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Determine Needs
Most business websites offer visitors a number of activities to engage in that will satisfy the visitor's goals and contribute to the businesses' bottom line. These activities usually consist of a multi-step process by which visitors can fulfill their intentions. It is important to make these processes as user friendly as possible for customer satisfaction and for business success.
The most important of these processes is that which culminates in a purchase through a sales path. A typical sales path has three or four steps, including a shopping cart. Unfortunately, the road to "ka-ching" is fraught with abandonment. Shopping cart abandonment rates still hover between 50 and 60 percent. This means that more than half of the online shopping carts are abandoned. DoubleClick estimates that shopping cart abandonment results in $4.51 of lost revenue for every $1.00 of revenue made from sales.
Analytics process analysis tools enable the measurement of loss between any two steps in your sales path, also providing the total loss from start to finish. Knowing which steps have the highest abandonment rate will identify areas for improvement. Loss reduction at any step within your sales path should have a positive effect on your overall conversion rate.
- Identify Goals
The next step is to identify the key activities and actions that you want to improve, quantifying your objectives. Your objectives will depend on the nature of your business website. For instance, you might state an objective to "increase website widget sales by 10 percent in January by reducing the steps in the conversion funnel from four to three." Note that it is important to define a specific change and set expected goals.
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Four Commercial Website Archetypes
There is consensus in the web analytics community that there are four classifications for commercial websites: e-commerce sites, content sites, lead generation sites and self-service sites. Below are some
generic objectives for the four basic commercial websites. This information can be helpful in defining your own business objectives. -
E-commerce Sites
The objective is to increase sales and decrease marketing expenses. Basic measures include sales, returns and allowances, sales per visitor, cost per visitor and conversion rate. Advanced measures include inventory mix, trend reporting, satisfaction, RFM and other predictive modeling techniques. -
Content Sites
The objective is to increase readership- level of interest and time spent on the site (stickiness). Basic measures include visit length, page views, and number of subscriptions and cancelled subscriptions. -
Lead-Generation Sites
The objective is to increase and segment lead generation. Basic measures include white paper downloads, time spent on the site, newsletter opt-ins, reject rates on contact pages and leads-to-close ratio. -
Self-Service Sites
The objective is to increase customer satisfaction and decrease customer support inquiries. Basic measures include a decrease in visitor length or fewer calls to a call center, as these are measures of customer satisfaction.
With clearly defined objectives and a good analytics tool, the job of measurement becomes a reality. Your objectives state what you want to do with your website or your marketing campaigns. Keep in mind that your objectives must be quantified:
- 100 qualified leads per month
- Gross product sales of $1 million in the next quarter
- 50 newsletter subscriptions per month
- 100 website registrations per month
Once defined, objectives should be broken down into small steps, prioritized, and made accountable.
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Define Metrics
Given that you can measure and analyze a vast array of website data, it is important to know what to measure to improve your business results. This suggests bottom-line variables such as costs and revenues. What business processes impact costs and revenues? Once you identify these, you can manipulate them to achieve higher profits. Below are some questions you might ask to identify important metrics for analysis.
- Are you attracting unique visitors to your site?
- Are visitors spending time on your site, and if so, where?
- How well do you convert visitors on your site?
- Does your site navigation help visitors accomplish their intended actions?
- What behavior shows that a visitor is ready to buy?
- How does the behavior of customer segments differ?
- How can profiling help you cross-sell and up-sell?
- What is your churn rate?
- How do you describe your best customers?
- How do you measure loyalty
Once you've identified your most important processes leading to conversion, you must set clear, quantifiable goals for improvement.
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