Making your website a driver of lead generation and business growth is increasingly complex, and requires substantial investment. Marketers need to balance setting expectations and measurable goals with the ability to demonstrate the ROI of their online efforts.
In our webinar with premier Boston digital design agency Boston Interactive, we’ll show you how to measure what your website can do, and how it can do it well. Learn how to use analytics tools and eye tracking to understand and motivate your audience better than ever before.
Brand experience Dream Center Peoria Presentation.pdf
Measure Website Effectiveness with Analytics Tools, Eye-Tracking and KPIs
1. I Spy With My Little Eye
How to Determine KPIs
and Drive Website Effectiveness
2. Boston Interactive is an integrated web
marketing agency that excels not only
at developing award winning websites,
but also driving quality web traffic
through SEO, paid search, social
media, mobile,, and other online
marketing strategies.
Percussion CMS makes it easy to
create and manage content-rich, SEO
friendly websites. It’s the first web
content management system built for
marketers. Update your website
content without any technical skills and
go live faster than ever.
3. How do you motivate visitors to take an action?
15. DEVELOP KPIs
HOW DO YOU IDENTIFY KPIs?
User Groups:
Primary
- General Counsel at large companies
- C-level Executives
- Business Development
Secondary
- Media
- New Hire Candidates
User Goals:
- Find out “How Food is Foley”
(capabilities in their industry or specific
work)
- Find an attorney at Foley Hoag, read
up on and/or contact them
- Enhance knowledge through client
alerts, publications, blog posts
Is this where they would want to work
16. USER GOAL: Find an attorney and contact them.
[New graphic?]
HOME
Lawyer
Finder
Our
People
Biography
Contact
Options
(phone, email)
17.
18.
19. MEASURE & VALIDATE
WHERE DO YOU SEE RESULTS?
Find an Attorney Conversion Rate
22. MEASURE & VALIDATE
QUICK GLOSSARY
Users
Individual visitors to your site
Sessions
Individual visits—one visitor can return for
multiple sessions
Bounce Rate
How many visitors leave site right after arriving
32. Case study
The Goals
§ Increase online leads
§ Prove value and competitive balance
§ Attract high-caliber talent
§ Enable dynamic, targeted and easy
content retrieval and consumption
§ Promote Greenwich Associates’
offerings both nationally and
internationally
34. Case study
Landscape Analysis
§ Aite Group
§ Bain & Company
§ Booz Allen
§ Cerulli Associates
§ McKinsey & Company
§ TNS Global
35. Stakeholder Interviews
§ Assessment of current site
(strengths & weaknesses)
§ Audience groups and messaging
§ Aspira onal tone/brand
§ Compe tor assessment
§ Sugges ons for improvement
Case study
36. The Strategy
§ Showcase exper se and GA’s value
proposi on, not sell it. Tone should
be understated and conserva ve
but forward thinking
§ Communicate global presence and
perspec ve through imagery and
editorial tone
§ Include regional landing pages for
localiza on
§ Consistently elevate and clearly
communicate calls to ac on
Case study
46. Thank you
Visit us online:
www.bostoninteractive.com
www.percussion.com
Editor's Notes
Thank you for joining us. Today we’re going to discuss steps to take to determine the best KPIs for your business’s website and various ways of measuring these KPIs.
Introduction
Boston Interactive
Percussion
Today we’re going to discuss how to determine the best KPIs (Key performance Indicators) for your business and drive your website’s effectiveness. With ONLINE SEARCH,PEOPLE ARE GETTING REALLY TARGETED WITH their searches and it’s important to be able to effectively measure the traffic coming into your site – where they’re going, how they’re getting there, etc. KPIs will help you achieve this.
So how do you motivate website visitors to take an action?
Users go to websites for a solution, an end to their research, question, inquiry, hunt, etc.
In the example case study we’re using here today, we’re showcasing the Foley Hoag website. Foley Hoag is a local, Boston-based law firm that has been in practice since 1943.
They employee hundreds of lawyers across 3 offices in Boston, DC, and Paris, and cover practices from clean tech & renewables energy, to business and commercial disputes, to privacy and data security law.
You can imagine with such wide scope it is important for visitors to their website to be able to quickly and easily find exactly what their looking for.
In order to do that though, you must understand WHY visitors are coming to your website.
Understanding WHY
According to 2013 study conducted by lawyernomics.com, almost 22% of people search for a specialty lawyer through an online search
According to that same study, 30% of those surveyed visit the lawyer’s website following a Google search
So, for law firms, you can see why users are visiting their website – they are looking for a lawyer to find more information on them. So it’s important to showcase their depth of experience and personality on the website.
