One of the best things you can do to wring more ROI out of your website is to optimize for desired business results like sales leads.  Few clients are doing this yet.  Why?  Not in their habit path, no one understands it, or sometimes even worse — they are making faith based assumptions (“I think this is going to work”) and gambling their web results on guesswork.  WebFadds provides testing services, and to help you understand more about them and how to be successful with them — here are some strategies and tactics with visuals to help:

• Measurable Desired Business Outcome(s):  What is the desired, and measurable result that your MarCom team  wants?  For B2B, this is often leads generated via a lead form, and to track conversion rates, we need a unique “thank you” page that a prospect sees only after filling out the form.  Sometimes it’s “engagement.” Sometimes a download of an important White Paper.  We can’t improve results unless they are well defined and trackable.
• General Factors that Improve Results:
  • The clarity and strength of your value proposition:  Often, clients are unclear on the question of why choose this company and its product or service.  Another mistake is to believe that visitors will choose to surf the site and figure out their value –not true and dangerous for two reasons:  they may not take the time to do this, and even if they do they may take the time, they may form a very different concept of value about your company,  its services and products.   State the value clearly on the testing page.  You have the opportunity to help them visualize and “feel” good about your company — take it.
  • Reduce “friction”:  Anything that feels too hard or takes too long = friction.  Longer forms do not convert as well as shorter forms.
  • Reduce “anxiety”:  People worry about the credibility of a company, and what they will do with email and other personal information.
  • Increase motivation:  Promise them something like a free white paper, etc.

Types of Tests

• VBO – Visitor Behavior Optimization: In VBO, we are interested in the “Why” of visitor behavior, beyond the “What” we get from Analytics. Sometimes “Where” too. One popular method here is to get a heat map of where people click on particular pages, then ask they questions that get to the “why” for the behavior.  This is good to test a design before you even implement it, because the visitors are just reacting to a JPG of the page.  Another type of VBO test you can take is an exit survey to help you answer the “Why” of visitor behavior.  Analytics answers “what” your site visitors do and don’t do, but not why — so the best thing to do is simply ask visitors questions that help you understand more about their behavior relating to your desired business outcomes.
  
  Above are some results of one kind of VBO test we did for Content Marketing Institute , and  for International Performance Group (Click to Enlarge).  It provided feedback on where people tend to click on the page (heatmap at left), and also what they remembered and believed the site to be about.
  
• LPO Landing Page Optimization:  This is probably what I will recommend for this client based on your comments.  Here we focus on improving desired business results on only one page.
  • We work with either Google Website Optimizer, or another good option Visual Website Optimizer.  Each offer certain strengths — VWO offers a WordPress CMS plugin, for example.
  • A/B Test: Here you are testing two separate page designs.  This requires a complete separate design for each page, and approximately 1000 unique visitors for a valid test (see next point).  Google has a short video example:
    
    
  • Multivariate Test: Here you only need one page, but you test different combination of persuasive elements on that page to optimize for desired business outcomes.  One popular set to test is:  Two Headlines, Two Persuasive Images, and Two Calls to action.  You would then be showing six different page element combinations to visitors, so you would need 3000 unique visitors for a valid test (see next point).  Google has a short video example:
    
    

• CRO – Conversion Rate Optimization: This one is similar to the nature of LPO in that you are interested in increasing the number of desired business outcomes, called “conversions” in analytics (when a visitor completes a lead form they “convert” from a visitor to a prospect). The main difference here is that you usually will take a series of pages into consideration — the sales “funnel” leading from your home page to a secondary page to an actual desired outcome page, for example.
  Above (click to enlarge) is a “funnel visualization” (series of pages leading to a goal) for a client that would like to have more visitors download their whitepaper.  CRO often involves looking at which pages are not functioning well to get visitors to complete a desired business outcome, and here one problem is the homepage.  They have no call to action on their home page to funnel visitors to this goal.
• Number of Visitors to get a Valid LPO Test: Think 1000 for an A/B test (500 interact with each page), and 3000 for a 3 element Multivariate Test (500 visitors interact with each of six page element combinations).  Google adwords is an excellent way to gather visitors for a test (figure .50 cents average per click, or $500 for 1000 visitors plus management fee).  CRO tests may require move visitors.  We can give you a quote on managing your PPC ad campaign.

