Data Driving » Blog

Use Case: What traffic sources are driving quality traffic?

Nick — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 12:04:53 +0000

In this series, I would like to provide real-life analysis from the site Mytripguru.com. This is my site so I am comfortable reporting the traffic figures and analysis. The aim is to show how web analytics can be used to drive real change on a website. Remember, analysis means absolutely nothing if it does not drive change!

The first thing in any analysis is to frame the goals of the site in terms of Key Performance Indicators. For the purpose of this post, the goal of MyTripGuru.com is attract high quality traffic with highly engaged visitors. How would you measure high quality traffic?

First, I set up a goal in Google Analytics to define my Key Performance Indicator. In this case, I want to see how many users sign up for the site. This goal is very simple to set up in Google Analytics. A visitor who successfully signs up for the site visits two pages – the sign up page and the confirmation page. These have to be included in the goal. In the case of Mytripguru.com, the pages end in signup.php and my-account.php. The goal looks like the following in Google Analytics:

With Google Analytics, goals are tracked once they are created, so you will need to wait for data to be collected before insights can be gained. I set this goal up a while ago so I have some traffic numbers to analyze. The first question is how many times this goal has been completed on the site. This is an easy analysis. Just pull up the report Goals Overview and look how many times this goal was triggered (expressed as a conversion).

But this data is still pretty meaningless because it is not actionable. What I really want to know, is how traffic from various sources are converting. Are my SEM campaigns effective? How good is the traffic from referrals? How are my email campaigns performing? What about organic searches and direct traffic? To analyze this traffic I like to pull the necessary metrics into Excel using the Excellent Analytics Excel plugin. This is a very useful plugin that let’s you pull data via the Google Analytics API to take advantage of Excel’s powerful reporting capabilities. The report I generated in Excel looks like this:

Now we can see some more interesting figures. Direct traffic (medium: none) has resulted in 27 registrations and referrals have resulted in 42. Not bad. But a quick glance at the figures show that cpc traffic is quite high. I don’t see many conversions here. To put things into perspective, some simple data crunching is necessary. In Excel, I added two Key Performance Indicators – Bounce Rate and Goals/Visit.

Now, the data is starting to become meaningful. The metric Goals/Visit puts things into perspective. On the low end, cpc and organic traffic is worrying. On the positive side, email traffic is converting very well, although the traffic numbers for this medium are too small to be meaningful. As a web analyst, the clear priority here is in optimizing cpc and organic traffic to generate more conversions.

The next step is to drill down into the cpc and organic traffic. Since I am running a cpc campaign with several thousand keywords and virtually no one signed up, I believe the problem is with my landing pages. In another analysis I also noticed that most of the landing pages for organic searches are the same as for cpc traffic. So, my landing pages clearly need work. Had the number of conversions been higher, I would take a look at specific keywords and ads that are converting well or especially poorly. My focus for optimization would then be on the SEM side – such as writing better ad copy or using better keywords. In this case, I think the problem is not with the quality of my ads but my landing pages. Now the fun begins. It is time to take a closer look at my landing pages. But that is the subject of another post!

An Easy Way to Improve Your HTML Email Marketing

Nick — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 12:55:41 +0000

Email Marketing has come a long way since the last decade. Despite security concerns and early calls for text based email campaigns, HTML emails have become the standard for most companies because of their visual appeal and higher conversion rates. HTML emails also allow companies to measure how many emails were opened and which links were clicked. When combined with a good customer relationship management (CRM) database, this can be a powerful medium for reaching out to your customers.

But there is still some room for improvement. As I increasingly depend on my iPhone to check my email, I have noticed a pattern where companies write a message on top of the html content for email clients that don’t support html or have it turned off (see screenshot). This is certainly a nice thing to do and the recipients lacking HTML support should not be ignored. But valuable real estate is being used to inform a small group of people that this email can be viewed differently. Instead, wouldn’t it be better to use this space to improve open rates for your email campaigns?

This change is trivial to implement. Simply add the text to a lower section in the html code, for example in another table. Recipients who open the email will see the message when the email is opened and all recipients will see an additional call to action when previewing the email.

Assuming you have tracking in place, why not give it a try and see how the open rate improves?

Portfolio: Ice Tigers Wiesbaden Ice Hockey Club

Nick — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 08:43:25 +0000

Name: Ice Tigers EV Wiesbaden

URL: http://evwiesbaden.de

Services: Web Design, Online Marketing

Description: The Wiesbaden Ice Tigers are a Regionalliga ice hockey team based in Wiesbaden, Germany. The main purpose of the site is to inform fans, team members, the media and prospective members about the club.

Portfolio: Famous Toastmasters Wiesbaden

Nick — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 08:39:36 +0000

Name: Famous Toastmasters Club of Wiesbaden

URL: http://famous-toastmasters.de

Services: Web Design

Description: The Famous Toastmasters of Wiesbaden, are, as the name indicates, a Wiesbaden-based chapter of the Toastmasters Association. The goal of the project was to reach both current and prospective members with a friendly and fun modern layout. As it was important that members be able to easily update the site on their own, the site was created using WordPress.

Portfolio: Bauunternehmung Peter Brand

Nick — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 08:35:23 +0000

Name: Bauunternehmung Peter Brand

URL: http://www.peterbrand.de

Services: Web Design

Description: Bauunternehmung Peter Brand is a regional construction company that specializes in construction jobs around the home and in various industries. The main purpose of the site is to promote recent projects and inform prospective clients.

