All posts tagged web site goals
Assign Values and Know Where Your Bottom Line Stands
Assigning values in the context of analytics is essentially about measuring the number of conversions. It is very important from the point of view of the publisher because the revenue received is based on the number of conversions. Just as important for the advertiser because assigning values helps to keep tabs on revenue stream. One way of objectively measuring this is by assigning values to conversions.
This involves three simple steps:
1. Specify a name that you will recognize when viewing the goals within each set of your reports. Example: ”email sign-up”, newsletter sign-up, or “article ABC download.”
2. Identify up to ten pages in a defined funnel. Funnels are optional, but defining one shows you where visitors drop off during the path to completing a goal.
3. Assign a value for the goal. Google Analytics uses an assigned goal value to calculate ROI, per visit goal value and other important metrics. A good way to value a goal is to evaluate how often the visitors who reach the goal become customers. For example, if you are able to close 10% of your prospects/leads that are generated via your contact us page and your average transaction is $500, then you might assign $50 (i.e. 10% of $500) to your “Contact Me” goal. In contrast, if only 1% of mailing list signups result in a sale, you might only assign $5 to your “email sign-up” goal.
Web analytics allow you to define a dollar value to any goal you define. When you do not assign goal values then you are omitting key data. Goal values give a holistic view of which traffic sources perform the best. Some common examples of defining goals are lead generation forms or purchased products. Secondary goals could be posting a comment or entering a contest.
You can then measure the real performance of traffic coming to your site by using the goal conversion rate, which essentially treats all goals equally by adjusting the weight for each goal against the per visit goal value. You may discover that your email campaigns have a higher conversion rate compared to your PPC campaigns but a lower per visit goal value.
In the case of pay per click (PPC) campaigns, goal values can help you determine the true value of each active campaign. Comparing revenue per click against cost per click is essential information for determining how to best optimize your PPC spending. You could be under spending on a PPC campaign that has a low average conversion rate but high revenue per click and, vice versa, over spending on a PPC campaign that has a high average conversion rate but low revenue per click, and you wouldnt know unless you actually assign goal values.
Above all, assigning values helps you to showcase the dollar value of your site to the website’s stakeholders. Theres no value in saying, Our site has 355 newsletter signups, 260 comments, 20 leads generated from submissions, 900 social shares, 76 RSS subscriptions, and 286 account registrations. The true value is in saying all this, and adding the all-important rider: ….This represents $50,000 in value to our business, up 20% from last month.
Think Like a End User, Not a Site Owner
As a site owner, you may have created the worlds best website, you may believe it is the elephant in the room, which no one can ignore. Cheers, but are there any suitors for your elephant? Is it drawing in the traffic? Is it paying you dividends? If silence is your answer, then let the truth be told. Successful, prosperous websites are gauged by traffic (to a degree) and meeting website goals and not by buzz. And to reach the pinnacle of successful online is to think like an end user, not a site owner. Below are some ideas to help you with your transition from site owner to end-user.
Is Your Message Mixed?
Make the sites goal loud and clear. If you are selling French perfumes online, push it to the forefront of the site, rather than splash images that do not call for measurable and tangible action.
Blend Your Design With Content
Too much design, too little content, is like gloss that ends up as gross. The content has to be populated the right way, across the shell, homepages, section pages and interior pages. Dont be mesmerized by design, but dont give it a cold shoulder either. Form should follow functionality, and not the other way round.
Ease of Navigation
How does your navigation link work? Is it easy to use or a potential trap for visitors? A visitor should not feel challenged. He should be able to go where he/she wants on your site, quickly and easily, period. Using a search box on the site is the way to go, to get your visitors to their product/service directly.
Do Not Ignore The Shopping Cart
There are a million shopping carts out on the web, so you should know how to pick and choose the right one with the right fit for your site. Default shopping carts are best avoided; always go for a branded shopping cart, to lend credibility and confidence to your purchaser. You cannot be too careful when it involves your customers money!
