It costs a fortune to get a customer to decide to take an action online. Don’t frustrate and loose them at the last minute with poorly designed web forms.

Unfortunately most forms we encounter have problems. They are the least glamorous, underloved part of websites. Product managers, marketing and designers are not interested.

That is ok but we can still do a good job by addressing common issues such as labeling, placement and design of elements, calls to action, help.

A good starting point is Luke Wroblewski’s Web Form Design which provides web form design best practices from labels, input fields, actions, help text to error handling.

Once you redesign your forms, don’t forget the analytics and optimisation.

The free web analytics solution is now more attractive than ever, giving users the ability to conduct extremely detailed analysis to extract a better return on their online investment.

Advanced segmentation

Segmentation of data is one of the fastest and most effective ways to gain real insights into the efficacy of your marketing programs. As I’ve said before, segmentation takes the noise out of web analytics data, breaking it down into meaningful chunks that you can analyse more effectively.

In the past, however, the best segmentation tools on offer were through high end solutions.

The good news is that the power of segmentation has just been brought to the masses, with advanced segmentation tools now available to Google Analytics users.

There are nine default segments that will come in handy to most people who use the analytics tool. These segments can be applied to any report you want, and include:

1. All visits
2. New visitors
3. Returning visitors
4. Paid traffic
5. Non-paid traffic
6. Search traffic
7. Direct traffic
8. Referral traffic
9. Visits with conversions

But the real power lies in the ability to create custom segments. This means that you can isolate a certain behaviour, examine it carefully and see whether your marketing campaign worked for that group.

For example, you might want to isolate:

• All visitors who came from a specific email campaign AND purchased at least one product
• All visitors from Sydney who completed a goal
• All visitors who started a transaction, but dropped out (and where).

Once you have defined your custom segments, you can then compare the performance of that segment with the rest of the site using the reporting tools.

Or you might want to compare the performance of one segment to that of another. For example, you could view the bounce rate for a page, and then split it into the bounce rate for visitors who came from search and direct traffic.

Custom reporting

Until now, users of Google Analytics have had to content themselves with using the standard reports on offer (e.g. visitors, traffic sources and so on).

With the new “Custom Reports” tool, you can define your own criteria and create your own report. For example, you may want to create a report showing e-commerce information by geographies. Here’s how it’s done:

1. Create a custom report with the following metrics:
   • Visits
   • Unique purchases
   • Revenue
   • Per visit value
   • Average value
2. In the dimensions, add “city” at the top level. If you have customers from around the world, you may like to define “country” as the top level, and add city as the second dimension. If you do this, the report will initially show visits by country, and you can then select a country to see data segmented by city.
3. Then you can compare cities according to the metrics you defined - so you can see, for example, the average value of a visitor from Sydney to that of one from Melbourne.

More information at your fingertips

Once you have your segments and custom reports created, you can then access deeper insights by combining the two. Want to see which city is of greater value, as well as where your visitors are coming from in that city? Not a problem. In terms of segmentation, you’re only limited by the data sets you have to work with.

Setting these reports and segments up doesn’t take long at all. Once they’re up and running, you can begin to make more finely tuned marketing decisions, and better target your offering to particular groups of customers.

Bienalto can provide Google Analytics setup and configuration services. Read more about how we can assist you in implementation and optimisation.

Further reading

You can learn more about the value of segmentation in some previous posts:

Web Data Segmentation - a pre-requisite for gaining actionable insights

Understanding your website’s users

Informing information architecture with quantitative insights

The annual Web Analytics Buyers Guide 2008 from E-consultancy is now available for purchase. With its in-depth vendor profiles and market analysis, it helps you to put things in perspective when making buying decisions.

So what’s in the Guide? And how does it compare to what’s going on locally? With responses flooding in to our Australian Web Analytics Survey, we can provide a few answers.

One of the biggest predictions in E-consultancy’s guide is that the UK market for web analytics would grow by 12% in 2008. We agree (give or take a few percentage points).

Already, we can see a trend in comparing results from this year’s Australian Web Analytics Survey to last, with organisations spending significantly more on the investment in external professional services and in-house web analytics staff.

Not surprisingly, the investment in tools doesn’t show the same growth - a great proportion of organisations in Australia now use Google Analytics as a preferred tool.

