New School Analytics

We all know the scenario: you step into a restaurant just to find that all tables are full with customers happily eating their lunch. Now, if you could just know who long it will take until you can have your own table to sit down and have your lunch.

Usually you would look for some of the busy staff and ask the obnoxious question: “how long is the wait time for a table?” The answer you’ll receive will most likely be a very biased one that underestimates the actual wait time by, well, a lot. After all, who wants to loose customers through stating a very long waiting time for a table. As a staff person, you are much better off, giving a shorter waiting time, knowing that once a customer sits down and waits for a while, they are much more unlikely to get up and leave for another restaurant then when they first walked through the door.

A much better approach than asking the staff how long you have to wait is doing your own restaurant waiting time analysis. Read the rest of this entry »

Non-Profit Website Optimization

When working with a local non-profit organization I decided to take a deeper look at their annual conference registration sign-up process. My goal was to improve the registration process and have more people register for the annual conference. Easier said than done! Here we go.

I already set-up good macro and micro goals for the non-profit and was tracking the sign-up process via the goal-funnel in Google Analytics. With the goal funnel working, I could see after a bit of time that a lot of people never make it past the initial registration page. They either go back to look at all the information again or even leave the page.

That was a problem and I decided to make some changes to that very first registration page to find out what kind of information visitors need to continue with the registration process. There had to be a way to get more than just 14% of visitors through the funnel (the screenshot of funnel is from a later point, after we already optimized the website, but you get my point).

My thought was that, if people get to the first registration page and then have to go back to re-read some information, they obviously miss some summarizing information right above the personal information fields. So what do you do? You set-up a simple A/B test and test the new page (which has a quick summary of the conference highlights) against the old or original page. Have a look below and see what I am talking about.

Here is the original page:

And here’s the test page with the conference summary:

Now, after running the experiment for a few weeks the results speak for themselves. Have a look at the website optimizer results. The orange line represents the conversion rate of the new test page and the blue line the conversion rate of the old or original page.

Visitors register at a much higher rate for the conference via the new test page which includes a short conference summary than they do via the old original page without such a description.That is great news and a good reason for a high five with the team! Registration process on the website optimized – check!

One point worth mentioning, is that the difference in conversion pretty much disappeared at a certain point (that’s when the orange and blue line almost touch each other). The reason for that is simple that the “early-bird” registration discount was taken off the website at this point and all the stragglers rushed to sign-up for the conference. In that rush, it obviously did not make much of a difference, which page (original or test-page) a visitor viewed before registering for the conference.

What did I learn from all of that?

1. Look for troubled areas in your website that hurt your mission critical goals (in this example conference registration)
2. Develop concrete theories of how to improve those areas on your website
3. Put your theories to the test and set-up a web optimization experiment (start with a simple A/B test to keep things simple)

What did you learn from this little project? Anything that I missed? Share your thought and comments with me and all the readers.

Non-Profit Website Goals

Every website needs concrete goals and a non-profit website is no different than a e-commerce or business website. Think about your purpose, what you are trying to achieve, set-up your goals and start measuring how well you are doing in achieving those goals.

I generally I like to divide goals into macro and micro goals. Macro goals are your mission critical goals. That is, the one thing your organization cannot live without. If your key event of the year is to organize a conference than you macro goal is to have as many people as possible sign-up for your conference. If you are selling shoes, you want to sell as many shoes as possible.

Micro goals are the goals that also contribute to your success and make people aware of who you are and what you do. Since only a small percentage of all your visitors are actually signing-up for your conference or buying a pair of shoes from you, it only makes sense to also measure a few smaller goals that eventually lead somebody to achieve your main, or macro goal. Micro goals could be your “about” or specific product page. It could also be how many people contact you with questions about a certain product or service. All of those goals measure engagement and how interested your visitors are in what you do.

For a local non-profit the web analytics team agreed on several macro and micro goals. Read the rest of this entry »

When planning and organizing a national conference that relies entirely on online registrations make sure you include a few bright minds with web analytics and website optimization skills in your planning team. Doing so not only provides you with a better understanding of the dynamics of the registration process (how often do they come to the website, before they register? Do they actually look at our conference content when registering? Which content is most crucial? etc.) but also offers you the opportunity to work on optimizing your website during the conference registration process.

With those simple goals in mind – find out how people are interacting with the website and how can we improve the registration process to have more people sign up – a small team of the Hawaii-Pacific Evaluation Association (Full disclosure: I am the part of this web analytics team and was acting Secretary at the time) began to evaluate their own non-profit website in three straightforward steps:

1. Understand process measures (visitors counts, traffic sources and page-views)
2. Set Macro (the important big stuff) and Micro (the small but still important stuff) goals for your website and measure your conversion rate (how many visitors out of all your visitors achieve this goal/do what you want them to do)
3. Optimize mission crucial parts of the website Read the rest of this entry »

I had the opportunity to speak about web analytics and the online experience evaluation at the 2010 Hawaii-Pacific Evaluation Association (H-PEA) Conference. My presentation was scheduled for the last time slot of the day (full disclaimer: I was responsible for the scheduling of the presentations during the conference and really wanted to go last so other presenters did not feel that I used my board status for my own advantage) right before the the ice-cream social. So participants had the choice: listen to that nerdy guy in the silly aloha-shirt or go and have some ice-cream. Read the rest of this entry »