Internet Marketing: Web Site Dynamics

Web Site Marketing Effectiveness

Web Site Dynamics

• Get intimate knowledge about your web site
• Understand what people do on it
• Measure the achievement of web site goals
• Compare different page effectiveness
• Compare page version effectiveness
• Fine tune wording and layout
• Analyze search engine keyword effectiveness
• Improve Pay-per-Click performance
• Analysis search engine traffic

Key Points

• Set goals
• Measure performance
• Increase conversions
• Improve Sales

Active Tracking

Where have you been on our web site today?

Active tracking gathers web page usage information as it happens and stores it in a database for real-time analysis.

Internet Web Site Marketing

To improve your web site effectiveness as a marketing and selling tool you need clear objectives of what constitutes success (a conversion) and a strategy to measure it and improve it. Success must be measurable, it could be things like: making an online purchase, downloading a new product PDF brochure, downloading trial software, avoiding a telephone support call or telephoning a marketing consultant.

Do you know the answer to the following questions?

1. What are the objectives of your web site?
2. Do you know how effective your web site is in achieving conversions?
3. What entry pages are most effective in achieving conversions?
4. Which entry pages are least effective?
5. Overall which page is most effective?
6. Is the latest revision of a page performing better than its predecessor?
7. What is the impact of adding a button in a particular position on a page?
8. Which search engine keywords gives the best and worst objective fulfillment rates?
9. What traffic do you get from each search engine and which engine is most beneficial?
10. How much is a ten percent improvement in web site effectiveness worth to you?

Improving the Effectiveness of Your Website

Web site performance and return on investment can be improved substantially by defining clear objectives and putting in place a strategy to measure and improve them. It is not a strategy that yields huge improvements overnight, it is a strategy that enables ongoing continuous improvement.

Traditional web site log analysis fails in several major areas. It doesn't remove the influence that search engine spiders, other crawlers and references from other web sites have in inflating the web site performance statistics.

Secondly it is all a bit of a guess, there is nothing in the web site logs that really ties together consecutive site accesses by the same user it has to be inferred by the analysis software. Thirdly the site logs are text files which are not suitable for ad hoc querying or analysis. The graph that follows shows the weekly sessions on the CyWarp web site from traditional log analysis.

The traffic here is inflated by search engines and references to graphics images from other web sites. The real traffic is shown below which is around 20% of the inflated web statistics.

Active Tracking = Active Management

There are three requirements to be able to analyze the performance of a web site.

The first requirement for analysis is accurate data. Instead of using the web logs we use active tracking of web page usage to record interactions with the web site and progress through it. Active tracking is suitable for both low volume and high volume sites. With high volume sites we recommend the use of statistical sampling where we measure the interactions of a significant sample rather than measure all activity. The activity measured is browsers only, no search engine spiders no other creepy crawlies.

The second requirement is having the right information available. Any user interaction can be selected for tracking. If there are two links on a page providing the same result then the performance of each link can be individually measured.Web page accesses are recorded as is the date and time of web page creation. The performance of each web page version at meeting web site objectives can be individually analysed.

The third requirement is that the data is readily available for analysis which means that it has to be in a database. Our active tracking system automatically stores web site usage information into a database for real-time analysis and ad hoc queries. Our reporting system allows you to focus in and fine tune any portion you wish.

Web Site Dynamics Demonstration

Background Information to the Demonstration

The primary focus of the live data graphs is on the sales conversion ratio. This is the ratio that tells you how well you have gone turning web site visitors into customers. In other words your success rate at getting a web site visitor to take the action you want. The sales conversion ratio is quite simple.It is the number of people who purchase your product or service divided by the number of people who visit your web site.

The horizontal bar graphs used frequently in the analysis pages the graphs are ordered from bottom to top. For example if displaying the entry point web pages with the greatest number of sessions then the web page with the highest session will be at the bottom of the graph.

Web pages are almost always considered from the aspect of where they are the entry page. Sales conversions do exactly the same, they look at conversions where a particular page was the entry page regardless of which page the final conversion actually occurred. The web page entry count is referred to as sessions . A session has one entry page, one exit page and possibly other pages in between.

Keyword phrases used in search engines are converted to lower case, numbers without periods are stripped, single character words such as 'a' are removed and the words are then sorted into alphabetic order. Thus 'A Slide Show Maker' is converted to 'maker show slide'. It is done to normalize the keywords so that they can be grouped and counted.

For consistency in the graphs where Sessions, Conversion Ratio and Conversions are shown they are always shown as blue, gold and green bars.

The data is collected in real time and is immediately available for display. However because we have made this information public to reduce load this web site is configured to cache graphs for sixty minutes and to refresh long term summary data every 12 hours. If you happen to access the site and get selected for a summary data refresh you may have to wait 20 seconds for a web page to display.

Dynamics of the CyWarp Web Site

Every site visitor is an opportunity. Web site tuning is about making the most of these opportunities and maximizing the conversion ratio. The web site dynamics pages below cover:

Web Site Traffic and Conversion Ratio Improvement.

• Increase search engine traffic and sales including Pay-per-Click opportunities.
• Manage under-performing search engine keyword traffic.
• Identify under-performing web pages for tuning candidates.
• Tuning web page performance for increased conversions .
• Monitor Pay-per-Click and other programs - coming soon.
  

General Information.

• Traffic Analysis- High level overview page showing traffic patterns.
• Conversion Analysis - High level overview of objective conversion patterns.
• Search Engine Optimization - Progress on a set of keywords and search engines.
• Web Page Performance - Drilldown into individual web page operation.
• Search Engine Traffic - Drilldown into individual search engine patterns.
• Search Engine Keywords - See how effective individual keywords are.
• Browser information - See browser types and languages.

Technical Information.

• Technical Overview - A brief background and live graph configuration pages. The graphical analysis is fully customizable. We provide many standard graphs but you can add your own, modify the standard ones or we will develop custom graphs for your web site.

This software provides you with the tools and the analysis to see what is really happening on your web site and improve it. With these tools you can make informed decisions to improve your web site performance both through content optimization and search engine optimization. The future is finally in your hands.