Two Final Pieces of Optimization Test Advice:

• Always be testing — drive this tactic into your marketing culture, and you will definitely see an increase in ROI.
• Avoid the HIPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion), because at best when a C-Level Manager says “I think this will work”, you are gambling on faith instead of asking your prospects and customers directly via VBO, LPO, and CRO testing.

Read more here:  WebFadds VBO-Max Services |  Contact us today for a quote.

Have you spent time in Google Analytics, enjoying the reports, but scratching your head as to what they mean?  What action can you take based on the information you’ve reviewed?

The answer depends on learning what visitor behavior you should watch, based on what business goals you have for visitors to your site. Do you have goals for what you want visitors to do?  Are they tied to dollar values in terms of ROI?  We always advise clients to begin a site design or upgrade by determining “conversion” goals for when visitors “convert” to prospects, leads, and customers.  There’s a debate right now among managers and business owners asking, ‘is Social Media good for ROI’?  You can answer that question, plus gain other actionable insights from your metrics when you set goals for business outcomes, and then use Analytics to determine ways to guide visitors to those outcomes.

Three Google Analytics rules, and five filter strategies to guide you

Three rules of Metric Analysis:

1. Metrics are Secondary, Action is Primary: Use Analytics to gauge Visitor movements toward or away from defined Business Outcomes, and Conversion goals at your site.
   CHALLENGE QUESTION:  What are the three top Business Outcomes you want at your site, and what is a good ROI dollar value for each?
   
   Above (click to enlarge) one way to gauge visitor behavior, leading to a business outcome is through a “funnel analysis” — but this requires that you first identify and set-up dollar value goals
2. Custom Configured Dashboards Reveal Your Next Tactics: Always custom configure your dashboard overview, and never rely on the simple “top 10″ reports.
   CHALLENGE QUESTION:  What actionable Analytics may not be found on standard reports, and further, what important Analytics are three or more clicks deep into your standard reports?
   
   Above is a a customized Google Analytics “Dashboard” — note three important customizations:  Conversions are shown at top under overview, overview shows a specific segment of visitors (returning visitors), and behavior is compared for two different periods (blue and orange lines)
3. Always be Reviewing Visitor Segments.  Always: Every visitor at your site arrives with different intentions and is in search of different goals.  Use “Advanced Segments” to learn how to serve them.
   CHALLENGE QUESTION: What visitor segment bounces away from the same page that other segments continue through to a conversion, and what can you do about that?
   
   Above -  we have filtered the metrics to view the behavior of three custom visitor segments, to see how they relate to key phrases people used to find this client’s site.  The three segments (click to enlarge) are Returning Visitors, Search Engine, and Non-Bounce Visitors.  Below, I’ll recommend five filtering strategies.

Five Filter Strategies: You can create permanent custom filters — I call them globals, and also filter report results on the fly as you review your metrics.

• Well Converting Keywords: Keywords/phrases visitors clicked to arrive at your site, with a per vision goal value of .XX cents or higher.  You’ll then focus on them in future blog posts and articles using SEO-savvy copy writing techniques.
• Make Social Media Prove its Value: Filter to check ROI value for Social Media.  One approach is to filter data from “referring sites”, to see how Social sites like Twitter, FaceBook, and LinkedIN send visitors with good ROI value.
• Who’s not Bouncing?: Study keywords that have a low bounce rate (less than 30%) and that referred at least 2 visitors (the higher the better).
• Follow the Path: Use Path Analysis to determine where your visitors are coming from, and then what pages in sequence they visit at your site.  Then the 46 thousand dollar question… at what page do they leave and how can you prevent that?
• View, Sort, and Filter for Conversions: You can filter just about any report to see if your visitors converted… and why they didn’t.

WebFadds will be applying methods like these in our “Analytics-MAX, Site Goal Service” in 2010, and thanks to recent upgrades to Google Analytics including advanced Segmentation and Filtering, we look forward to a surge this year.  Please contact us today, and we’ll be pleased to return a prompt estimate for your Actionable Analytics needs.