Web analytics: What to ask of your site data

Done properly, web analytics can result in huge improvements to the bottom line. But, while it is all very well pulling out loads of data and running off report after report, it's not much use if those reports are just going to sit idly in someone's inbox and the data cannot be put to any use. Potential customers could be dropping off your web site due to one tiny glitch that could easily be fixed, resulting in hundreds more sales, if only the web site owner was looking at the right data.

"Ultimately, clients want to measure success," says Andrew Hood, managing director of Lynchpin Analytics, which was spun out of search engine marketing agency Ambergreen. "They want to evaluate what the web site is doing for their business and bottom line."

But, singling out exactly which areas need improving isn't as easy as it sounds, partly due to the sheer amount of data that can be pulled from a web site, which can be overwhelming.

Web analytics experts will always tell their clients that getting the most out of web site data is simply a case of asking the right questions. That means asking for information that can be acted upon to improve sites and campaigns.

So, Revolution put the experts to the test and set out to discover the most useful and important questions that a marketer can ask. And here's the top 10.

Q1: What do I want to measure?

The glib answer is anything, so long as it is tied into the company's business or marketing objectives, but this can be half the problem. "One challenge is that clients don't always know what they can measure and what it can tell them," says Conrad Bennett, technical services director at WebTrends.

Site Intelligence MD David Jackson suggests going back to basics: "Where are you spending money, as you want to measure the ROI on what you're spending?" he asks. A firm investing in an email marketing or pay-per-click (PPC) campaign could start by asking what impact these campaigns have on their site visitors and measuring how many convert into buyers. Sometimes the results may indicate that a campaign is not working, which means the company may want to redirect its spend.

"If my paid-search campaigns aren't performing, I'll want to eliminate them and leave only those campaigns that are performing to stop the drain on my budget," says ClickTracks VP Michael Stebbins. "Importantly, you need to look at the return over time as people will often respond to a campaign, but perhaps not make a purchase on their first visit," adds Jackson.

Q2: What do I need to improve on my web site?

This key question relates back to why an organisation created its site in the first place and every company should ask it, regardless of their target audience.

Singling out which areas need improving isn't easy, partly due to the sheer amount of data that can be pulled from a site. The trick, says Ian Roddis, web site co-ordinator at the Open University, is transforming data into 'intelligence'. "For a number of months we've had a sense of visitor patterns - how long visitors stay on the site, conversion ratios - but, when you make it into intelligence by tying it into your business or marketing strategy, that's when you produce the real insights, the real 'wows'."

Q3: What are visitors doing (or not doing) on my site?

In essence, this question reveals how successful a site is in achieving its aims. "If you have a content-based site, is the number of content pages per visitor increasing or decreasing? This could give you an idea of whether the content is working or how many loyal visitors are coming to your site," explains Sean Burton, lead technical consultant at Foviance. Acting on this information is where the value of web analytics comes in.

Analysing visitor activity can have unexpected surprises. "One thing we noticed from analysing our home page was that some of the most popular things people want to look at are sites relating to last night's programmes, but a lot of promotions on our home page are about tonight's TV," says Louise Brown, head of operations at Channel 4 New Media, which uses Omniture's web analytics technology. Results are only as good as the quality of the data analysed, so it's vital to consider this when making decisions and ensure data is as accurate as possible.

Q4: Which campaigns and partnerships produce the highest return?

Web analytics tools use sophisticated logic to determine which channels - search, banners, email, user reviews, blogs or other ads - have delivered visitors to a site. This data is invaluable in revealing whether a campaign has succeeded and where they should be investing their marketing spend.

The challenge lies in determining what provides the highest return as it depends, once again, on the company's marketing. E-commerce web site owners should note that the channel delivering the most click-throughs doesn't always generate the highest returns.

Jim Sterne, president of the Web Analytics Association and Target Marketing, cites the example of US store Macy's, which, some years ago, was deciding whether to continue supporting Mac users as most of its visitors used PCs. "The guy in IT said, 'wait a minute let's look at conversion rates'," recalls Sterne. "And they found the conversion rate for PC users was about two per cent, but 30 per cent for Mac users. The IT guy said, 'I don't know why that's true, but it's worth our while to carry on supporting Mac users'."

One of the biggest benefits of web analytics is the insight it delivers across all campaigns. "For some of the people we work with, the biggest benefit is being able to see how key campaigns working together have derived much better results than if they had run individually," says Lynchpin's Hood.

Q5: How does offline marketing affect online sales, and vice-versa?

As well as showing which of your online campaigns work best, web analytics can reveal valuable information on the performance of offline activity. A popular strategy is to use above-the-line ads to direct viewers to a microsite; it is then just a case of measuring how many people visit it to determine the online traffic generated by the campaign.