According to the UK report, only 21% of companies use Google Analytics exclusively, but typically use it as a complementary tool to support another investment.

But with Google raising the bar with its new segmentation and reporting tools, it will pay to see how these figures change next year.

Purchase the Web Analytics Buyers Guide

Download the latest Australian Web Analytics Survey

There’s a prevailing attitude amongst web users out there: site search doesn’t work. It’s not surprising, given the common practice of ‘let’s chuck a search engine on our site’ without planning how it should work.

If it doesn’t work, then why bother? Why should you include site search, when it requires a reasonable investment to implement and maintain?

I’ve been hearing these questions a lot recently.

Indeed, scout around the new generation of corporate sites and you’ll find that more and more of them are dropping site search. Without naming names, the recently redesigned Australian websites of a large auto manufacturer has abandoned site search (excuse the pun).

So is this the new black? Is site search dead?

The case for site search

The good news for people who are ’searchers’ instead of ‘browsers’ is that site search is a fundamental element of some sites, and will never die. I say ’some’ - news sites, e-commerce sites and large information portals all lend themselves to search. Their customers or users are generally specific about what they’re looking for, and site search becomes a crucial navigational tool.

These sites must invest in a proper implementation of site search - not just ‘chucking one in’. You need to think about the circumstances under which people might search on your site, and then create scenarios for different searchers. These scenarios give you your indexing rules and guide your decisions on when to emphasise certain types of content (for example, directing a user to a product page instead of an FAQ).

Then, when you’ve got your site search right, you can sit back and reap enormous benefits from the insights gained via site search analytics. You can see:

• Who’s using the site
• What people are interested in
• What language people use in searching for products and services.

These insights are gold to marketers looking to improve or enhance not only the site itself, but also how they position their products and services in the broader marketplace.

The case against site search

On the other hand, if your current site search only attracts a handful of users, or you don’t have the resources to maintain it, then perhaps your site would be better off without it. Why bother maintaining one if only a very few per cent of customers use it?

There’s also a strong case against site search for businesses that want greater control over what people see on their sites - and how they get to certain pages.

A previous client of mine, TressCox Lawyers, wanted clients to be able to see the full spectrum of what they offer, as well as the many partnerships they have. So they focused on building logical, clear navigation paths on their site so that clients could easily find their way around - whilst seeing what TressCox wanted them to see.

Interestingly, TressCox has still got a site search function on their site - but it’s buried down at the bottom of the page, to discourage people from using it.

I think the key message is that you shouldn’t do site search simply because everyone else is doing it. It’s imperative to get it right - you will cause more harm than good by having a poorly performing site search function.

Most importantly, I think the fact that people are questioning the relevance and value of site search is a healthy development. It’s a sign of maturity in the market, and can only mean good things for the quality of site search in the future.

More good reading on the topic:

• Kick butt with internal site search analytics (by Avinash Kaushik)
• Does your site search need a makeover? (by Hurol Inan)
• The benefits of site search analysis (by Hurol Inan)

What do you think? Does your business have a strong case for having a site search function? Or are you considering abandoning it? Post your comments below.

• Removes usability dead-ends of the old site design
• Emphasises additional paths beyond search to explore products by brand, price, genre
• Introduces faceted search features to facilitate refinement and improve product findability
• Smoothes the path from browse/search to purchase with a decluttered and simplified design

Our approach was a combined in-depth understanding of online retail, analytics-driven insights into user behaviour, an expert review of the current site and competitive analysis of local and international online retail sites.

For small arts organisations, every penny in the piggybank counts. They are always on the lookout for ways to extract more value from minimal budgets – while still conveying a professional and appealing image to customers.

The Song Company, a Sydney-based vocal ensemble that has set the world alight with its distinctive and dynamic sound, is now achieving significant cost and time savings with the launch of a new website and online ticketing system.

The new-look website, designed and built by Bienalto Consulting, has online ticketing, album purchasing and subscriptions functionality. It all ties into a Salesforce.com database, which stores crucial ticketing and marketing information.

“We are a small arts organisation that is low on resources, but recognised as one of the best in the world. It is important for us to be able to pull above our weight in commercial dealings – and this requires a professional online projection of our image,” said Antony Jeffrey, General Manager, The Song Company.

