Web Analytic Matt

Top 5 Performance Boosting Techniques For Your Website Using Web Analytics
Matt Hopkins posted in Web Analytics on March 30th, 2007

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

You have a website, its ticking along nicely, you get some revenue from it and it provides you with a reasonable web presence.

I’m going to make the bold claim that web analytics can boost the performance of ANY website. But it can also just provide some pretty numbers and graphs that give you no value whatsoever.

In order to achieve the former situation you need a little expertise. Hopefully this post can provide you with some real techniques to start improving your website performance. Importantly, this post assumes that you have a pretty good web analytics application like Google Analytics or Unica NetTracker.

Technique #1 - Conversion Metric
This shoud be the basis of most of your basic web analysis. Your analytics tool should allow you to define a conversion metric for your website.

A conversion is where a visitor to your website has carried out an action on your site which benefits your campany goals. This could be that they have purchased a product online, they have given you their contact information and become a lead, or even that they stayed for longer than 5 minutes.

So a conversion event should be based upon some form of trackable visitor behaviour.

Once you have this conversion metric you can then use it in conjunction with some of your web analytics reports to fine the best converting traits of your website visitors.

Technique #2 - Referrer Report
The referrer report shows you where your website traffic has come from. This is useful information as you can define which web links drive the greatest levels of traffic to your site.

For example, if wikipedia links drive hundreds of visitors to your website then you may wish to add more links on wikipedia or other wiki sites to drive greater levels of traffic to your site.

Quantity is not necessarily quality
This is where your conversion metric can help fine tune your link building. By creating a report of your referrers then applying the conversion metric you can see which referrers give you the most benefit.

It may be that wiki sites give you the most traffic but that directory sites give you the highest levels of conversions.

Then your actions would be to increase the number of links to your site on web directories. This is because a referrer that provides 50% converting traffic is better than one that gives a 2% conversion rate. So build up the levels of the best converting traffic.

This same concept of using conversion rate as a Key Performance Indicator can be used in conjunction with other wb factors such as keyword, page, content area, geographic region of visitor, visitor path and advert landing pages.

Technique #3 - Path Reports
A path report shows the most popular visitor paths through your website.

By using your path report in conjunction with conversion rate you can decide which path you want to drive visitor traffic down.

Another good way of using path reports is to identify the most popular path overall. Once this has been identified you can then use this information to plant calls to action along this path in order to increase your conversion rate.

In my experience I have found that it is often easier to increase the conversion rate of your most popular path than it is to drive more people down a high converting path. This is your ideal path may not be the ideal path of your visitors, and changing their behavioural patterns is often very difficult.

Technique #4 - Scenario Funnels
A scenario funnel or funnel report is one that look at a single path through your website or a website process like a checkout process on an e-commerce website.

Using a scenario funnel you can identify where your visitors are failing to reach each stage of a website process or path. You also get provided with a conversion rate for each stage within that one website process. This can be very useful for finding out what stage of the process is failing at to what extent.

Lets use the checkout process as an example. The diagram below is from Unica NetInsight.

The 3 stages that we want to look at are

1. Entering the checkout
2. Entering credit card and personal details
3. Confirming your delivery address

As we can see from the graph above there is a huge drop in conversions from stage 2 to stage 3.

Using this basic information we can then decide whether to investigate why stage 3 is causing people to drop out of the checkout process. Or you may decide to remove stage 3 entirely which increases your conversion rate immediately from 4.9% to 22.3%. That alone could be a huge jump in website revenue.

There are of course certain limitations to scenario funnels which should be understood when looking at these types of reports. An explanation of these limitation can be found here. Understanding Funnel Reports

Technique #5 - Content Groups
A content group is a way of clustering related website content together. This adds value to your web analytics by creating a form of business context around your website content.

This means that you can compare the content areas that matter to you and your business.

The advantage of this is that it too can be used in conjunction with your conversion metric, showing which area of content contributes the most towards conversions.

Obviously the action to take from this information is to create more of the best converting content. Bare in mind that could be articles, but it could also be product categories, products or even popular downloads.