This is still a common situation in alot of businesses (I know, I’ve been there!). You have a web site that has been built over recent years, but decisions on the design, content and how you market online are typically the result of the Highest Paid Persons Opinion (HiPPO). Whoever makes the most money, i.e. the boss, gets the final say.
Perhaps you do work in a company where staff from various levels are encouraged/empowered to contribute ideas to improve your business? If so that’s good, but in reality you usually end up with a whole load of subjective opinions. And when you have a whole load of personal opinions, the HiPPO still still has to pick one – and likely be their own or one that conforms to whatever pre-conceived ideas they had in their head at the time.
Basically you want to target what your customers want, but in reality the HiPPO becomes the stand-in for defining customer needs.
So how to combat this culture?
In a nutshell – objective data. Relevant data measuring your business goals captured from the real world.
If you have an opinion, but more importantly the evidence to back it up, that’s a whole different ball game. Not only does a HiPPO have to disagree with your opinion, they now have to disagree with objective data. HiPPO’s can waffle their way around your subjective arguments, but not so easy when your objective data backs you up.
Capturing the data you need
I’ll assume you’re working in (or running) the team looking after the company web site(s). The high level responsibilities for this team will likely be:
- Understand the company’s online business goals.
- Design and implement a website / internet marketing strategy to meet these goals.
- Demonstrate success.
Note that not every company (in my experience) asks you to do #3. Alot aren’t even aware you can. But measuring success is extremely important if you are to move away from HiPPO decision making.
I’ll assume that you’re clear on what the company’s web and internet marketing goals are, so your job then is to:
- Generate ideas on changes to your web site.
- For each idea, define how you will measure the success (or failure) of the idea.
Generating ideas – Analytics needed
If you have Web Analytics set up for your web site (if not give us a call!) you have the tools already to identify your problem areas. If you don’t have any Analytics tool set up for your web site, you really have no way to capture data on how your web site is used, and is it delivering what your business needs. You’re essentially stuck with subjective decision making and guesswork – please do me a favour and get Analytics set up!
I’ll focus on Google Analytics here, but the ideas and features will be similar if you have another analytics package already in place on your site.
Firstly, target the big losers – your Landing Pages
Get some big imact right away. Your standard clickstream reports available in Google Analytics will tell you the main pages that visitors see when they come to your site (your ‘Landing’ pages). They will be visitors from search engines, email campaigns, social media campaigns, external ads, etc.
Identify the ones with the highest Bounce Rates (i.e. the percentage of visitors who enter your web site on this landing page, and then leave immediately). These will have most traffic, are not that hard to fix, and you typically get a high ROI on fixing these. You will likely be spending money acquiring the traffic to these pages (e.g. SEO work for organic search, paid ads, putting together campaigns, etc) so if you reduce the Bounce Rate, you get higher conversion and more revenue, or you can scale back spending on acquiring customers. Either way you make money.
Focus on ‘Goal Conversion’
What do you really want visitors to do when they come to your site? Where should they be clicking to fullfil those goals. You can set up Google Analytics to track goals (e.g. visiting a particular page, downloading some content, buying products, signing up for your newsletter, etc).
Google Analytics also has some nice reports to tell you the success of these goals, especially if you set up goal funnels.
For example, you want visitors to arrive at a landing page -> click on a link to page 2 -> click on sign up for newsletter -> done. Or if you’re selling products, you expect customers to enter classic e-commerce funnels, e.g. Landing page -> Product search -> View product -> Add to Basket. And Check Out -> Customer info -> Payment Details -> Review Order -> Confirmation -> Done.
Identify what pages leading to your web site goals visitors are bailing out on (i.e. visitor Exits)? Are you losing most when customers are asked to input their personal details? Maybe too many fields or mandatory info that some are uncomfortable giving (e.g. do you really need their home phone number?).
You’ve identified the problem pages, but how to fix it?
You’ve come a long way – you’ve captured real visitor data and identified the problem pages. But what exactly is turning off customers? Is your navigation confusing, or your sales pitch isn’t clear, or the big button to go to your sign up page is just below the fold (i.e. it’s just off the bottom of the page on visitor screens and they have to scroll down to see it)?
There are a number of ways to identify the specific problem areas on the web pages you need to fix:
Get real customer feedback (See our Overview of Web Analytics – Section 3. Voice of the Customer). You can embed opt-in non-intrusive surveys on your web site (e.g. KissInsights, SurveyMonkey.com or 4Q from iPerceptions) which allows customers to give you feedback directly. If visitors are having problems finding what they need on your site, quite a few of them will be happy to tell you about it, if you make it easy for them.
Engage with Usability companies (e.g. usertesting.com). They will put your web site in front of a panel of human testers. Put simply, you tell them what tasks you want the users to perform, and they get their testers to see how easy it is to perform the task. You get written and video feedback on how easy / or difficult it was to perform the tasks you specified.
See where visitors click most often on your problem pages. There are some great tools on the market that can show you where visitors actually click when they visit (Crazyegg.com is our favourite). These tools show your pages as heat maps allowing you to identify quickly where you’re getting visitor clicks. You know where you want visitors to click, now you can see where they are clicking. Perhaps they’re clicking no-where, or maybe they’re clicking on your sidebar ads instead of doing what you want them to (hint – maybe remove the sidebar for this particular problem page).
Brainstorming with colleagues. Get together with you co-workers and get some ideas on where the problems might be. Consider the following:
- Is the ‘Call to action’ (i.e. the one primary thing you want visitors to do) for this page clear?
- Does this tie up with your inbound marketing strategy? i.e. Are you perhaps targeting the wrong search keywords and you’re bringing in visitors that aren’t finding your page relevant?
- Is your branding clear and do you have solid credentials on the page (especially if the action is requiring visitors to part with money)?
- Can people scan your page and find some relevance quickly (a.k.a. ‘the 5 second test’).
- Is it visually appealing?
So you’ve got a shortlist of ideas for improvements. How will you measure if they’re successful?
In todays online world, you really shouldn’t be flying blind when changing your web site. There are a number of tools to help you measure the effect of site changes. You want to quickly determine if your change helped your business goals or is making things worse. If you are going to fail, you want to fail quickly.
The way to roll-out changes and measure success is via A/B Split Testing (See our Web Analytics overview – Step 4. A/B Testing).
You will need a dedicated web split testing tool to execute tests – an excellent free choice is Googles’ Web Site Optimizer. This allows you to set up tests on your web site that allows you to show both your new web pages (with your new idea(s) implemented) and also continue to show your old web page. Web Site Optimizer will split your visitor audience into 2 groups and each will see either the new or the old version. You set the split ratio – we usually just go for 50/50. We show the new web page to half of our visitors, and half still see the old page.
You run the tests for a period (at least 2 weeks depending on your web site traffic) and then you use Web Site Optimizer to show you the test results. If your new page is more successful you put the new web page live with confidence that it’s been approved by the people that matter, your customers. If results are inconclusive, or negative, you hold fire on the change and re-think your ideas for page improvement (I’m sure you’ll have more to look at from your idea generation work).
Despite all the prep work outlined here, you may still get some things wrong, but that is to be expected. If you do make a change that make things worse, you’ll lose a few customers for a few days, but if you get it right, you’ll gain more customers for a lifetime. It’s a good trade off.
Final words
It’s all about data. If you measure and collect data on your web site, you can make informed decisions on how to improve. You don’t need to be a master negotiator to get the HiPPO to do what you want, your data does all the talking for you.
If you have any questions on this post, you can always get me on ar@search-motive.com I’ll do what I can to help.
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