Optimizing User Experience Using Web Analytics – Part 2

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.