How to Remain in Style Always
On the web, todays trends are pass tomorrow. Its the perils of e-commerce evolution. So how do you retool your sites design that might look archaic sooner than you think? Redesign your site? But its like a journey without end. The trick is to realign, not redesign. Think up ways to realign your sites features with changing trends on the go.
Be Consistent
Everyone loves to experiment, but dont throw consistency out the window! In the hands of a professional web designer, your site will wear a consistent look standard formatting of fonts, links, colors, etc. This is lost when you do the edits or touch up the site yourself, banking on your rudimentary knowledge of simple HTML by adding new content pages. A small change leads to inconsistent formatting which might put off a visitor.
You Have Got Mail
You may have experienced this before: Impressed by the touch and feel of a great looking site, you look to see up the owners phone number and you get lost, making you wonder for a moment, that the customer (the site owner) may be in hiding! Dont make the simple mistake of sending your prospects hunting for your contact. Put your phone number/contact details in a prominent position.
Cash in on Merchandising Opportunities
Never miss up on an opportunity to make that extra dollar. Merchandising opportunities abound for your website, such as cross-sell, multiple add-to-cart, and other direct call-to-actions.
Practicing the above, especially as you foresee future growth and create a larger bouquet of offerings, will get you on your way to becoming the successful, prosperous site you once thought you had.
What Goal Type Are You?
Talking about goals is an old topic in the world of analytics but one worth repeating. Enabling goals is one of the best ways to assess how well your site meets its business objectives. The hardest part for most website owners always seems to be identifying what goal type to use. A goal can be any activity on your website thats important to the success of your business. An account signup or request for a sales call are two examples of a goal. No website is immune from setting up a goal, especially if you would like to:
1. Understand how much time visitors stay or, more importantly, do not stay on your site.
2. Try to minimize the amount of time people spend on a specific section of your site (ex. support section)
3. Move visitors from one time-based goal to the next (i.e. from 2 to 5 minutes, 5 to 10 minutes, etc.) Every website should have at least one goal, especially now since Google Analytics allows for up to 20 goals. Let’s take a look at the different variations of goals to choose from.
Time Based Goals
Time based goals can be set if you would like to measure a specific amount of time a visitor has spent on your website. Simply edit the goal by entering in the hours, minutes and seconds that you would like a visitor to spend on your site before a goal is counted. You can even track a time based goal if a visitor does not reach a certain period of time on your site simply by setting the condition to “less than”.
Pageview Based Goals
This is similar to time based goals except you are tracking goals when a visitor exceeds (or doesn’t exceed) a certain number of pages. The same conditions apply, meaning greater than or less than and the number of pageviews you would like to set up as a goal for each visitor.
URL Destination Goals
Identifying a specific URL destination has alway been the traditional method of tracking goals in Google Analytics. To define a goal in Google Analytics, you specify the page that visitors see once they have completed the activity. For an account sign-up, you might set the Thank You for signing up page as a goal. For this type of goal, you can even enable a funnel to see where visitors have dropped off in the process. The trick here is determining the type of “match” for your URL. Google has three to choose from. I recommend visiting the following URL for more information on match types – http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en_US&answer;=72285&utm;_id=ad
Downloads
This is a variation from the other three goals but worth mentioning as many sites have downloadable files. The beauty of setting a download as a goal is that you can assign a value, just like the other three goals mentioned. The only difference being is that file downloads can occur multiple times during one visitor session whereas any other type of goal can only happen once during a visit. So, for example, if a visitor comes to your site and downloads 5 PDF files during a single session, and each file is worth, say, $5, then you would accumulate 5 transactions totaling $25.
Setting goals is not a difficult process but rather a thought process. With that said, keep the below points in mind and you will be on your way to successful tracking.
Consider organizing goals by function (i.e. by time, download, etc.)
- A visitor can only convert at each goal once per visit.
- If you have multiple goals then consider consolidating into one profile in order view them all in one interface
- Creating new goals will not modify your historical data, only future data
- Add a value for each goal
Is Event Tracking One of Your New Year’s Resolutions?
It’s a new year and a fresh start. For some, that means resolutions and goals for 2010. Okay. I realize that dropping a few pounds and not smoking are ideal resolutions but what about goals for your website? To me, setting up a goal would be just as easy as not touching that piece of chocolate cake.
