Data and insight derived from web analytics should be a key driving force in the creation of wireframes, information architecture, and usability testing.  The following is a partial list of bits of data that help User Experience experts make informed decisions, when creating the layout for a new site that will more effectively achieve the intended goals:

• Navigation Preferences: By categorizing your navigation types into groups such as drop-down menus, primary navigation, content navigation, quick-links, content links, text links, graphic/button links, flash/media links, etc you can start to see how visitors prefer to navigate across the site.    This becomes more exciting when you are able to compare these numbers with the navigation preferences of other sites. 
• Visitor Tasks:  Content popularity and/or click-paths are essentially the visitor showing you what tasks they are performing successfully (conversion) or unsuccessfully (abandonment). 
• Vocabulary / Nomenclature / Taxonomy:  The visitors are telling you how they describe and categorize their needs in 3 important ways.  First, the choice of words and phrases they use on public search engines such as Google.  Second, their choice of words and phrases on your site search engine (i.e. Endeca).  Thirdly, they are exposing what words make them click within the navigation and content in the site (as well as what words they don’t click on). 
• User Research:  Often overlooked is the data that tells us what company the visitor is at when navigating the site as well as demographic information such as if they are using an expensive ISP or a more practical one.  Their technical aptitude can be loosely derived from their connection speed, browser, operating system, and plug-in preferences.  The language, region, country, state, and county of your visitors also helps in defining web marketing strategies.   
• Conformity / Variance: Analyzing the deviation in variables such as visitation (frequency / latency), click-through-ratios, and search trends shows degrees of loyalty and dependencies within your visitors during a sales cycle/product research.  

Generating a report of these variables and more helps the entire team review and evolve site layouts more intelligently.  Often in projects we find that if the wireframes and information architecture are data-driven, the revision of designs becomes an informed process rather than one of personal preferences.

Marketing budgets are often divided up into channels/segments such as events, print, mail, television, radio, etc.  The sales team, often operating on a separate budget, actually spends budget on some channels with the same goals as marketing - such as inside sales.

When analyzing how the marketing budgets should grow (or shrink) an organization should analyze how the different channels stack up against each other for common variables. 

For example, as a touch-point (impression), ask your team to quantify how often each channel serves as a touch-point for potential and current customers.

Another example would be to put a cost to each impression.  Take the total budget per channel and divide it by the number of touch-points (impressions). 

From these numbers, as a channel for interaction with potential and current customers, the website and email are the most cost effective.  Adding conversion rates to this table may paint a different picture.  Analyzing budgets in this fashion shows that online channels are more cost effective at interacting with potential and current customers.

But what if the product/service is marketable to a global audience and the company cannot afford to send a sales team to every major country/region where demand may reside?  How does a marketer decide which regions to make investments for global growth?  Knowing that some regions are more expensive to localize for and some regions are more competitive than others when it comes to SEO/PPC initiatives, how does a marketer weigh the cost against the opportunity?

The answer should be simple: 

1. Use global keyphrase research tools to see if customers in various regions are searching for your product or service on the web. It’s typically OK to make the assumption that if there are surfers using relevant keyphrases to find your services, that customers are out there. 
2. For the regions that have online audiences for your product, pilot as many micro-sites (2-5 pages) as possible with small campaigns for driving traffic and see which sites demonstrate growth.  Translating a few pages and posting them as static pages is significantly less costly than fully building and deploying integrated/localized web sites. 
3. While the pilots are running, monitor site analytics to see if your micro-sites are attracting the traffic you expect and if the sites are able to convert traffic at acceptable conversion rates (i.e. Lead Generation). 

Note: 2-3 page micro-sites are not always successful and generating leads for complex products.  Allow your micro-site to link heavily to your primary corporate site (even if it is in English) to help sell the company along with the product/service.  The analytics will show if the language barrier causes abandonment.

The pilots will cost significantly less than full-blown web sites and will allow you determine which regions have more opportunity for growth giving your team a prioritized list of regions to localize into.  Remember that these sites will require maintenance overtime as you are budgeting a pilot and full blown localized sites.

1. Start by estimating the value of a conversion event on the website. Let’s use lead generation as our primary goal.  If we have an average web lead / converted customer ratio of 4% and our average value of a web customer is $7,500, then the average value of a web lead can be estimated (roughly) at $300.00. 
2. Next, in your analytics tool associate the value ($300) with the conversion event (Lead Generation).  Most Analytics tools will help you do this if you can associate a dollar value with your conversion event.  For our demonstration, we will assume that there is a Thank You (and next steps) page after each lead form.  Users that reach the Thank You page are worth an average value of $300.  The way to do this in each analytics tool is a little different.  For example, if you are using Google Analytics this would be the $Index value. 
3. For the next step, log in to your analytics tool and decipher which content is most highly valued to your converted users.   Again, this will be different depending on which analytics tool you use.  Sticking with our Google Analytics example, go the Reverse Path report see which pages are viewed before conversion events and go to the Top Content report to see the value of those pages.
   
4. Now you know which content your web leads are looking for and which content is most influential to them!! !  Update the link structure on your homepage by adding prominent links to the most valued content and eliminating links to the least valued (or least visited content). 

2 Notes

* First: Be sure to measure your average conversion of the event (lead generation) both before and after the homepage has been optimized.

** Second: Use common sense when optimizing links on the homepage. Some links require context before you put them in front of a user.  For example, just because terms and conditions on a home loan application are highly valued and highly visited by customers that convert, doesn’t mean that it is the first page a visitors wants to see on your homepage. Customers looking for home loans may need to see rates first in order to put the terms into context.

If you have questions about how to implement this process, please contact us at 650-212-3900 or info@extractable.com

Google Analytics announced an API to their popular analytics service.