Understanding WHY people are visiting your site can take a lot of brainstorming and research but in the end it will help you implement more effective KPIs
Key performance indicators, or KPI’s, are key to making sure that you provide what people are looking for effectively, measuring the metrics that ultimately lead to a new client and drive profit.
Understanding whether or not your website does these things effectively is critical, because no matter how pretty your website is if the design doesn’t guide the users to the desired outcomes it isn’t going to help you in business development.
So where do you start in determining what your KPIs should be?
WE HAVE A 4 STEP PROCESS. WE IDENTIFY THE PROBLEM
WE STRATEGIZE OUR DIGITAL MARKETING GOALS
WE DEVELOP MEASURABLE KPIS THAT SUPPORT OUR GOALS
WE NEED TO MAKE SURE THAT WE MEASURE AND VALIDATE THAT OUR STRATEGIES ARE WORKING
So step 1, identifying the problem
Are you trying to position your employees as thought leaders? Are you trying to increase leads? Are you trying to drive more people to attend your events?
Identifying the problem and your business goals will ultimately help you identify your key performance indicators, or KPIs
In Foley Hoag’s case, we sat down with them in a brainstorming session and asked them these questions. In the end, we had identified three business goals the firm was aiming to achieve – generate more inbound leads, position themselves as thought leaders, drive event attendance.
Once you’ve identified your business goals you need to think about how your website can assist you in achieving these goals. That is what leads to developing strong KPIs. Implementing quantifiable measurements tied to specific business goals that are used to evaluate the achievement of specific targeted activities. In the case of Foley Hoag, this included contacting attorneys (which would increase inbound leads), increasing publication downloads (helping them to achieve a measure of thought leadership in the industry), and seeing a rise in event registrations (which would ultimately help increase the number of event attendees).
So how do you identify the specific KPIs best-suited for your website? It’s a combination of the KPI’s you’ve identified as well as knowing (as we mentioned earlier) how and why users are visiting your website.
Implementing website usability and researching who your users are and why they’re visiting your site is a very effective way to structure content effectively, it is vital to define accurate user profiles and each of their goals. We will consult on in depth user research and industry best practices to create a user experience that will meet your strategy goals. By grouping information, matching the site navigation to the expectation of users, and adhering to design consistency; we can create a site structure that showcases your content in a seamless and easy-to-use manner.
In Foley Hoag’s case, users wanted to visit the site and find an attorney in a practice specialty, maybe see a profile of a potential lawyer match
To structure content effectively, it is vital to define accurate user profiles and each of their goals. We will consult on in depth user research and industry best practices to create a user experience that will meet your business goals.
By grouping information, matching the site navigation to the expectation of users, and adhering to design consistency; we can create a site structure that showcases your content in a seamless and easy-to-use manner.
once we’ve identified the users and the user’s goals, we develop use cases which is where we identify the different paths through which different users may enter the site and find the content and achieve a specific goal.
we do for this the entire website until we’ve developed a comprehensive and fluid site map. We begin to test the KPIs and form a structure for doing so by creating a site map so we have a clear sense of, when people visit your site, what is the sequence of events you want them to take? With the end goal being to take an action
and of course site maps aren’t pretty, so we work with our talented designers to bring your site to life!
Once you’ve identified your KPIs and implemented them, it’s time to move on to measuring and validating these KPIs and spot fitting if need be. different people use different kinds of analytics software to measure their success. This is an example of the analytics we pulled for Foley Hoag after implementing their KPIs.
So let’s talk about some of the ways you can start measuring website performance, beginning with the most popular tool you’ve probably all heard of and might even use on a daily basis already: Google Analytics
Google Analytics is still the best completely free tool for tracking website analytics
You get insights about visitor behavior and traffic sources that can tell you a lot about what’s happening when people get to your website
It can seem overwhelming, but if you have your KPIs in place, you can zero in on the most important metrics
Quick note before we get to the next few slides, probably a refresher for most of you
In Google Analytics, you want the number of users or visitors and sessions or visits to grow---this is your site traffic
Your bounce rate is the rate of visitors who get to your site and leave immediately, for whatever reason—this number you want to keep low, and 30 to 50% is about average for most business websites
Besides keeping track of how many visitors you attract to your website, it’s also important to understand where they’re coming from. \
This tells you which parts of your website and overall marketing strategy are most effective
Organic/Search – if most of your site traffic is coming from organic search, that’s great news – it means your SEO is really strong and you’ve done a good job of optimizing for your keywords
Direct traffic is people typing in your URL into a browser
Referral traffic comes from other pages on the web linking to your website – this could be someplace you have sponsored links, or maybe you wrote a guest blog post and this is also a number you want to increase over time
Email traffic comes from links contained within email – so this could be from any of the email campaigns or newsletters you send out, or any links contained in your email signature
Social – whatever you or your site visitors share to social networks, if someone clicks those links, that traffic is tracked appropriately
Paid Search – if you are running an AdWords campaign, this is where that traffic would get tracked
Understanding where your audience comes from is important, and also tells you if there are differences in site usage based on the audience source. For example, in this screen shot you can see that the bounce rate for email traffic is dramatically lower than other forms of traffic. That’s great! It means the audience is highly engaged and the website content is meeting their expectations.
