from this campaign unique?
- What strategies and tactics could apply next time, when a similar campaign or initiatives run?

This thinking process and approach would naturally help to tackle the analytics data, and build better understanding of the results to plan for the next action.

A good web analytics solution can help optimize websites, improve usability, identify bottlenecks in website navigation, track media and promotional mixes, increase customer acquisition and more through web traffic analysis. An analysis of online usage discovered that 47% visitors abandon their online purchases due to tedious registration processes and inadequate product information. Acting on these findings will allow you to improve conversion and generate more leads, sale, and better meet your website objectives.

Point of action to measure before optimization varies depending on what you are trying to accomplish. Some of the concepts to help you come up with what to measure are:

Identifying the key areas to work from allows you to set a point to benchmark from. Setting up a good plan to reach your goals are important factors in website optimization.

It is easy to implement a web analytics solution and then forget about it. Since web analytics does not run on autopilot, and it would be worthless if nothing is done with the acquired information. The optimization phase would allow analyst to create a define set of data point so the website data has a point where captured metrics could be benchmarked.

In optimization, web metrics data turns into an actionable data. What was analyzed is put into action to promote enhancements to better align the website to the business objective. Every change to the website, every design decision, every new feature should be analyzed in comparison to what the actual state of the website is and what the expected future impact on the site will be.

Once the change is made for optimization, it is necessary to measure the impact of the change and determine how it compares with expectations. This concept will allow optimization phase to be the final point in the web analytics life cycle, and act as a foundation for the next version of the life cycle.

Website optimization is the process of reducing complexity to maximize website performance. Website optimization can also include search engine optimization (SEO), pay per click optimization, and conversion rate optimization. Strategies to optimize is very important in running websites.
Website optimization can lead to increase the conversions and further meet the business objective.

The figure shown above is a typical conversion funnel seen in web analytics conversion metrics. The overall conversion rate for this funnel is 0.09%. The kind of question to ask your self is:

There are so many questions to be asked before you work on website optimization. Forecasting the impact and return for website optimization is important. There are also many methods and technical solution for website optimization available.

Contact ZoomMetrix to learn more about your option