Usually you would look for some of the busy staff and ask the obnoxious question: “how long is the wait time for a table?” The answer you’ll receive will most likely be a very biased one that underestimates the actual wait time by, well, a lot. After all, who wants to loose customers through stating a very long waiting time for a table. As a staff person, you are much better off, giving a shorter waiting time, knowing that once a customer sits down and waits for a while, they are much more unlikely to get up and leave for another restaurant then when they first walked through the door.

A much better approach than asking the staff how long you have to wait is doing your own restaurant waiting time analysis.

To do this analysis, count all the tables in a restaurant in a first step. For this example, let’s assume this is a small lunch place with only 10 tables. Next, look around you and make a good estimate of what you think is the average eating time (the time a person occupies a table) in that place. If it is a typical downtown business type of lunch place, the average eating time is usually about 30 minutes (people have about an hour for lunch, so they won’t spend much more time than that). If it is a more casual type of family lunch place, maybe you need to crank up your estimate to a full hour. Just look around and see what and how much people are ordering, eating and drinking. For this example, let’s say that a table is occupied on average for about 60 minutes per lunch.

For all your data crunchers out there, I am assuming that the average eating time follows a normal distribution. That is some people will take longer than 60 minutes to get off their table and some will take less than 60 minutes, but generally speaking after 60 minutes the average table is free again.

To calculate your average restaurant waiting time, simple divide the time a table is occupied on average (that is 60 minutes in our example) by the number of tables in the restaurant (10 tables in our example).

For our example, 60 divided by 10 equals six minutes of average waiting time to get your own table. Waiting six minutes is not too bad and pretty helpful to know, considering that just a few second ago you where wondering if you should go look for another restaurant, ask the busy staff for help or just sit down and wait for as long as it might take.

How do you typically figure out your waiting time and can you think of other situations where this simple technique might help?

When working with a local non-profit organization I decided to take a deeper look at their annual conference registration sign-up process. My goal was to improve the registration process and have more people register for the annual conference. Easier said than done! Here we go.

I already set-up good macro and micro goals for the non-profit and was tracking the sign-up process via the goal-funnel in Google Analytics. With the goal funnel working, I could see after a bit of time that a lot of people never make it past the initial registration page. They either go back to look at all the information again or even leave the page.

That was a problem and I decided to make some changes to that very first registration page to find out what kind of information visitors need to continue with the registration process. There had to be a way to get more than just 14% of visitors through the funnel (the screenshot of funnel is from a later point, after we already optimized the website, but you get my point).

My thought was that, if people get to the first registration page and then have to go back to re-read some information, they obviously miss some summarizing information right above the personal information fields. So what do you do? You set-up a simple A/B test and test the new page (which has a quick summary of the conference highlights) against the old or original page. Have a look below and see what I am talking about.

Here is the original page:

And here’s the test page with the conference summary:

Now, after running the experiment for a few weeks the results speak for themselves. Have a look at the website optimizer results. The orange line represents the conversion rate of the new test page and the blue line the conversion rate of the old or original page.

Visitors register at a much higher rate for the conference via the new test page which includes a short conference summary than they do via the old original page without such a description.That is great news and a good reason for a high five with the team! Registration process on the website optimized – check!

One point worth mentioning, is that the difference in conversion pretty much disappeared at a certain point (that’s when the orange and blue line almost touch each other). The reason for that is simple that the “early-bird” registration discount was taken off the website at this point and all the stragglers rushed to sign-up for the conference. In that rush, it obviously did not make much of a difference, which page (original or test-page) a visitor viewed before registering for the conference.

What did I learn from all of that?

1. Look for troubled areas in your website that hurt your mission critical goals (in this example conference registration)
2. Develop concrete theories of how to improve those areas on your website
3. Put your theories to the test and set-up a web optimization experiment (start with a simple A/B test to keep things simple)

What did you learn from this little project? Anything that I missed? Share your thought and comments with me and all the readers.

Every website needs concrete goals and a non-profit website is no different than a e-commerce or business website. Think about your purpose, what you are trying to achieve, set-up your goals and start measuring how well you are doing in achieving those goals.

I generally I like to divide goals into macro and micro goals. Macro goals are your mission critical goals. That is, the one thing your organization cannot live without. If your key event of the year is to organize a conference than you macro goal is to have as many people as possible sign-up for your conference. If you are selling shoes, you want to sell as many shoes as possible.

Micro goals are the goals that also contribute to your success and make people aware of who you are and what you do. Since only a small percentage of all your visitors are actually signing-up for your conference or buying a pair of shoes from you, it only makes sense to also measure a few smaller goals that eventually lead somebody to achieve your main, or macro goal. Micro goals could be your “about” or specific product page. It could also be how many people contact you with questions about a certain product or service. All of those goals measure engagement and how interested your visitors are in what you do.

For a local non-profit the web analytics team agreed on several macro and micro goals.

Our Macro goal was conference registration hands down. Without anyone showing up for the conference all the work organizing would be for nothing. So registration was mission critical.

