Top tips: 4 ways to improve website performance with web analytics

2010 has been pegged as the year of the ‘dotcom’[5]. With the recession driving the need for measurable results that prove return on investment, marketing budgets are attributing more spend toward online activity. Further, a new report released by Forrester has shown that B2B expenditure on interactive marketing is expected to double by 2014.

Whilst this growth is positive, it has also meant companies are operating in an increasingly competitive market space, where an alternative product or service is only a click away. Sites now need to deliver relevant, targeted information and offer high levels of interaction with site visitors who are increasingly web-savvy. These visitors have a low tolerance towards poorly designed sites with slow loading pages, complicated processes and long winded forms. In fact, recent neurological research by customer experience consultant Foviance, shows that poor performing websites cause stress; unsurprising research when considering personal frustrating online experiences.

Given online budgets are continuing to increase, arguments suggest that a necessary amount of this should be attributed to improving your customers’ online experience. The need not only to remove potential “web stress” through better website design but also to go one step further and anticipate the needs of a new customer through better segmentation and targeting is a key consideration for companies. To achieve this, knowledge of the customer is essential. Individual needs and preferences must be met and this relies on access to in-depth intelligence of each visitor to your site. Customer journeys can be identified, meaning website usability can then be refined and continuously improved. 

Web analytics are fundamental to the retail sector with many basing entire strategies around the detailed intelligence.  The B2B sector, which is arguably still early adopters in the usage of web analytics, could learn from the online success experienced in the retail sector. 

With this in mind, we have put together some tips on how to improve website performance.

1. Establish and regularly review key metrics

Often, online retailers focus too heavily on one metric: optimising the site around that single Key Performance Indicator (KPI). Conversion, for example, compares buying sessions against overall sessions. Used alone, this KPI doesn’t provide a thorough picture when problems occur. Consequently, the retailer may believe the issue is price and consider lowering prices or offering discount promotions to increase conversion. This can mask the underlying issues, which might be related to the quality of traffic, navigation, creative, content relevancy or price.

The reality is that many factors play a role in getting the visitor to complete a conversion. The same is true within the B2B market. Consequently, successful B2B marketers should establish a framework of appropriate KPIs, set targets for each one based both on their goals and a comparative Benchmark, and review them on a regular basis to make sure targets are being met. Once again, web analytics can be used to monitor and analyse these.

2. Analyse the customer journey to determine website weaknesses

Analysing visitor funnels/paths is a key step in identifying customer journeys and drop off points, including abandoned transactions, downloads, video plays and form completions, which in turn can help identify problems with the website. By using behavioural segmentation to slice and dice the data, marketers can delve even deeper to establish the reasons why this may be happening. From a B2B perspective, a company may want to look at keywords and phrases driving visitors to the site, the length of time on the site, bounce rate, the length of time on the page and onsite search terms.  They should also examine segments of new vs. repeat visitors, traffics sources and more advanced segments such as serial abandoners and one page visitors. These insights can then be used to improve search engine optimisation, adding new content, optimising online forms, creating more relevant content to improve the site’s stickiness and ultimately increasing the number of leads or conversions.

3. Organising the site around the customer

Whilst ‘merchandising’ is traditionally coined a retail term, it is essentially the process of optimising the saleability of products and services, an equally applicable need within the B2B space. If done right, online merchandising leads people past the home page to view products and services. It entices them with cross-sell and up-sell offers to drive up average order value. It ensures that pricing is inline with the competition and helps visitors move effortlessly through shopping and checkout processes. However, this is a complex process, and is by no means a case of ‘one size fits all’. 

It is important to remember that product and service categories represent internal product and service groupings, not necessarily how people buy. Products and services must be grouped on the site according to multiple consumer preferences. In retail, products may be grouped into key trends that appeal to your target consumer such as ‘Gothic’ or ‘Bohemian’ as well as classic groupings such as brand. For B2B, services might be grouped by business need, pain or issue and by sector and function. Similarly when putting together promotional offers, these must appeal to the target audience.

Retailers are incredibly successful at recommending products based on a customer’s online behaviour. B2B organisations can offer relevant whitepapers, opinion pieces and case studies based on this online activity, creating personalised content to enhance the customer experience. 

B2B organisations need to employ visitor profiling methods, which will enable them to analyse the visitor lifecycle, the potential to convert and track and score leads.

This includes tracking repeat visitors, visitors who view multiple content - not just in the same session but across multiple sessions and content affinities - where combinations of content are viewed and analysis of conversion attribution to understand the marketing mix that leads to a successful sale.  In doing so B2B companies can score them and apply this knowledge to inform the decision as to when a lead should be contacted, the channel best to contact that lead and the content to include when making that contact. 

4. Constantly review and adapt

a. Regularly review

b. Benchmark

c. Constantly update and question everything

d. Marketing, site developers and sales working together to continuously improve

e. Consider a web analytics specialist

The starting point for organising the site around the customer is, of course, detailed behavioural

Fundamentally, all of these tips are dependent on deep understanding of the customer.  By using web analytics, B2B organisation can effectively put this advice into action and perhaps more importantly, continue to adapt their offering in response to their customers and potential customer needs.

By Craig Whiston

Head of Client Services

Coremetrics

www.coremetrics.com

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