Challenge

Until now, The Song Company managed all ticket orders by telephone and mail. With approximately 10,000 tickets sold each year, and ticket sales taking up to five minutes over the phone, valuable administrative time was taken up with processing sales.

In addition, the team had little way of tracking where the sales were coming from, or which marketing brochures or campaigns the customer was responding to.

The Song Company sought a website redesign that would enable them to manage ticket purchases, album sales and subscriptions; while also tying in with their marketing efforts to save both time and money.

Solution

Upon the recommendation of branding and design company, Principals, The Song Company engaged Bienalto Consulting to design and develop the new website (Bienalto also recently developed the Principals website).

The first thing that Bienalto did was to implement a Salesforce.com database to house ticketing and marketing information. Using this database, an email marketing program was soon up and running.

Emails are sent to the subscribers of The Song Company, with special promotions, upcoming performances and other information about the ensemble.

The website integrates with the Salesforce.com system, as well. With its online subscriptions and ticketing capabilities, The Song Company is on its way to realising the goal of shifting ticket purchases from telephone and mail to online.

“We expect to transform our customer marketing processes, moving everything online over the next couple of years. We will build in more sophistication, such as segmentation, until we reach our goal of 100 per cent of ticket purchases and subscriptions online,” said Jeffrey.

Using the Salesforce.com system, The Song Company has the ability to send out emails with dynamic content – which means they can personalise content according to subscribers’ preferences and behaviours. For example, if a subscriber purchases tickets to a particular concert, a follow-up email with details of the accompanying CD could be sent one week after the concert.

Results

“Our new site is an enormous improvement on the old one. It is easy to update, logical and a delight to our customers – I’m convinced that this time, we’ve got it right,” Jeffrey said.

The Song Company now has a clear picture of where customers are coming from, and what campaigns they are responding to. The tracking capabilities within Salesforce.com provide a clear snapshot of marketing successes.

“From our first meeting with Hurol Inan, we were deeply impressed with how switched on he was. Bienalto is a truly professional outfit – with incredible knowledge in both technology and online marketing. This combination has delivered a winning result for The Song Company,” said Jeffrey.

It’s why marketers love customer demographics, and information on product holding, past purchases and campaign responses.

But what if you could go beyond this, and use online behavioural insights for your campaigns as well?

Taking it one step further, what if you could build or tailor an analytics solution to capture these behavioural insights - not just from the web, but from offline data as well?

It would place some pretty powerful information at your fingertips.

Instead of putting the behavioural data on your website into the “too hard” basket, organisations need to start asking how this data can help them achieve better ROI on their marketing campaigns.

The first step is to think about the scenarios, or insights, you need.

For example, you might want to capture insights about repeat purchasing behaviour; or the instances when a loyal customer starts browsing in new product areas.

In these scenarios, if you track the customer’s movements and collect the right data, you can then target them with campaigns across all channels - online through dynamic offer targeting, email marketing, direct marketing, and telemarketing.

The second step is to work out what’s required from your analytics or tracking solution. And this step represents a fundamental paradigm shift.

In the past, organisations would simply state, “I need a web analytics solution.”

Now, instead of selection of an out-of-the-box solution and thinking how it would help your business, organisations would benefit more from a solution that is built around those specific scenarios or insights identified as delivering value to the business.

Here’s where it gets contentious. Many of today’s web analytics solutions are not on an open architecture, which makes it incredibly difficult for you to integrate behavioural and offline data.

Seek web analytics solutions with open architectures. Get them to show how they can meet your specific scenarios. Be prepared to build custom tracking mechanisms, which are specifically designed to generate leads for your business.

Once you’ve done this, you can start capitalising on your behavioural insights. Not only are they easily actionable and translate into truly targeted marketing, but they also make the measurement of ROI much easier.

As Akin Arikan says in his excellent book, Multichannel Marketing, there is “no excuse for not using the rich lather of behavioural data from the website as a component for targeting marketing communications.”

So start thinking about it. Your customers will love your intuition.

Having returned to Australia, Jon is now consulting to Bienalto and sharing his valuable expertise with some of our clients. Here, he offers some invaluable perspectives about where Australia sits on the ‘totem pole of sophistication’ when it comes to e-commerce and online marketing.

So where, exactly, is Australia on this totem pole?

JB: The good news is that Australia performs as well as overseas counterparts in some industries. In travel and publishing, for example, we can see as much innovation here as elsewhere.

