We also like to think it’s a great win for government agencies that are seeking to extract more value from the online channel. After all, agility and sophistication are the order of the day when it comes service provision and meeting the diverse needs of today’s citizens – and Bienalto has the depth of experience in online marketing to ensure that government agencies get just that.

We have strong experience in the government sector already, and have built strong relationships at all tiers of government. This is never better exemplified than when we conduct our annual Australian Web Analytics surveys. The 2008 survey, which received a very strong response from government, even has a separate section on government issues and trends.

Bienalto is delighted to be a part of the ICT panel, and looks forward to assisting government agencies to boost their online marketing programs.

These business leaders are asking the right questions. In most cases, there is room for improvement – and a strong business case, too, given that online is a low-cost, proven channel that generates measurable results.

That is, attracting more customers, generating leads, creating buzz and awareness, or simply improving business efficiencies.

Quantitative analysis is the fastest and most effective way to find out how you can better leverage the online channel.

Quantitative analysis the key

The best way to understand how well your website is currently working is through quantitative analysis. This strategic tool paints a clear picture of the best and worst aspects of your site; and, as long as you are prepared to act on the findings, your site’s performance will improve.

I have talked in the past about the importance of quantitative analysis, and the message is as relevant as it ever was.

When we help our clients analyse their websites, we start with the absolute basics:

• Are customers coming to your website?
• What are they doing on your site?

From this baseline, we can identify the gaps or pitfalls, develop a roadmap to plug these gaps and ultimately improve the performance of the online channel.

It sounds simplistic, but of course we cannot reach any conclusions without a comprehensive understanding of our client’s business and their strategic marketing approach.

Reassess your KPIs

During the assessment phase, it’s important to cross-check the stated objective of the site against its KPIs. Setting up good KPIs is critical for the ongoing monitoring of a site’s performance, and it ties in beautifully with a quantitative analysis.

With a vast array of measurables to choose from - page views, cost per acquisition, new visitors, the list goes on - there’s absolutely no point in trying to do it all. Rather, you should realign KPIs to match current business priorities and focus on getting accurate, timely data to support these KPIs.

The right KPIs enable you to track issues, identify opportunities and provide relevant recommendations to senior management about the online channel.

Augment with benchmarking

Once you have identified gaps in your website, it pays to check out what the best of the rest are doing. Seek out best practice in your industry and benchmark against comparable sites. This enables you to gather fresh ideas and set a clear direction for your own site.

We use a tool called Position Pundit to professionally benchmark our clients’ sites, looking at the user experience and customer acquisition/retention mechanisms. These insights can be invaluable in planning the future direction of your own site.

In conclusion

Rationalising your website. Realigning it. Resetting it. Call it what you will – but any form of strategic re-evaluation of your online channel now will pay off in the long term.

I know it works. Having provided website analysis services for many clients in the past few years, and seen these clients reap measurable rewards from the changes enacted, it’s a proven investment.

Knowing that your website is doing OK is more than just about peace of mind. If it’s not up to scratch, you need to know how you can fix it. If you just ignore the problem, then you run the risk of losing customers – and at a time like this, every single visitor counts.

Want to know more? Read about Bienalto’s website analysis, benchmarking and web analytics services.

Or contact me today to discuss your site.

In July 2008, the investment attraction function previously administered by Invest Australia was rolled into Austrade as part of its overall trade facilitation function.

Austrade’s existing website lacked the scalability to simply ‘plug in’ a new section of content and was ready for a refresh to improve usability and content.

Austrade engaged Bienalto for one month of intensive strategy and collaboration to devise a new information architecture and content rationale for the site. The new website, which was launched in February 2009, creates a dynamic, progressive platform for the future growth of the agency.

Challenge

Until 2009, Austrade had operated different websites for its local and overseas audiences: www.austrade.gov.au and www.austrade.com. There were issues associated with marketing the two sites; as well as the challenge of overcoming misconceptions around the US domain of the international site.

There were also content issues. The typical Austrade customer would come from a particular industry or market – and without creating too many headaches for content managers, Austrade sought a better way to channel users down their chosen pathway.

“In addition, we faced the challenge of incorporating all of the information from the Invest Australia website – in the knowledge that we had no extra funding to manage a whole new sub-site,” said Shannon Kolbe, Web Project Manager of the e-Business Team, Austrade.

This challenge of managing new content on a shoestring was picked up on by Bienalto, which came up with innovative ways to reduce the cost of upkeep on the new site.

