Using Web Metrics to your advantage

You want people to have a great experience using your site. But how will you ever know? Will you ask them? Sometimes that’s effective, but how many people really have the time or inclination to fill in a feedback form or send you an email with their thoughts and experiences? Are all the people who are kind enough to do this an accurate representation of the people that visit your site? Your goal should be to track what people are doing on your site – where they’re clicking or where they’re getting stuck and inevitably leave your site.

You could bring focus groups into expensive testing labs and record your subjects actions on the site, asking them questions about the site and their interactions with it, but this takes time and money – time to find the right people that represent your target market and collate and document all the responses, money to get them interested in helping you test your application, and more money to hire the necessary equipment to perform these tests. Not a particularly attractive concept in the current state of our economy.

But there are other options available which can give you the metrics required to establish what your potential customers are or aren’t doing on your site. There are tools which you can implement to execute the appropriate tests and gain the necessary metrics, some of which we discuss in our previous post “Helpful tools for tracking user behaviour.” But to delve deeper into establishing what works and what doesn’t work on your site, we’ll highlight a few additional tools and methods.

Split A/B Testing

It’s often difficult to decide if a particular design layout has the desired effect. In fact, with so many design options available to us, choosing a single layout can be a stressful process. An image, the placement of a text block, or an action button, can all have a significant impact on how successful your design and layout strategy is. The best option is to let your customers tell you which one works by tracking their actions around your site. Split Testing allows you to show different layout variations of certain elements to different groups of site visitors, and to track which one is the most likely to deliver the desired result.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

SEO provides a substantial amount of data pertaining to the visibility of your site on Google and takes into consideration fundamental elements, namely keywords, links and search impressions. Google’s Webmaster Tools are useful for SEO purposes, and provide important information on various technical aspects of your site, such as broken links, HTML problems and duplicate Meta.

With constant monitoring of your site, these issues can be addressed as and when they happen. You also receive insight into page load time, an important factor of client satisfaction, and will be able to identify which keywords (on various search engines, i.e. Google, Yahoo) bring the most traffic to your site. With this knowledge, you can equip yourself with the advice you need in order to ensure optimum results are realised.

There are numerous tools and methods available to track the performance and usability of your site and it can be difficult or even overwhelming to decide on a starting point. We recommend that you get your SEO right first by putting Google Analytics in place, and then supplement that with user feedback surveys and forms. Once you are confident with gathering and understanding this data, you can move on to Split A/B Testing and other more advanced methods such as goal tracking and heat maps.

Metrics is about applying a layer of tracking, understanding it and then implementing the next layer. Each layer helps you refine the previous layer’s metrics and once you’ve got the correct layers carefully in place, you’ll have the tools you require to fine-tune your site and optimize it to align as closely as possible with your business goals, which is, after all, the goal of your website!