Once someone is on your website, you want to understand what they’re doing: are they clicking through to other pages? How long are they sticking around? Where are they most likely to go from your products page vs. your about page?
In-Page analytics allows you to see which links got the most clicks on a page within your website—this is a view with Google Analytics
And now it’s also an extension you can download for Chrome
Here we can look at the Resources page on the Percussion website and see right away that the Content Marketing resources section is getting more clicks than any other topic
A great experiment to conduct here would be to change the order of some of these items—is content marketing getting more clicks because it’s listed first, or is it really the most popular? Once you can measure and record this information, you can test and try new things
Google Analytics can only take you so far, of course, and you want other ways to engage with your audience and measure their response
Marketing automation tools like Marketo, Hubspot, Eloqua, Constant Contact, and Mailchimp allow you to create campaigns and email messages to see what kind of messaging works best for your audience
All of these also link back to Google Analytics, so you get the full picture of which campaigns were most effective in terms of messages actually opened, click throughs, and then the level of engagement with the resulting website visitors
You see there’s a lot of data you can collect about where your visitors come from, how many of them there are, how engaged they are
You can also look at form submissions in your marketing automation system, social shares, and top pages to see what is most effective with your audience
By now also might be thinking that you there have to be some limits to the kind of information you can capture – and there are
You can collect information about someone who took an action, but not the visitors who didn’t
Most importantly, you might not be able to understand why they did or didn’t do something on your website
To get some more insight into visitor behavior in a way that’s more predictive, we are going to look at another measurement tool – Eye Tracking
Here is an example of an eye tracking test we ran for Foley Hoag after implementing their KPIs – you can see where the user’s eyes are going, and the bigger the circle the longer their gaze is. We wanted to make sure users were landing on the “Find a Lawyer” section, as well as events.
This is an example of the heat map produced from our eye tracking results – you can see with the red circle that users eyes are landing on and staying focused on the “Just In” and “Find a Lawyer” sections, which is good news supporting our implemented KPIs
Here’s an example of another site from a DentaQuest. It’s very powerful information to have to know where users eyes are falling so you can implement more strategic designs and KPIs
Here the users eyes are focusing largely on her teeth, which makes sense as a dental insurance company. But it’s also noteworthy to see that many folks were drawn to the “Dentists” section on the homepage. Signaling folks are utilizing the site to search for dentists within their coverage, one of their KPIs.
Since we’ve run through the foley hoag case I thought it would be helpful to run through another case study, this one here based on Greenwich Associates, the global provider of market intelligence and advisory services to the financial services industry.
We implemented our four step process in determining Greenwich’s KPIs and first sat down with them to identify the problems and carve out their business goals. Which in this case were to
You can see that their former site was basically a blog reel, which can make tracking and measuring KPIs very difficult.
We then strategized with the client to do a landscape analysis. Not only researching their competitors and practices they were implementing but also talking to user groups to identify why users were visiting the site and how they were using it.
Here is a short list of interviews we conducted in order to fine tune user goals even further, speaking to stakeholders to find out even more about the difference audience groups, and their thoughts and assessment on the sites current messaging
The Strategy and KPIs that were defined from here were the following. Some KPIs are achieved simply through design aesthetics and imagery, including the tone of the content.
From there we created a proposed site map and wire frames to carve out how we wanted users to travel through the site in order to highlight these KPIs
Here is the wireframe
And finally the finished site – you can see we put strong emphasis on the tone and design of the site as well as making it very easy for users to find the information they were looking for.
One final case study to leave you with is for the National Board of Occupational Therapy website which works to strengthen the occupational therapy profession by providing certifications and educational resources for students, practitioners and employers.
We started the process by sitting down with NBCOT to identify their problems and define their business goals. For them, it was very straight forward, they knew that with so many different audiences using the site they needed to simplify the structure and also enhance the certification process housed on their site
We met with them on site to strategize
We then developed user groups based on the certification process they were looking to highlight and boost to develop a use case of how they saw these users using the site. This helped us to find the right KPIs which included driving more people to their applications section of the site and completing them online.
From there we developed the site map and wireframe – this specific wireframe outlines the US Certification process
And then the site is developed. This site actually just launched not that long ago so we are still collecting data via our measurement systems (in this case eye tracking) and are excited to see the results!