Portfolio: FTS Consulting

Nick — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 08:30:22 +0000

Name: FTS Consulting

URL: http://fts-consulting.com

Services: Web Design

Description: FTS-Consulting is a site that presents training, consulting and coaching services for internationally-operating organizations. The aim behind this relaunch was to present the business services more professionally to match the needs and expectations of both current clients and prospective clients.

Portfolio: Gaestehaus Both

Nick — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 08:13:18 +0000

Name: Gaestehaus Both

URL: http://gaestehaus-both.de

Services: Web Design

Description: Gaestehaus Both is a guesthouse in Braubach am Rhein in Germany. The goals of the site are to provide information to visitors and to provide a booking form for reservation inquiries. The site was designed using WordPress.

Sharing Statistics from ShareThis, Revisited

Nick — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 13:11:02 +0000

ShareThis once again released new sharing statistics for its ubiquitous plugin and I thought I would continue my tradition of offering some comments about the latest trends.

The numbers this time are not as detailed as earlier but there are some interesting insights from this data. Compared to last year, Email sharing is down by more than 10% while Facebook sharing is up by 12%. Twitter, which barely made the list last year, is the #3 sharing platform with nearly 6%. Last year I made the (not so bold) prediction that Twitter would increase and Email sharing would fall. The continuing rise of Facebook sharing shows just how powerful Facebook has become as a medium for distributing content. I also believed that StumbleUpon would become more important, but these figures are regrettably not available. Nevertheless, it is apparent that Twitter and Facebook are establishing themselves as the leaders of the pack.

So what does this mean for content publishers? It is very tempting to offer readers a large number of options to share content but in the end, perhaps less is more. From a usability and conversion perspective, it is usually better to limit the choices in order to drive traffic toward a conversion goal. With Twitter, Facebook and Email sharing (based on these statistics), a content publisher has over 85% of the sharing mediums covered. Does it make any sense to bother with the remaining 15%?

The rest of the blog post over at Sharethis.com is equally interesting. I encourage you to read it as it reveals some interesting data about how users engage with the content once it is shared. User engagement (measured as pages/visit) of visitors coming to a site via a shared url on Twitter, for example, significantly underperforms Facebook and Email in this important metric. As the post correctly points out, this makes a lot of sense because articles or other links shared by your close friends are more likely to be clicked and appreciated than the “drive-by” nature of the links on micro-blogging sites such as Twitter.

Mytripguru.com launched

Nick — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 20:24:43 +0000

Gutenberg, Germany

Data Driving is proud to announce the launch of Mytripguru.com, an easy to use, intuitive online travel guidebook where members are recognized as experts, or Trip Gurus, for sharing their travel experiences. The Guru Rating system rewards top contributors and promotes them as experts in their particular regions and activities.

Mytripguru.com is built on the premise that everyone is a Trip Guru and has travel experiences or local knowledge to share. The more a Trip Guru contributes, the easier it becomes for visitors to the site to get travel advice from other Trip Gurus who share similar interests.

The simple navigation and user interface is designed to let Trip Gurus focus on their travel writing and readers to find relevant travel advice as easily and intuitively as possible. By promoting the top Trip Gurus in specific and marketable destinations and activities, Mytripguru embraces local businesses who hold tremendous knowledge about things to do in their regions and can profit from high level exposure on the site. Furthermore, by recognizing Trip Gurus for the quality and quantity of their contributions, local businesses are encouraged to add related content in their region to increase their Guru Rank while safeguarding the integrity of the site.

Mytripguru.com is founded and managed by Nicolas Johansson, owner at Data Driving. For more information about Mytripguru.com or Data Driving, please contact Nicolas Johansson.

Data Driving Design Decisions – The Home Page

Nick — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 12:06:50 +0000

This series describes some of the design and strategy decisions that one faces when developing a website, especially one with a social networking component or a community focus. The first part in this series takes a look at the home page. What types of home page designs work and why?

Why is the home page important?

For the majority of visitors and websites, the home page is the landing page of a website. It is also the page where the goals and expectations of visitors are the most diverse. This makes it important to balance the page and keep it relevant for all visitor segments.

What are the options?

For sites that have an element of social networking, community or reviews, there are essentially three options for home page design – walled garden, content only or hybrid. Let’s look at some examples of each.

Walled Garden

An example of such a home page is Facebook.com. The page acts like a wall and lets the visitor know that all the action is in the walled garden.

This makes sense when all content is only consumed by members. It also sends a message that privacy is taken very seriously since no content is visible from the home page. For new member-only content sites, this is difficult to pull off, as the home page might scare away first time visitors, making growth needlessly dependent on network effects and word of mouth.

Content Only

Myspace (at least the German site) falls into this category because there is only a small, unobtrusive box for users to log in or register. The focus is clearly on content and no real attempt is made to describe the service or entice new visitors to register. To be honest, I don’t see many advantages to this approach in the case of MySpace. They might be better off with a walled garden approach like Facebook and Twitter to attract new users.

It does, however, make sense for sites where content can be consumed by any type of visitor. Epinions, for example, has this type of start page and it works well. In this case it encourages the visitor to explore the site (consuming content) while minimizing distractions.

Hybrid

This is a mixture of content and a call to action to register. This type of page shows openness. It tries to balance the needs of new visitors and returning members, each of whom have very different intentions on the site. Gdgt does this quite well, as does Vimeo. Both sites rely on user-generated content but allow regular visitors to consume all of the content. For new sites, this is probably the best way to go.

Has anyone noticed other home page designs that don’t fall into one of these categories?

The next part in this series will take a look at how the home page might change if a user is logged in and revisits the home page.