The process of establishing website goals begins with identifying and then tracking specific events on your website. Alas, most analytics programs, Google specifically, give us the ability to track a wide variety of events visitors take on websites and then act on those results to improve upon your website’s performance.
The first of the two-step process begins with you, the site owner, asking questions in order to determine what event it is you would like to track. For example, if you have an e-commerce site then you would probably want to know how many sales were generated last week or last month. That seems obvious. But, have you ever wondered how many people are clicking on Product A on the products page? For non-e-commerce related sites, you might ask yourself whether people are opting-in your recurring e-newsletter or downloading the latest e-newletter in PDF format.
Event tracking really depends on the specific goals and needs of your site, and what you want to track. Nonetheless, you should be tracking some type of event because when a visitor interacts with a video player or game on your website, no pageview is generated, thus making it difficult to measure.
Here are some common events that are tracked that do not generate pageviews:
- Clicks on links that take the visitor to another site
- Clicks on an image or button (ex. Facebook icon or shop now button)
- Banner Ad clicks
- File downloads (ex. PDF)
- Page widgets
- E-commerce activity/shopping cart purchases
- Member functions (ex. tracking new member sign-ups, log-ins, etc.)
- Flash, Ajax and Javascript related contentPlay button on a video or audio
Tracking specific events, the second part of the process, is relatively easy. If you are using Google Analytics, then all you need to do is call the _trackEvent() method each time you want to register an event such as how many clicks to an external link or video downloads. For example, if you want to track how many people clicked on the “follow us” Twitter icon/link on your web page then the code would look something like this:
The “Home”, “Follow” and “Twitter” identifiers represent the category, action and label so you can view the specific results for this event right in your Analytics account. It’s really that simple. For more information on setting up event tracking in Google Analytics visit: http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/eventTrackerGuide.html
Remember, event tracking is there to help improve your overall online sales and marketing goals and allow you to have a better understanding of your visitors’ actions. Now, isn’t this a resolution worth sticking with?
Web Site Success Comes With Goals, Not Design
It’s amazing there are still business owners who just don’t understand the fundamentals of owning a web site. With all the buzz about technology and social media, the primary focus always appears to be on web design. True, web design is important. Especially when it comes to branding. But good web site design and layout is not rocket science given the plethora of open source solutions and software available on the Internet.
Truth be told, the success of any web site will depend on more than just design. Besides, just having a web site isn’t good enough anymore. If a business is spending money on a web site, shouldn’t there be some talk about a return on investment? With no cookie cutter approach to count on, we can take a look at some guidelines for establishing goals to measure that return.
Before you even start the design and development of your web site, ask what you want to accomplish with your web site and what type of desired result you seek not only for you but also for your visitors.
- Describe what you want to accomplish with as much clarity and detail as possible. If your goal is to provide information to the public or generate product brand awareness, don’t just state that. Write down exactly how you are going to provide information or generate product awareness. You should also state exactly how and when you will evaluate your progress.
- Break your web site goal(s) into smaller, obtainable minor goals. For example, if you sell multiple products organized in multiple categories, then establish a goal for each category or each product web page. This will help identify areas of strengths and weaknesses on your way to evaluating your overall web site goal.
- Establish goals you know you are actually capable of obtaining. If the goal is to generate new leads but you get very little site traffic, then set your sites low. Be realistic. It’s better to reach your goal regardless of how small than to not reach it at all. That will allow you to better determine what works or doesn’t work.
- Set goals by time and/or importance into specified target dates. For example, if you are trying to sell products for the holiday season or communicating the latest product or service information to customers, then make sure you note your start and completion dates.
- If your goal is to obtain new web site visitors and customers, then your site should be centered around the relevant keywords that new customers would use to search for your site.
Whether it’s increasing traffic, converting customers or just simply sharing information, having clear, established goals and objectives will prevent you from performing unnecessary analysis. It will also help you better understand your web site’s successes and failures and allow you fix and improve your web site. Otherwise, you will never be satisfied with the results regardless of the design.
