Using Data and Insight to Improve Your Website's Commercial Performance

1. Using Data and Insight to
Improve Your Website’s
Commercial Performance
Lawrence Roberts MCIM

2. What Is Your Website For?
- To be found!
- To inform?
- To engage?
- To persuade?
- To generate enquiries?
- To make an offer?
- To make sales?
- To maintain a relationship with existing customers?
Very likely all of these..

3. Quantify Your Commercial Goals
Business, and therefore commercial website
management, is ultimately about the numbers
- Be clear about what needs
to happen.
- Set SMART Goals

4. Example SMART Goals
Develop based on your buying “journeys”:
Our website will:
- Receive 1000 unique visitors every month from September
onwards.
- Generate 25 submitted enquiry forms every month from
October onwards.
- Generate £50,000 in online sales by December.
- Have 100 customers (people who have already bought) that
return to the site and 10 customers that buy from the site every
month from January 2016.

5. How Might We Improve Website Performance?
- REACH: Make it easier to get found (SEO, Google Adwords)
- REACH: Drive increased search traffic (with useful & engaging
content)
- INTERACT: “3F Strategy”
- INTERACT: A clear “call to action” (download, newsletter sign-up,
enquiry, appointment)
- CONVERT: A clear offer (purchase, sales offer) that is easily accepted
- ENGAGE: Maintain an ongoing relationship..
- Use clear Visitor journeys (Fast; Functional and Familiar)

6. “3F Strategy”
Great commercial websites are:
Functional
Fast
Familiar

7. Digital Marketing: RACE Model

8. Measurement to Drive Performance

9. Google Analytics – What Does it Do?
<script>
(function(i,s,o,g,r,a,m){i['GoogleAnalyticsObject']
=r;i[r]=i[r]||function(){
(i[r].q=i[r].q||[]).push(arguments)},i[r].l=1*new
Date();a=s.createElement(o),
m=s.getElementsByTagName(o)[0];a.async=1;a.s
rc=g;m.parentNode.insertBefore(a,m)
})(window,document,'script','//www.google-
analytics.com/analytics.js','ga');
ga('create', 'UA-43871798-3', 'ljrdigital.com');
ga('send', 'pageview');
</script>
Records information every time a
web page is viewed:
- Time
- Location
- Details of page being viewed
- Where on the Web a visitor was
referred from
- Whether the visitor has viewed the
page before
- Desktop, Tablet or Mobile
Plus every time specific events occur:
- Contact form submissions
- Video views

10. Basic Measurements
- Number of Visits over a given period
- Number of Visitors
- Number of Returning Visitors
- Number of Mobile Visitors
- Number of Visits from a Given Town/Country/Continent
- Fraction of Single-page Visits (the “Bounce Rate”)
- Average number of pages viewed
- Average time spent on the site
- Number of Page Views of any Given Page
- Identity of the Landing Page, Second Page, Exit Page…..

11. Derived Measurements
Combinations of the Basic
Measurements that provide useful
information:
- The number of returning visitors that
view the “contact us” page
- The number of mobile visitors in the
UK that viewed the company video
- The number of returning visitors
where an enquiry form is submitted
immediately after viewing the
“special offer” page

12. Example Dashboard (1)

13. Example Dashboard (2)

14. Example Dashboard (3)
Traffic Source Data: How Traffic Arrives at the Site

15. Keeping Data Clean
Automated visits are now a
serious pollutant of your web
analytics data.
Many such visits are now
originating in Russia.
So Remove “bots” and “spiders”
From the dataset by ticking the
box marked “Exclude all hits
from known bots and spiders”
in the View Settings.

16. Continuous Improvement
- Plan
- Do
- Measure
- Analyse and Learn

17. Analysis and Insight
Analysis:
“Examine (something) methodically and in detail,
typically in order to explain and interpret it”
Insight:
“An accurate and deep understanding of something”
Learning:
Measure Hypothesize (imagine)
Testing

18. Why You Need to Ditch Your Data!
- The entire analytics dataset is
unlikely to tell you very much
that is useful (too much noise)
- Focus on your target market
(particularly location, but also
referral sources and behaviour)
- Specific Data is Needed to
Answer Specific Questions

19. Typical Questions to Provide Insight
Examples:
“What proportion of people that buy
are local (say within a 50 mile
radius)?”
“How much more likely is a visitor to
buy if they have visited the site
before?”
“Which page do people view most
before they buy?”
“Which page do people view most
after failing to buy?”

20. Example: Limit Data to Target Market
- B2B
- Fairly volatile traffic volumes
- No real insight as to what is happening

21. Example: Investigate Basic Measurements
The Bounce Rate is the fraction of visits where the visitor leaves
without viewing additional pages (back button, browses to other
sites)

22. Example: Look at Individual Traffic Sources
Increases in search traffic correspond to increases in
bounce rate:

23. Example: Look at Volume of Traffic to
Individual Landing Pages
Blue – Home
Brown – Blog
Green – Blog

24. Example: Look in Detail at Bounce Rates
of Traffic Landing on Different Pages
Home page Bounce Rate: 45% (30% of traffic)
Other pages Bounce Rate: 55% (10% of traffic)
Blog pages Bounce Rate: 90% (60% of traffic)
Average Bounce Rate = 73% (Very High)
Choose Topics Carefully - Of interest to your target audience,
but not everybody!
And measure performance after publishing to make sure you
have quality traffic.

25. Summary (1)
- Be clear about what your website is for.
- Set SMART goals based on the RACE model.
- Great websites are Functional, Fast and Familiar (3F Strategy).
- Website optimisation is about continuous improvement (Plan,
Do, Measure, Analyse and Learn).
- Use Google Analytics to provide the “eyes and ears” for your
continuous development journey.
- Review your performance dashboard often and understand
what you see.

26. Summary (2)
- Insight is gained by postulating why things are
as they are, and then testing that
understanding through measurement.
- Use subsets of the data that are designed to
answer each specific question.
- Keep your data clean!
- High traffic volumes alone do not make a site
successful.
- When blogging, choose topics carefully: Of
interest to your target audience, but not to
everyone!
- Measure the performance of each blog article
(traffic, bounce rate, time on site, watched
videos, completed enquiry forms, purchases..)

27. Thank-You!
Lawrence Roberts MCIM
Principal Consultant
LJR Digital Marketing
Tel: 07966 473478
E-Mail: lawrence@ljrdigital.com
LinkedIn: lawrencejroberts
Web: www.ljrdigital.com
Twitter: @LJR_Digital