The first implementation we are working on ties Google Analytics into a content management system that we are deploying for a client.  For many organizations, the CMS is used daily to make updates to the site while the analytics are viewed less frequently.  This gives all CMS users the ability to analyze the page(s) they are working. 

CMS users will have the ability to know valuable information about the content they are editing, such as:

1. how people get to the page they are working on  (entrance, visitors, pageviews)
2. and how many leave after viewing it (bounce, abandonment)
3. are people reading this page (time on page)
4. if the copy they are spending so much time on only gets viewed by 1% of the site audience

Content owners / marketers that are aware of this data will improve overall site performance by being aware of how specific pages impact site goals.

I’m excited about our first implementation of this new, simple channel for getting analytics data in the hands of the web team. 

For more information, check out the Google Analytics Developer Docs.

The site design and information architecture should increase student applications and stone submissions while driving repeat visitors as they have a more positive online experience with the GIA brand.

If you need a stone evaluated, are interested in a jewelry career, need to buy a ring or learn more about a stone make sure to visit GIA online or visit them in Carlsbad.

Hence, link building should be an integral (and ongoing effort) in any search engine optimization (SEO) program.  Where should you look to increase the number and quality of backward links to your website?

• Find industry related blogs; and blog!
• Find and participate in industry related websites and forums.
• Submit your website to free search engine directories like DMOZ.org.
• Build relationships with similar website owners and prove value in having them add a link to your website.

To elaborate on the last point a little more; in Google’s search engine find related websites by using the following search syntax “related:www.yourwebsitehere.com” and identify any websites that might benefit from adding a link to your website.   Don’t email or call the website owner blindly.  You will need to build a relationship and prove value to the other website owner that creating a link to your website is in their best interests. 

Show value!  For example, if your websites focuses on listing all the Happy Hour events in the city of San Francisco consider contacting websites like MustSeeSanFranisco.com or SFTravel.com.  Who on vacation in San Francisco doesn’t want to have a drink at a local Happy Hour event?

Lastly, don’t forget to “optimize” the hyperlink by including the primary keyword phrase in the actual link.  Example:  Instead of adding the following text to another website you are getting a link from, “Visit http://www.yourwebsitehere.com/ to see some social events including happy hours in the city” write “Visit our partner to find great happy hours events in San Francisco”

The direct benefits of getting backward links is A) your website will receive more site traffic from visitors clicking through on that backward link and B) search engines will give your website more “weight” when determining where your website should appear on related keyword searches.

During the website redesign, Extractable worked with CFCU to make sure the new web experience on the CFCU website was as professional as larger financial institutions in the areas but also directly addressed the students, faculty and affiliates associated with Louisiana State University (LSU) that make up a large percentage of their member base.  The website was designed for ease of use and to enable members to have a positive online banking experience.

Before the website was launched benchmark figures were calculated in order to show a positive ROI on the project over the next several years.  Figures and base costs originating from the website were calculated for the member call center, average products/services per member and on the total membership of the credit union.

If you live in Louisiana or are affiliated with LSU please consider using CFCU as your primary financial institution because sometimes the “perfect bank for you, isn’t a bank at all”.

Here’s a trick on how to setup one of your Pay-Per-Click campaigns so you can get credit for the sale and receive the allocades of your coworkers you know you deserve!

Setup one of your Pay-Per-Campaigns so the ads only display in a major city where your company has most of their brick-and-mortar stores.

Example: If your company focuses on selling competitive priced jewelry, setup a PPC campaign to only display ads in New York (assuming that’s where a majority of your stores are located) and bid on keywords like “discount jewelry, jewelry distributor, diamond wholesaler”.

Next, write all your ads to lead with the city abbreviation “NY” (an obvious abbreviation for anyone living in New York) and then include some of the keyword phrases that you are bidding on (eg. NY Diamond Wholesaler).  Use the second line of the ad to explain what your company sells (eg. necklaces, bracelets, rings etc) and use the last line of the ad to “hook” your customer (eg. advertise free shipping and a coupon for 10-20% off any purchase).

Keeping best practices in mind, create a specific landing page for this campaign.  Include (and better yet bold) the keywords you are bidding on, pictures of your products, etc.  Most importantly include a 10-20% coupon that can be used online upon checkout or printed out for in-store purchases.

If you’re a PPC rockstar you’ll probably already realize that setting up a geographic targeted PPC campaign with targeted ads that include the city name and take customers to a custom landing pages will result in:

1.    Higher clickthrough rates (don’t be surprised if you get close to 10%)!
2.    Higher online conversions (who doesn’t like a good 10-20% discount on a product they are already interested in?)
3.    Higher total sales (since you’ll get credit for offline sales generated online).

Have you figured out how number 3 happens?

The coupon code!  By setting up your campaign this way, you’ll have customers print off and use the coupon in-store (in order to get the 10-20% discount)!  Since, this coupon is only on your PPC landing page you’ll get credit for the sale!

CU ONE approached Extractable to help design a website that would “provide exceptional value to CU ONE members by delivering outstanding products and services anytime, anywhere.”  By having the website function as a 24 hour online member center (by empowering members to do more of their financial tasks online and by organizing information on the website more clearly) the website is poised to be a success!

Some great CU ONE site features include:

• Secure loan and mortgage applications
• Ability to open and fund an account online
• Wide array of financial calculators
• Numerous online forms
• Detailed online map
• Numerous online forms
• Dynamic Frequently Asked Questions
• Print and send-to-friend features
• Online help demos
• Online chat support

In the next month CUONE will be working to implement RSS feeds on their website and dynamically pull in rates into specific webpages in order to ensure their members have the latest rate information possibly available.

If you live in Michigan (or surrounding states) and are looking for a stable financial institution that still feels “personal” please make sure to visit Credit Union ONE.