thefunnel

I came across an interesting web application that I’m probably going to try out.  This tool greatly improves on-site conversion rates by being able to present content to web site visitors dynamically, based on a certain set of user defined rules, such as keywords, visit frequency, location, referred / visited URL and so on. What this means is that based on what you know about the visitor as a persona, you can present the visitor with more relevant content, which leads to higher conversion. For example, if one of the web sites visited prior to yours was one of your competitors, you would have a different message compared to if the visitor was a frequently returning loyal customer. Not only does this helps in being more targeted in your messaging, it also provides a potential solution for reducing “page sub optimization” (this is when the same one web page is trying to target multiple audiences, by scrolling messages / banners, etc.), and the need for specific landing pages, which are not helping to build your SEO equity on your main site.

Here’s one example how to think about measuring the success of a B-2-B web site. To start with you should first organize your metrics into different high level groups. The typical high level groups would be web acquisition, web engagement, and web conversion. The next step would be to define sub metrics for each group.  For your acquisition metrics should count and track the number of visits, unique visitors, returning visitors for different sources of referrals, such as organic search, paid search, marketing campaigns, and direct traffic. For engagement you should measure, visit depth (or page views), visit time (duration), visit returns, visits per visitor, bounce rate, exit rate, number of comments and content consumption (or form completion). In addition you must also be able to cross reference acquisition sources with the various engagements. For paid search, you might also want to drill even deeper down separating golden key words from, generic ones and the long tail words. This will enable you to scratch the surface in understanding ROI for your search investment. Finally, the web conversions also need to be divided into sub-groups. My suggestion is a four tier approach. Responses are the lowest value conversion events, where the visitor leaves a trace, but there’s no follow-up activity. Generic success events are things you want to count and put a value on. These could be certain page views (for example, example a new product), new names registered to the database, or sign-up for newsletters. The third tier is the selected few, most valuable success events. These could be contact requests, partner referrals, service requests or more valuable page views such as pricing views. And fourth are your key performance indicators such as a request for a quote or sales leads. Similar to web engagements, you should be able to trace the web conversions all the way back to the acquisition source. In addition since we’re talking about a conversion event, that normally requires a web form of some kind, you should also track completion rates or abandonment rates.

And finally you should be able to slice and dice this data based on the business segmentation (your web taxonomy). In addition you should also create a dash-board where you track the trending of all the different conversion percentages rather than the absolute numbers. If you then are also able to correlate this data to your web satisfaction data, measuring things such as overall satisfaction, would recommend, able to find, and a positive search / browsing experience, combined with how much money and effort you’re putting in, you’re much closer to understanding your real performance and business contribution of your web site.