Solution

Bienalto benchmarked investment sites from around the world to gain a clear picture of what information investors need to aid the decision-making process.

Guided by this research, Bienalto recommended an interface rich in graphics and video content; with clear navigation from the home page to channel users into different sections of the site.

“After consultations with the investment specialists, we saw that what they do is no different to a professional services firm. That is, they provide advice. So we started thinking within the context of what is best practice for professional services firm,” said Hurol Inan, Managing Director, Bienalto.

The rationale behind the video content – which appears within the “Invest” section of the site – was clear:

• Investment specialists are located all over the world, and are always on the road; and while they are more than happy to talk about their expertise, they are much less willing to write about it. Video and audio are a quicker and easier way to capture their messages and establish dialogue with customers.
• The video solves multilingual issues, with recordings made in different languages according to which country the investment specialist is based in.
• Potential investors are more likely to engage with Austrade’s investment specialists after listening to them speak in a video or audio recording.

Another new area of the “Invest” section addresses the content management issues. “Investor Update” is a blog-style communications piece, which gives Austrade a manageable platform for getting new messages to market and keeping the content fresh.

“Investor Update is the first port of call for any potential customers who want to stay up-to-date with Australia as a market. All the investment specialists have to do is send a bulleted list of hot topics to the Corporate Communications team every few months – and we’ve got the content we need,” Shannon said.

Bienalto’s aim was to build a site that would grow with the organisation, whilst remaining mindful of the strain content management would place on internal resources.

“Many sites make the mistake of designing for the launch; that is, creating a whole lot of content that the company has no resources to manage down the track. The content on Austrade’s site can be refreshed on an ongoing basis, and can also be rotated to ensure a fresh appeal for repeat users,” said Inan.

Results

The simplicity of the new Austrade website is winning votes with Austrade staff around the world.

“I keep hearing how proud people within the organisation are to be able to promote the website to customers,” said Shannon.

“A priority for the new site was to encourage more customers to talk to our investment specialists. Bienalto has really nailed this with their solution – the video recordings of our investment specialists discussing current economic issues really boosts their credibility.”

As Austrade sets forth with its new investment role in place, Shannon believes that the new site forms the centrepiece for clarifying the service offering.

“We’ve now got a new, clear way of looking at content, and incredible efficiency in delivering this content to our main audiences – which frees us up to explore new opportunities and ensure this site remains as progressive as it is today,” said Shannon.

Visit the new Austrade website.

From Cindy Lauper to classic concertos, Chicago the musical to Carmen the opera, the Queensland Performing Arts Centre (QPAC) shows it all. It is the premier multi-venue performance space in Queensland, attracting renowned international performers as well as providing a home away from home for Queensland’s leading performing arts companies.

With new shows on each month, QPAC relies on a slick and efficient marketing system that promotes the program to a database of more than 150,000 people. Of course, details about each show are not sent to all people on the database – and therein lies the key to what has become an incredibly efficient and successful email marketing program.

Bienalto has designed and developed a template for QPAC’s event promotion emails, enabling them to send out targeted emails to segments of the database – at the click of a button. Following on the success of this template, Bienalto is now working on a range of other projects with QPAC to iteratively improve its online communications channel.

Challenge

With such a diverse repertoire on its bill, the biggest challenge facing the marketing team has been finding a customer segmentation model that works. In other words, calculating what a customer is likely to buy tickets for, based on their previous purchases.

“The problem is, just because someone came to the ballet last month, it doesn’t mean they will buy a ticket to the next ballet performance,” said Rae Bassett, Audience Development Manager, QPAC.

“Particularly for first-time bookers and those that only come to the occasional performance, it becomes incredibly difficult to predict what their next purchase will be.”

QPAC sought a new way of promoting events that would rely on segmentation in the first instance, but would also include other promotions that could potentially generate increased sales.

Bassett and her team also sought a more streamlined and efficient process, to reduce the time spent on each campaign.

Solution

Bienalto devised an email template featuring a ‘QPAC recommends’ section. So, along with the main promotion, two to three alternative events can grab a customer’s interest, to squeeze more value from the single piece of communication to customers.

Information architecture principles have been applied to the design of the email template, to ensure that key elements (for example, ‘Buy Tickets’) are easily accessible. The design is also flexible enough to accommodate the distinctive branding requirements of different productions.