For micro goals we measured visitor interest in the conference material, the our keynote speakers and in our half-day workshops.

The results speak for themselves. The Non-profit converted 10% of their website visitors. Meaning that 10% of all visitors to the website registered for the annual conference. That’s an absolutely great result and deserves a high five! Macro goal – check!

For the micro goals, the interest in the conference material was great. About 61% of visitors showed interest in the conference material, followed by 22% for workshops and 7% for keynote speakers. You may ask, why did only 7% of visitors show interest in the international conference keynote speakers. Good question. My take is that many specialists in the field already knew the keynote speakers by name and had little use of looking at their short bios (which are on a new page). If that’s the case, then the bios of the keynote speakers, which I assume are a sure highlight of the conference, should be placed somewhere more prominent on the website. That way visitors who are not familiar with the names (maybe newbies in the field) might be enticed to give the conference a try that year.

So what did I learn from the all of this?

• Set macro and micro goals and start measuring your website goals
• Interpret the results of your website goals and figure our what that means to your website
• Start making adjustments according to your results and improve your website

What did you learn from this goal setting project?  Did I miss anything important to you?

PS. Part 3: “Optimizing the Conference Registration Process for a Local Non-Profit” is coming soon.

With those simple goals in mind – find out how people are interacting with the website and how can we improve the registration process to have more people sign up – a small team of the Hawaii-Pacific Evaluation Association (Full disclosure: I am the part of this web analytics team and was acting Secretary at the time) began to evaluate their own non-profit website in three straightforward steps:

1. Understand process measures (visitors counts, traffic sources and page-views)
2. Set Macro (the important big stuff) and Micro (the small but still important stuff) goals for your website and measure your conversion rate (how many visitors out of all your visitors achieve this goal/do what you want them to do)
3. Optimize mission crucial parts of the website

Pretty simple stuff right? Let’s jump right in and look at counts, traffic and page-views (or what is called process measures in the strange evaluation universe).

Process Measures

Traffic looks good. The website is getting a decent amount of visitors and people spending enough time on the site. With a bounce-rate (no action/click by a visitor) of about 38% we can be happy.

Moving on to traffic and noticing that the majority of visitors come via search engines (a quick check revealed that people searching for h-pea via Google rather than typing the address into the browser address field – so we are all good). But what’s surprising at first is the really high amount of “other” in the traffic report. Well, rather than a surprise, this is actually great news, since we tagged all links in our direct marketing efforts for the conference to see how much traffic is generated through all the marketing work. With 30% of the traffic share the direct marketing campaigns sure did work. High five team!

If your mind is as analytic as mine you will immediately ask: do visitors that arrive at the website through direct marketing campaigns represent quality traffic? In other words, were those people who actually signed up for the conference or did they only look at stuff and did not do anything to improve the bottom line. Great question and the answer is: Yes, visitors coming to the site via the campaign signed up at a higher rate than the average visitor. At best we increased the conversion or registration by about 12 percent. Not bad at all. What does this tell us? Keep spending time on direct marketing and make sure that the write-ups are high quality – this will bring even more conference visitors in 2011.

Let’s quickly check the page-views and notice that some of our main pages, that is the ones with the most page-views, have pretty high bounce rates. For example, the papers.html site has a high 59% bounce rate, but also almost 4 minutes of average time on page. That tells me that next year, we should not simply copy the papers description of the presenters submission, but maybe summarize them in one or two sentences (rather than 500 words), or even better have the presenters themselves provide a quick and interesting blurb.

OK, here is what I learned so far:

• The H-PEA website receives decent traffic
• The direct marketing campaigns do work
• Some pages need re-writing of maybe better content for 2011

What did you learn from this little exercise? Did I miss anything that you think is important?

PS. Part 2: “Developing and Measuring Online Goals for a local Non-Profit” coming soon.

To my surprise many of the attendees told me that they never even considered having actual goals and objectives for their websites and walked away eager to measure their online presence in more detail. Hearing that was another wake-up call showing me how few people are actually familiar with the possibilities and opportunities that web analytics offer.

After my presentation was done I was particularly thrilled with one attendees comments stating that “this was the best thing we heard all day”. Man, did that comment make my day!

Keep measuring, it will change the way you look at your online presence.

You can find my presentation abstract below:

Cutting-Edge Techniques to Evaluate an Organization’s Online Presence
Marco Morawec – Kamehameha Schools

Many organizations have a website representing its public face and supporting its mission by providing specific content and tools to its audience. In simple terms, the online presence of any organization is an integral part of its overall strategy. However, very few organizations have defined goals for their online presence, or even know what they should achieve online. Evaluating a website through web-analytics enables the organization to define those objectives, analyze the outcomes, and develop actionable insights for consistent improvement of the online experience and the organization’s services offered to the community.
This presentation uses the H-PEA website as a self-reflecting and real-time online evaluation example, introducing participants to the beauty of web analytics.