New School Analytics

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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

Pretty simple stuff right? Let’s jump right in and look at counts, traffic and page-views (or what is called process measures in the strange evaluation universe).

Process Measures

Traffic looks good. The website is getting a decent amount of visitors and people spending enough time on the site. With a bounce-rate (no action/click by a visitor) of about 38% we can be happy.

Moving on to traffic and noticing that the majority of visitors come via search engines (a quick check revealed that people searching for h-pea via Google rather than typing the address into the browser address field – so we are all good). But what’s surprising at first is the really high amount of “other” in the traffic report. Well, rather than a surprise, this is actually great news, since we tagged all links in our direct marketing efforts for the conference to see how much traffic is generated through all the marketing work. With 30% of the traffic share the direct marketing campaigns sure did work. High five team!

If your mind is as analytic as mine you will immediately ask: do visitors that arrive at the website through direct marketing campaigns represent quality traffic? In other words, were those people who actually signed up for the conference or did they only look at stuff and did not do anything to improve the bottom line. Great question and the answer is: Yes, visitors coming to the site via the campaign signed up at a higher rate than the average visitor. At best we increased the conversion or registration by about 12 percent. Not bad at all. What does this tell us? Keep spending time on direct marketing and make sure that the write-ups are high quality – this will bring even more conference visitors in 2011.

Let’s quickly check the page-views and notice that some of our main pages, that is the ones with the most page-views, have pretty high bounce rates. For example, the papers.html site has a high 59% bounce rate, but also almost 4 minutes of average time on page. That tells me that next year, we should not simply copy the papers description of the presenters submission, but maybe summarize them in one or two sentences (rather than 500 words), or even better have the presenters themselves provide a quick and interesting blurb.

OK, here is what I learned so far:

• The H-PEA website receives decent traffic
• The direct marketing campaigns do work
• Some pages need re-writing of maybe better content for 2011

What did you learn from this little exercise? Did I miss anything that you think is important?

PS. Part 2: “Developing and Measuring Online Goals for a local Non-Profit” coming soon.