The reverse - tracking the effect of online marketing on offline purchasing - is not so easy and involves some guesswork. One of Site Intelligence's clients, a big retailer, claims to be able to predict stock demand in-store from the browsing activity on its site, but that's unusual. Typically, it is difficult for a retailer without any actual results to determine whether shoppers are just browsing before going in-store to buy or buying elsewhere.

Site owners can track links to 'Contact us' pages to see if there is any correlation with a rise in call-centre traffic, which some luxury travel firms do, says Hood. "If a travel agent is selling high-value products, a phone call provides an opportunity to upsell," he adds. Importantly, the web site owner can attribute the telephone call back to the online marketing, which requires integration of call-centre sales with online marketing results.

Q6: Which search terms (paid and organic) work?

Search marketing is a significant channel and accounts for the biggest chunk of online ad spend for many brands. Web analytics tools can collect data on incoming traffic from different search engines. As with other marketing channels, whether a keyword is 'working' or not isn't just determined by the amount of traffic it generates; the ROI also needs to consider what users do on the site and whether they accomplish their goal, be it to buy something or sign up for a newsletter.

The organic search results that deliver users to a site can also provide interesting insights, says Sterne of the WAA. "Did the person who wrote my web site copy use some strange vocabulary that causes the wrong people to come to my site, for instance, or are people finding me as I use a word once, so I should be using it more on my site to bump up my rankings?"

Q7: Who are my key customer segments?

For many organisations, segmentation is one of the holy grails of web analytics. The Open University has started to create profiles of its site visitors to find out more about its unknown visitors or 'ghosts', as Roddis calls them. He explains: "We have 'dwellers' who stay on our web site for 30 minutes or more, visit many web different pages and may or may not buy; 'dippers' who look at one or two pages and then disappear, and various other categorisations. The idea of using a tool like Site Intelligence is to see what they're doing on the site."

"For the majority of web sites, individual visitor analysis isn't realistic," reckons WebTrend's Bennett. "So, site owners will be more interested in breaking down the mass of visitors to their site into segment profiles." These can be fairly simple, such as new versus returning visitors or buyers versus browsers, or more complex groupings. Armed with this information, site owners can then think about how they target individual segments in order to increase the effectiveness of their campaigns or convert more visitors into profitable customers.

Q8: Who else in the firm could benefit from this data?

Web analytics originated in the IT department, providing information on the performance of web servers to webmasters, but savvy marketers realised the data they were pulling out could help them to target their ad spend more effectively.

In the same way, web analytics is expected to permeate other areas of an organisation to improve its understanding of customers. Certainly, at Channel 4, everyone involved in new business, down from chief executive Andy Duncan, uses the data, says Brown.

At the Open University, Roddis believes call-centre staff could benefit from using the data as it improves their understanding of consumer behaviour. "We've seen an increase in the sophistication of enquiries, as people have spent an hour looking at our web site before calling us," he explains.

What's important for any employee using the data is that it is presented in a way that's relevant to their role. "It needs to be a case of not just giving someone a report but explaining why what it reveals is a good thing or not," says WebTrends' Bennett.

Q9: What other methods can I use to measure my site?

"What web analytics does very well is to tell you where you might have a problem, but what it doesn't tell you is why the problem exists," says Matthew Tod, chief executive at Logan Tod. Consequently, over the past four years his agency's approach has been to combine web analytics with surveys and usability tests to help clients improve web site performance.

He continues: "The first question you want to ask a visitor is 'why are you here today?' because if the purpose of their visit is to book a holiday and people are leaving on the first page you know you've got a real problem. But, if the purpose of their visit is to find out information on the Caribbean and they're not in the market to buy yet, you've got a different issue."

As every digital marketer knows, customers are only one click away from the competition and, more often than not, a web site owner will have no indication if a visitor has received a bad experience on its site as the visitor will simply leave without any explanation. To find out why, site owners can boost their web analytics by engaging with visitors via small, pop-up surveys, in-depth reports, focus groups or one-to-one usability studies.

Q10: What's the next question?

"It sounds flippant, but it's really interesting as people get so far in looking at reports and then say, 'wait a minute, I'm going to have to make a decision'," says Sterne. "Ask yourself what else is there to learn, what else can I compare the data with, how else can I slice and dice it? Perhaps talk to somebody who has helped other companies and has different questions to you."

Organisations can no longer rely on refreshing their web site every few years because consumers are a lot more demanding and the industry moves incredibly fast. "If someone is having problems on a site, it could have quite a detrimental impact on the company's brand," warns Foviance's Burton.

The message is clear: site owners need to use web analytics in a continual cycle of measurement and optimisation if they want to keep their visitors engaged and improve their online marketing strategy.