However, it’s not necessarily fair to compare Australia to the UK and US. We will never have the same volumes of people online - their huge populations make it easier to justify spending more money at a greater intensity to achieve more sophisticated results in the online space.

Additionally, I would argue that the Australian retail industry is dominated (almost monopolised in some cases) by a handful of large players who simply do not understand or value the concept of eTailing. There is often little competitive impetus for these guys to push the online model. All it takes is for someone in the marketplace to “get it right” in terms of their website and e-commerce model, and the landscape will change rapidly as everyone else scrambles to catch up.

So that’s why we’re currently three or four years behind when it comes to e-commerce. But we’ll keep catching up - particularly when our broadband access improves from its current levels. I think we’re on par with Columbia at the moment, so there’s clearly room for improvement!

Let’s look at e-commerce first, then. What’s different in Australia?

As mentioned above, the number of people online and access to broadband are two key differences, as is the low competition here.

In Europe, perceptions have shifted from seeing the Internet as a giant price comparison portal, to a tool that offers convenience and choice. As more and more people come on board, retailers improve their level of sophistication and efficiency in logistics - you can place an order in the morning and have the product arrive in the afternoon. This sort of service increases consumers’ faith in the whole process, whereas in Australia products can still take a week to arrive.

Last year in the UK, retail shops on high streets suffered a terrible Christmas. Online, however, sales were huge. Year on year, online stores are selling significantly more volume than their biggest retail stores - people are changing the way they shop and the retailers are responding, not with cannibalism of retail stores, but with the positive displacement of resources.

Australia needs a sea-change of attitude - and it’s starting to happen - for retailers to embrace the online model of business.

Web analytics would play a role in this, to show them what’s working and what’s not. How does Australia rate in web analytics?

At the top end of town in Australian web analytics, businesses are just as sophisticated at their European and US counterparts.

But across the board, Europe and the US are simply more sophisticated in their use of web analytics because the increased volume of traffic makes it easier to justify the investment.

So overseas, you see web analytics bringing information in from multiple sources: email, web analytics software, paid search, CRM systems and the like. This creates a rich repository of information that online marketers use to create a single customer view, for instance. This centralisation of information empowers businesses to make more informed and balanced decisions.

What about email marketing? Bienalto is doing some great things with local customers, which would be on par with overseas companies…

What Bienalto is doing with customised dashboards and Salesforce.com is very similar to what I’ve seen overseas. Creating bespoke systems that enable powerful segmentation and targeting is what it’s all about.

For example, we had about 300,000 names in the net-a-porter.com database, and were able to deliver unique emails to every single one of them. We did it by building a bespoke system using Lyris, bringing information in from multiple disparate data sources, and populating the emails with completely different content for each user.

This is true one-to-one marketing, and Bienalto is certainly achieving it with its email marketing programs, especially in the B2B space.

We’re moving closer to the top of the totem pole, then. When is Australia at the top of the game?

What Hurol Inan and the Bienalto team are doing in multivariate testing is as advanced as anything I saw being done in the UK.

For large organisations in Australia that enjoy significant online volume, multivariate testing produces significant benefits with the spend justified through completely accountable and measurable results.

When I was working in the UK, we didn’t have access to the multivariate testing systems that Bienalto has access to. It is shaping up to be a strong area of growth for Bienalto.

So what do you hope to get out of working at Bienalto?

Hurol Inan and the Bienalto team are the smartest in Australia. They are so far ahead of the competition, pushing things that are being done overseas and attracting clients that are true thought-leaders.

Bienalto’s clients are very switched on in the commercial sense, looking at sales growth of 50-80% year on year in e-commerce. These are the sorts of figures that excite me, and I am looking forward to applying my experience in such a dynamic and progressive environment.

• Regression – predictive models built on past data to predict future responses
• Randomised trials – experimental design to test particular ideas have predict results, aka multivariate testing of web pages, covering an interview with Matt and James Roche of Offermatica (acquired by Omniture)

For the quantitative analysts, this book is the affirmation that you have chosen the right career path.

If you are surrounded by data-sceptics, get them to read this book. Written in a similar style of Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki and Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, this book makes statistical methods highly accessible to non-technical readers and will surely convert them!

Read more about the book and purchase your copy at Amazon.com

Interview with Ian Ayres