data analysis

10 considerations when building a website in this brave new Social World

August 24, 2011 By Chris Elvery 4 Comments

I’ve been helping businesses to specify their requirements in relation to web sites as effective sales and marketing tools for over 10 years and in that time – apart from the tech, little has changed – until now (well, when I say now, I mean over the last couple of years). If you’re currently looking at improving your website or are in the process of building a new site, then take note, the world has changed and due to the rise (and rise) of Social Media your website today performs a very different role to what it did a few years ago.

1) How well are you currently performing online?
And I don’t just mean traffic to the website, but looking at individual channels into the site – What are the bounce and exit rates? Where is most of your traffic coming from?

How many people are converting to one action against one of your defined key performance indicators? Without this information there’s really no point at even looking to change your web site.

2) What is the extent of your Digital estate?
Is it just a website? Have you engaged in other digitial channels? How active are you in these? What’s working well and not so well? Are they the right channels for your business?

3) How does your website fit into this picture?
Your website is no longer an island in a digital ocean with passing traffic from the odd reference on a 3rd party website or search engines delivering traffic based on key terms – your website should be bang in the middle of the shipping lane, with traffic directed towards it from multiple sources. Your website increasingly is not the place where decisions are made, but more often than not will be made outwith your site, with the site itself just nailing the “sale”.

Having said that we’re not there quite yet, so you still have to consider how your website stacks up, how it interacts, but you also have to be aware that individual pages of your site will be referenced across the web and so each key entry page has to work as hard as the Home page, with consistently placed calls to action (although these may vary based on what you’re trying to achieve on any given page). You need to think of your site as a series of landing pages.

4) What are your competitors up to?
This is very often missed and shouldn’t be, as it gives great insight in to how your competitors interact with their customers. You can use some of the free tools out there such as Yahoo site explorer (http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/uk/) to see what 3rd party links they have pointing into them, a keyword density analyser (I use http://www.ranks.nl/tools/spider.html) to see what they’ve optimised individual pages for, and one of the Social Media monitoring tools (there are loads – Addictomatic/ Twazzup etc) to get a feel for what their customers are saying about them and where they are saying it.

5) What’s the purpose of your site?
Strange question? But I see so many sites that have absolutely no purpose whatsoever other than to look good in the developer’s portfolio. You need to really think what you want to get out of your site, set KPIs so you know when it’s been successful. You also need to understand how the website fits in to your other online activity.

6) Who are your customers? What do they want? Where do they hang out online?
Persona development is key to delivering to your customers the information they want (and the information you want them to know) in the environment that they frequent. There are lots of great articles on persona development and that may be worth exploring in a future blog post, but in essence – consider your top 3 types of customer (there’ll be more, but lets focus on the key ones) – who are they? How tech savvy are they? How do they want information delivered? What are the triggers that will make them engage?

You’ll end up with a profile of your key customers and that’s as good a place as any to start building content which addresses their issues.

7) Content, Content, Content
You may think that you have the greatest website on earth, but is this where your primary engagement with your customers will take place?

I’ve recently undertaken an excercise with a couple of clients whereby we got a large sheet of paper (very high tech I know!) and written down the left column all the information (based on the personans) that we believe customers want to know as well as information that we need to tell them. Across the top we then put up their entire digital estate – blog/ Facebook, youtube, flickR etc. We didn’t take this for granted, we saw based on previous interactions which were working best, others which weren’t working as well and others we hadn’t considered up until the persona exercise. We then decided for each piece of information where it sat and what purpose it performed.

Let’s take an example – “recipes” – the call to action takes place on the website where the recipe is downloaded and they sign up to receive regular recipe updates, but the activity to get them to this point takes place across You Tube (“watch the video on how to make the recipe”); Facebook (“lets discuss the recipe and other ways of making it”); Twitter (Tweets relating to the recipe having just been made and how successful or otherwise it turned out) …..you get the idea.

8) Ensure that your relevant web content is syndicated

Lots of websites have great content which never sees the light of day and there are plenty of other places on the web that would just love to have your Presentation, Whitepaper, Press Release, Video, Images – the list goes on – don’t let your content hide on your site, get it out there (a number of my clients use PixelPipe – http://pixelpipe.com).

9) Ensure that even if your primary call to action is not fulfilled that an engagement mechanism is

This may be “Sign up for a weekly digest of information”; “Use our RSS feed”; “Follow us on Twitter”; “Like us on Facebook” etc). By allowing the customer to engage on their terms, you then have the opportunity to engage with them.

