Website optimization: the big bang approach versus 'iterative design'
Amplexor ECM Bulletin – November 2008
Simple question: what is the most common way of improving a website? Probable answer: having it redesigned every 3 to 5 years. The purpose of such a major redesign is to replace your outdated website by a completely new one that meets all contemporary requirements. Typically, such a major revamp is a hell of a job and an expensive one at that - swallowing up every last penny the marketing department has budgeted for the year. Finally after months of hard and tedious work, the new website is launched and will hopefully be regarded by the site visitors as a refreshing and satisfactory user experience.
But what happens then? Too often the web or online marketing team goes 'back to business' and shifts to 'maintenance mode': new content is added, issues are remediated - but no significant changes are being made to the website for several years - until the next major revamp.
There is an alternative approach: iterative design. Iterative design is based on incremental small steps that lead to continuous improvement instead of a complete makeover. But how do you know what to change? Only one way to find out - by using web analytics in order to discover what's happening on your website. However, if you want to use web analytics as a driver for iterative design, you'll have to go further than just reading the basic web metrics such as page views, unique visitors and average visit length. Each of these basic metrics may well be very interesting, but on their own, they don't tell you how to improve your website. That requires 'actionable insights': a deep and thorough understanding of the behavior of your visitors to give you an idea what is and what is not working on your site and how to remediate this.
In order to get such 'actionable insights', you need to ask yourself what the purpose of your website is. Generate leads? Highlight product promotions? Obtain subscriptions for a newsletter? Create revenue on your e-commerce site? Once you've reached a consensus on what your organization wants to achieve online, you'll have to translate these qualitative objectives into measurable target actions: a series of actions that the visitors undertake to reach their desired goal. Each of these successive actions needs to be measurable - not only the final target action. This allows you to analyze where you are losing visitors - e.g. after the third screen of a form that is way too long. All in all: crucial information that gives you insight in how to improve the 'conversion rate' or the number of times that your visitors achieve their target action.
Complementary to these rather straightforward conversions, you will have to define some key performance indicators (KPI's) as well: counts or - more often - ratios of web metrics that are derived from your business strategy. Everybody wants more visitors on their website, but more important is what kind of page views and visits you need for your website to be successful. Are all page views 'good' or do you need a specific type of visitors - e.g. 'engaged' visitors - visitors that 'stick' to your website?
Probably the most powerful tool for getting actionable insights is segmentation. Opposite to defining conversions and KPI's, you do not set clear goals in advance - but you start looking at particular type of visitors in order to understand how they use your site. Try not to focus only on obvious segments (e.g. geographical location), but dare dive into segmentation dimensions that you currently are not focusing on in your offline marketing strategy. You might even discover that visitors who've landed on your website via specific search engine keyword queries (e.g. your important brand names) turn out to be more 'engaging' than visitors that are referred via important partner sites - or vice versa. Once you've defined which segments are important to your web strategy, you can start optimizing your site for those target groups in order to obtain more significant results than trying to improve your webiste for 'the average visitor'.
This type of continuous improvement is hard and tedious work - every day again. But it is by far more effective than starting anew every few years!
Amplexor WebWatch
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