“We also wanted more ‘engagement information’ in our emails – which research from the United States has shown to be crucial for those first-time bookers who have the potential to become valued customers,” said Bassett.

With this in mind, the email templates enable the easy insertion of video content to better engage with customers. Bienalto has also helped to develop a ‘first-time booker’ program, which identifies the unique needs of new customers and sends timely welcome emails, information about the venue, reviews and a post-event email with a ‘first impressions survey’.

Results

“We have almost doubled our click-through rate on event promotion emails since we started using the new template,” said Bassett.

Prior to using the new templates in November 2008, the average open rate for campaigns was 27.5%. By February, the open rate was up to 45%, with an average list size of 10,000 recipients.

“Unique click-throughs have increased by 2% too. In itself, that doesn’t sound like a staggering increase, but the difference it makes to our bottom line is massive,” Bassett said.

The templates have made it much easier and faster for the promotion team to set up emails for each campaign – what once took up to four hours now takes 80 minutes. Considering that they often do more than 14 email campaigns per month, this is a huge saving.

“We simply could not live without email marketing anymore. It is so powerful and cost effective, and this new templated approach ensures that we extract maximum value from every piece of communication we send out,” said Bassett.

This year’s survey shows that businesses are investing more heavily in web analytics tools, and web analysts are becoming smarter about the ways they use these tools. For the first time, the survey report profiles different web analytics users – we’ve segmented the data to show you what these groups look like:

- Advanced web analytics users

- Government users

- Google analytics users

The full survey report is available for download now.

It costs a fortune to get a customer to decide to take an action online. Don’t frustrate and loose them at the last minute with poorly designed web forms.

Unfortunately most forms we encounter have problems. They are the least glamorous, underloved part of websites. Product managers, marketing and designers are not interested.

That is ok but we can still do a good job by addressing common issues such as labeling, placement and design of elements, calls to action, help.

A good starting point is Luke Wroblewski’s Web Form Design which provides web form design best practices from labels, input fields, actions, help text to error handling.

Once you redesign your forms, don’t forget the analytics and optimisation.

The free web analytics solution is now more attractive than ever, giving users the ability to conduct extremely detailed analysis to extract a better return on their online investment.

Advanced segmentation

Segmentation of data is one of the fastest and most effective ways to gain real insights into the efficacy of your marketing programs. As I’ve said before, segmentation takes the noise out of web analytics data, breaking it down into meaningful chunks that you can analyse more effectively.

In the past, however, the best segmentation tools on offer were through high end solutions.

The good news is that the power of segmentation has just been brought to the masses, with advanced segmentation tools now available to Google Analytics users.

There are nine default segments that will come in handy to most people who use the analytics tool. These segments can be applied to any report you want, and include:

1. All visits
2. New visitors
3. Returning visitors
4. Paid traffic
5. Non-paid traffic
6. Search traffic
7. Direct traffic
8. Referral traffic
9. Visits with conversions

But the real power lies in the ability to create custom segments. This means that you can isolate a certain behaviour, examine it carefully and see whether your marketing campaign worked for that group.

For example, you might want to isolate:

• All visitors who came from a specific email campaign AND purchased at least one product
• All visitors from Sydney who completed a goal
• All visitors who started a transaction, but dropped out (and where).

Once you have defined your custom segments, you can then compare the performance of that segment with the rest of the site using the reporting tools.

Or you might want to compare the performance of one segment to that of another. For example, you could view the bounce rate for a page, and then split it into the bounce rate for visitors who came from search and direct traffic.

Custom reporting

Until now, users of Google Analytics have had to content themselves with using the standard reports on offer (e.g. visitors, traffic sources and so on).

With the new “Custom Reports” tool, you can define your own criteria and create your own report. For example, you may want to create a report showing e-commerce information by geographies. Here’s how it’s done:

1. Create a custom report with the following metrics:
   • Visits
   • Unique purchases
   • Revenue
   • Per visit value
   • Average value
2. In the dimensions, add “city” at the top level. If you have customers from around the world, you may like to define “country” as the top level, and add city as the second dimension. If you do this, the report will initially show visits by country, and you can then select a country to see data segmented by city.
3. Then you can compare cities according to the metrics you defined – so you can see, for example, the average value of a visitor from Sydney to that of one from Melbourne.

More information at your fingertips

Once you have your segments and custom reports created, you can then access deeper insights by combining the two. Want to see which city is of greater value, as well as where your visitors are coming from in that city? Not a problem. In terms of segmentation, you’re only limited by the data sets you have to work with.