10) Monitor, measure, react, adapt

Lastly, you need to be able to be able to make decisions and refine your strategy – you can’t do this without measurements in place. Decide at the outset what your KPIs are and what you’re going to measure and then review regularly to ensure that you’re on-message.

Filed Under: behavioral targeting, data analysis, emetrics, Google Analytics, landing page optimization

Lies, Damn Lies and Info-graphics

July 21, 2011 By admin 2 Comments

Should we just consider badly constructed Info-Graphics as nothing more than pieces of “Graphic Art”, or should the potential to mislead be a serious concern to us all?

The persuasive power of numbers, in the form of statistics, has been used and abused by everyone with an argument to make since the first abacus was invented. However as we all know pictures “speak a thousand words” and the growth of Info-graphics, and the tools that produce them, has been prolific.

And so to my point… given how our little human minds work, our eyes are literally “drawn to pictures”, (see the link to a revealing example of this below ! ). Pictures make an impression like no table of numbers ever can. Properly executed this is a powerful tool for education and good, badly executed this is not only a waste of an opportunity it could even be used to deliberately mislead.

What factors determine a good info-graphic from graphic-art? – Here are a few suggestions and I welcome your thoughts….

Credible source data and source accreditations
Accurate interpretations of scale (e.g. don’t represent stated numbers with a picture unless the scale accurately represents those numbers)
Careful use of color conventions (try painting a start sign red and a stop sign green and you will see what I mean)
“Balanced” written commentary

Try working through this recent info-graphic (click to view) from the good folks at Cisco. Since the source is a reputable one I am going to take the figures as read – even the ones we can’t easily prove or disprove such as the number of IP addresses vs atoms on earth. (personally my first instinct is surprise at this however any physicists out there please reveal your answers now…)

It’s an interesting picture that combines simple line and picture drawings to represent connections and tell a story over time. It also uses diagrams such as the world population that are unclear as to whether the size/volume of the shapes represents actual numbers (or just a graphic to show rising size).

When you take an info-graphic apart in this way its surprising how more questions than answers can be raised.

(For those of you interested in the focal power of images on the human mind – in this case the male mind – and who haven’t yet heard of the (true) story of how Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam reduced their cleaning bills in the gents restrooms you might want to check this out)

Infographic Resources

Visual.ly – an infographics resource with promise of more tools to follow…

Gooogle Public Data Explorer – in beta with Google Labs, so I’m not sure where the team will relocate this app to but it’s worth checking out before it moves

Infomous – we’re divided on this Twitter graphic as to whether this is a true info-graphic or more graphic art, what do you think?

Filed Under: analytics, data analysis, Infographics

Business Intelligence and Gut Instinct

February 12, 2009 By SH 2 Comments

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Almost any good businessperson will tell you that predictions based on detailed information are typically more reliable than predictions based on feelings or intuition. The saying “knowledge is power” operates on the premise that if you know more than your competitors do, you can make powerful decisions for your company. Nowadays, businesses are turning to business intelligence (BI) to help them guide their decision-making processes. BI can be a powerful tool, but it is only as strong as the data that the system analyzes. When poor or irrelevant data goes in, poor and irrelevant business intelligence is reported. Often, companies don’t know how to use their business intelligence systems correctly and end up relying on their gut feelings instead of their BI reports. The good news is that you can learn how to leverage your data to get the best possible business intelligence for your company.

One of the first and most important things that companies neglect to do is define their objectives. What do you want to get out of your business intelligence system? What are the factors that drive your business? What type of business decisions do you commonly face? By determining what type of information you’ll need from your system, you can work backwards to decide what data is important for your company, what is useful to have for future reference, and what can be discarded. You can apply this method to sales data, customer information, and other important information that your company has collected.

Once you have determined what data should go into the system, a process needs to be put in place to maintain the cleanliness and usability of the data. Designations must remain consistent in order for your business intelligence system to produce usable BI. For example, if one department is inputs “Male” and another “M” under the same heading, reports crafted to include the information for customers under the “Male” designation will ignore the equally valuable information about customers under the “M” designation. My maintaining consistency across the board, your company will be able to get the information you need, when you need it.

Once you know what you’re looking for and have good data going into your business intelligence system, you can step back and let your system do what it was designed to do. You’ll find that your key decision makers will have to rely less and less on their instincts as they continue to get useful information from their business intelligence reports. By taking just a few steps, you can improve the way your company uses your BI investment.

Filed Under: business intelligence, business intelligence software, data analysis