Greetings,
the long-awaited report from our Web Analytic Seminar on May 3rd is finally here. A fantastic development has also taken place in the Swedish Web Analytic arena thank's to this seminar.
Lars Johansson, Web Analytic Professional at Vattenfall - One of Europe's leading Energy Companies, has started Web Analytic Wednesday in Stockholm. Our first meeting on May 10th (a week after the seminar) had 6 happy people attending and our upcoming event on June 14th has already attracted 15 people.
If you're interested in joining Lars's network of Web Analytic Professional - come to the next Web Analytic Wednesday on June 14th hosted by Alenio.Se.
===> REPORT FROM IMC'S ONE DAY KICK-OFF ABOUT WEB ANALYTICS
On May 3rd an excited group of people gathered in Stockholm for a full day about Web Analytic. The event was hosted by Websidestory and Two and together with IMC's network of people a group of 40 professionals had gathered.
~ 1. The first speaker, Mikael Karlsson of Resoner.Nu - the leading resource for Web Analytic Professionals in Scandinavia introduced the day by setting the "Standards" that everyone in the Industry should know about.
- What's the difference between Hit's, Page Views and Uniqe Visitors was discussed together with a brief history of Web Analytic in Scandinavia.
- In the 90´s it was all about the logg-file, said Mikael. Today its all about tagging up the pages and send the data to a central server.
Mikael explained the difficulties in delivering the right data to the right people in a company; What kind of statistics should the sales-force have? How much data do a CEO want and so forth.
The dominating way of ranking sites in Scandinavia 2006 is through calculation of unique Browsers that access a site. To view the current report - go to http://www.resoner.nu/nordtop.asp?p_id=58&nav1=5&nav2=50.
Mikael ended his session by talking about a panel of 8,000 individuals that the company Orvesto is planning to assemble in order to interview them regularly about their surfing behaviour.
~ 2. Second speaker: Fulton Yancy from Websidestory.Com discussed the need for a Strategy with Web Analytics
What is the working purpose for a Web Analyst?
- To analyze (obviously)
- To sort the data
- To guide other people about the data in hand
- To act and change according to the data assembled
Fulton then gave analyst example from the advertising world:
- How many exposures did an ad have?
- How many did actually see the actual ad?
- If you're receiving the data from the publisher, how can you verify the data?
As a wrap up he gave us a few advice:
- Try and measure the whole process - from first impression to an actual purchase
- Focus on Quality instead of Quantity in the data analyzis
And a big No on how not to do: Code first - ask questions later?- No - think analyzis when you build your web, not after!
~ 3. Third speaker, Stefan Helgesson from Two about Search Engine Optimization and Web Analytics
Stefan started about the need to get "natural listings" from Search Engines for a web site. If you get your site listed correctly (without the need for search advertising) the return on investment is 20 to 30 times higher than on comparative ads.
Its important to know your customer, so when you optimize for Search you should define your audience first. Is it a national or international audience for example? is one of the many questions you need to ask yourself before optimizing.
Mr. Helgesson then continued with talks about Conversion rates. He stated that Amazon.Com has the highest conversion rates of all - around 8%. 1 % in sales means a 50 Million US$ change.
The Conversion rate from search engines is very much dependent on the match to your selected key words.
Stefan had finally some interesting statistics about how much time different parts of the Search Results is looked upon:
- Title 31%
- Description 43%
- Domain 21%
- Other 5% (categories etc)
~ 4. Our fourth speaker for the day came from SVTi, the Interactive part of Swedish Public Service Television, Björn F. Johansson
What do you measure when you don't "sell" something? That was Björn's starting point as SVT is a public sector company.
SVT looks at pageviews, visits, unique visitors (browsers), time spent, and video (streaming that started).
SVT's Key Performance Indicators is:
- Frequency of Visits
- Pages per visits
- % of visitors that see's WebTV
- % of members that login
Björn is trying to segment between different types of visitors and analyze the difference between them. In the end its about adopting the site so it fits different user groups.
~ 5. The fifth speaker was Mr. Steve Jackson from Conversion Chronicles
** E-Commerce **
Steve started by giving an example from http://autom.com/. At Autom they had put behavioural flags on people's visits; Page views per session and average session time.
After analyzing visitors behaviour at Autom the question arose why people spent more than 10 minutes on the site when it actually took only 5 minutes to buy?
It turned out that the internal search engine couldn't handle both figures and letters at the same time. When someone searched for a product (instead of browsing to it) - they usually got an error page. It was a simple problem to fix, but it was only after a thorough analysis that it was found.
** Branding **
To analyze a sites brand-value are much more difficult than analyzing e-commerce site.
What Mr. Jackson recommends was to put a value to each visitor depending on which section they visit. For example the career-section, the share-holder section or the end user section - each section should have different values.
These values can then be aggregated to see how much a site is worth in terms of respective section and give a call to action - which parts of the site should we invest in more (or less)?
~ 6. No six in order was Mr. Stefan Helgesson from Two about the Value of Internet Marketing
A recent study had shown that only 5% of 250 surveyed Marketing Executives actually knew the value of Internet Marketing.
Mr. Helgesson suggested that as a Marketing Executive you need to have a strategy for long term measurement:
- Segment your buyers so you can differentiate between surfers and buyers
- Learn how to "cross-sell" by analyzing peoples buying pattern
- Funnel Analysis gives you the possibility to see which part of your web site actually convert most to buyers - interesting!!
and more.
In the end, you can measure everything on the web - you just need to do it!
~ 7. Mr. Fulton Yancy of Websidestory returned to talk about Internal Search Engines
Internal Search Engines are often forgotten but oh so important for the users. Put a Search button strategically in people's "faces" when they come to your e-commerce site and you will see how happy they are to use them.
If you then start to analyze your searchers behaviour you can start to change your website in order to get people where they want faster = more opportunities to sell (less time spent on searching).
A trend is to start adopt the web site in "real time" during a Search'ers visit: Behaviour driven website is a new keyword for our Industry.
It's also easy to forget the "error" results from searches. What were the searcher actually trying to find and can we help the next searcher so he can find it?
Mr. Yancy concluded that a good internal Search Engine increases a sites value.
~ 8. Final session from Mr. Stefan Helgesson of Two - Key Performance Indicators
When developing Key Performance Indicators for your website
- make sure that everyone in the company agrees upon them
- check that all methods and tools are used properly
- think "trend" when you use KPI - is it a positive or negative trend
Example of popular KPI's:
Conversion rates - ratio visitor compared to order
Average order value
Visit Value
Customer loyalty - ratio of new vs. excisting customers
Stickiness - ratio of visitors that arrives at pre-defined key-pages (example campaign-page or order-page)
Search engine referrals - how many visitors from Search Engines.
~ Wrap up by Mr.Lennart Svanberg, IMC
I thank all the speakers and delegates that was present during the day. Everyone seemed to enjoy it and so far the evalutions have said the same.
I personally think that User-Driven Websites are the key to more success in the competitive on-line landscape of 2006 and in order to have this - you need to analyze your website visitors behaviour.
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Thank you for reading IMC-Update
Lennart Svanberg,
Editor IMC-Update
info@imc.st
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