Setting these reports and segments up doesn’t take long at all. Once they’re up and running, you can begin to make more finely tuned marketing decisions, and better target your offering to particular groups of customers.

Bienalto can provide Google Analytics setup and configuration services. Read more about how we can assist you in implementation and optimisation.

Further reading

You can learn more about the value of segmentation in some previous posts:

Web Data Segmentation – a pre-requisite for gaining actionable insights

Understanding your website’s users

Informing information architecture with quantitative insights

The annual Web Analytics Buyers Guide 2008 from E-consultancy is now available for purchase. With its in-depth vendor profiles and market analysis, it helps you to put things in perspective when making buying decisions.

So what’s in the Guide? And how does it compare to what’s going on locally? With responses flooding in to our Australian Web Analytics Survey, we can provide a few answers.

One of the biggest predictions in E-consultancy’s guide is that the UK market for web analytics would grow by 12% in 2008. We agree (give or take a few percentage points).

Already, we can see a trend in comparing results from this year’s Australian Web Analytics Survey to last, with organisations spending significantly more on the investment in external professional services and in-house web analytics staff.

Not surprisingly, the investment in tools doesn’t show the same growth – a great proportion of organisations in Australia now use Google Analytics as a preferred tool.

According to the UK report, only 21% of companies use Google Analytics exclusively, but typically use it as a complementary tool to support another investment.

But with Google raising the bar with its new segmentation and reporting tools, it will pay to see how these figures change next year.

Purchase the Web Analytics Buyers Guide

Download the latest Australian Web Analytics Survey

There’s a prevailing attitude amongst web users out there: site search doesn’t work. It’s not surprising, given the common practice of ‘let’s chuck a search engine on our site’ without planning how it should work.

If it doesn’t work, then why bother? Why should you include site search, when it requires a reasonable investment to implement and maintain?

I’ve been hearing these questions a lot recently.

Indeed, scout around the new generation of corporate sites and you’ll find that more and more of them are dropping site search. Without naming names, the recently redesigned Australian websites of a large auto manufacturer has abandoned site search (excuse the pun).

So is this the new black? Is site search dead?

The case for site search

The good news for people who are ’searchers’ instead of ‘browsers’ is that site search is a fundamental element of some sites, and will never die. I say ’some’ – news sites, e-commerce sites and large information portals all lend themselves to search. Their customers or users are generally specific about what they’re looking for, and site search becomes a crucial navigational tool.

These sites must invest in a proper implementation of site search – not just ‘chucking one in’. You need to think about the circumstances under which people might search on your site, and then create scenarios for different searchers. These scenarios give you your indexing rules and guide your decisions on when to emphasise certain types of content (for example, directing a user to a product page instead of an FAQ).

Then, when you’ve got your site search right, you can sit back and reap enormous benefits from the insights gained via site search analytics. You can see:

• Who’s using the site
• What people are interested in
• What language people use in searching for products and services.

These insights are gold to marketers looking to improve or enhance not only the site itself, but also how they position their products and services in the broader marketplace.

The case against site search

On the other hand, if your current site search only attracts a handful of users, or you don’t have the resources to maintain it, then perhaps your site would be better off without it. Why bother maintaining one if only a very few per cent of customers use it?

There’s also a strong case against site search for businesses that want greater control over what people see on their sites – and how they get to certain pages.

A previous client of mine, TressCox Lawyers, wanted clients to be able to see the full spectrum of what they offer, as well as the many partnerships they have. So they focused on building logical, clear navigation paths on their site so that clients could easily find their way around – whilst seeing what TressCox wanted them to see.

Interestingly, TressCox has still got a site search function on their site – but it’s buried down at the bottom of the page, to discourage people from using it.

I think the key message is that you shouldn’t do site search simply because everyone else is doing it. It’s imperative to get it right – you will cause more harm than good by having a poorly performing site search function.

Most importantly, I think the fact that people are questioning the relevance and value of site search is a healthy development. It’s a sign of maturity in the market, and can only mean good things for the quality of site search in the future.

More good reading on the topic:

• Kick butt with internal site search analytics (by Avinash Kaushik)
• Does your site search need a makeover? (by Hurol Inan)
• The benefits of site search analysis (by Hurol Inan)

What do you think? Does your business have a strong case for having a site search function? Or are you considering abandoning it? Post your comments below.