Monthly Archives: July 2017

Turning Web Analytics into Nonprofit Success

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Non-profit web analytics success?!? I know, I know. You think I’ve gone crazy with the heat. But today, I’m talking about how web analytics can set you up for success, even if your tax status is a bit different.

Sarah from Seattle tweeted the other week, asking for advice on how to use web analytics, and specifically “goals tracking” to help her with a nonprofit website supporting the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture. I thought it would be good topic to explore a bit, so I’ll start with the basics.

Even the most “nonprofit” website still has digital goals, and let’s face it, they’re still “business” goals. Keeping that in mind, I’m going to try to label some different types of business goals one could track in web analytics, and more importantly, how to measure success.

  1. Memberships & Donations – I won’t spend much time on this one because it’s pretty obvious. Most nonprofits’ main digital goal is to solicit memberships or donations. And tracking them using web analytics is no different than ‘for profit’ sites. The only caveat is that (unfortunately) human nature seems to dictate a longer consideration cycle for donations than, say, buying a fancy new smartphone. Knowing this, it’s wise to track the content and micro-conversions that might lead to a donation (micro-conversions). Think about downloading brochures and visiting particular pages about the mission statement, leadership, whether donations are tax-deductible, etc.
  2. Logistics – For physical spaces like galleries, museums, and parks, there are goals related to logistics that indicate a strong likelihood of a visit. These should be tracked as goals, and optimized on an ongoing basis. Some examples here are downloading a map, visiting a page that lists directions and hours of operation, or even interacting with content related to “events.” For maps, it would be great to track that a visitor had mapped from their location to the nonprofit’s location, as that indicates strong intent to actually visit. For events, some sort of “add to calendar” micro-conversion would indicate strong intent. Another great goal to track regarding events is getting prospects to sign up for time-sensitive reminders via email or SMS.
  3. Opting In to Content Pushes – That’s an odd phrase, but it’s my way of saying that nonprofits should be tracking goals where prospects allow you into their lives a bit. Anytime a prospect opts to become more than an anonymous site lurker you achieve a portion of your business goal! The Burke Museum has lots of great options already, so it would just be a matter of tracking goals related to: subscribing to their blog, signing up for their email newsletter, taking action to follow them on Twitter, and taking action to friend them on Facebook. If you can’t track with 100% certainty that a conversion has occurred, track the action taken (e.g. clicking a Facebook icon) that shows strong intent.

Note that most web analytics programs won’t necessarily allow you to track all of these things as goals “out of the box,” but with some technical knowledge (especially JavaScript), perseverance, and creativity, they’re all quite achievable.

Calling all NPOs! What else are you tracking (or wishing you could track) as goals in your web analytics?

[A version of this post was originally published July 29th, 2009 on GrokDotCom.com, an award-winning, but now defunct, Marketing Optimization blog.]

4 Steps To Optimization Success

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Over the years, I’ve learned a lot about why certain organizations succeed with Optimization, and why others succeed “less.” To use the exercise regimen metaphor, many people start exercise programs with goals of losing weight or a better physique, but not everyone sticks with it and achieves their goals.

I thought I’d share some insights so that if you’re thinking about an optimization program, you can avoid the pitfalls and reap the rewards.

There are many nuances of course, but I’d boil it all down to 4 basic steps.

Step 1 – Get Help

Those who get a personal trainer are more likely to accomplish their fitness goals. In the world of online marketing, those who get expert help are far more likely to achieve their business goals than those who try to “DIY.” The help you need is cross-disciplinary: you need expert eyes looking at aesthetics, usability, copywriting, marketing strategy, A/B split testing, personas, pay per click, search engine optimization, and more.

Step 2 – Get Out of Project Mentality

There is a tendency to think about improving a website, or any marketing, as a one-time project with a beginning and end. I believe this is the wrong approach to optimization. You may think you can join a gym for 3 months, lose some weight, then cancel your gym membership and still maintain your improvements. But only a true lifestyle change can help you accomplish fitness goals. Same goes for Optimization, also known as Continuous Improvement. The shift out of project mentality needs to be addressed within your organization (culture), with your vendors, and especially with those who are going to “own” the implementation of your continuous improvements.

Step 3 – Budget For It

Closely related to Step 2, Step 3 is to budget for a process of ongoing optimization. Since it’s not a project that ever should “end,” it should always be in the budget, right? If you join a gym and see improvements (you drop a few pounds, keep them off, and feel better in general), why wouldn’t you budget that gym membership for at least the next couple years? Also keep in mind that “budget” doesn’t just mean a line item in a spreadsheet. Budgeting your internal resources’ time is important, too.

Step 4 – Celebrate the Wins, Learn From the Losses

I’ve already written about celebrating the wins, even if they’re small. Part of the celebration process is stepping back from the day-to-day process of Optimization and acknowledging that the process as a whole is effective. And publicizing wins is probably the most effective way to make sure Optimization costs stay in the budget no matter what! As far as losses go, I define a “loss” as a tested optimization change that decreased a KPI. One of the great things about digital changes is that if they don’t work, un-doing them is pretty quick and painless. But, too many clients back away from testing, changing, and optimizing because of a loss or two. Again using the weight loss analogy, weight fluctuates, and just because you gain back a pound that you lost, doesn’t mean you quit exercising. The key is to learn from the failed change, and inform your next round of optimization. That way, it just feeds back into your cycle of continuous improvement.

Hope this is helpful, and would like to hear your thoughts in the comments on if you think there are other Steps to Optimization that deserve a future post.

[Originally published May 27th, 2009 on GrokDotCom.com, an award-winning, but now defunct, Marketing Optimization blog.]

 

For Every Optimization, There’s a Hierarchy, So Get Started

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I sometimes wonder why more companies aren’t busy optimizing their websites and digital marketing. Or why those who are “on board” with the concept don’t always commit the right amount of resources towards the effort.

I’m not a mind-reader, but I think it’s due in part to an all-or-nothing mentality where nothing short of a full optimization ‘project’ is worth putting effort into. Most companies are more interested in redesigning their websites all at once instead of incrementally, even though incremental optimization is far less expensive, less risky, and more accountable!

Maybe you’ve heard the expression, “Q: How do you eat an elephant? A: One bite at a time.”

Sometimes, I tell clients to redesign and optimize a small design element of their site; their call to action buttons, for example. And they seem tentative and slow to implement the recommendation. Why? Maybe because they think it has to be 100% optimized right away, or they want some sort of guarantee that it will be perfect in order to devote resources to the task.

A useful model to get past this mode of thinking is to use the Hierarchy of Optimization. It’s a great mental framework to think about a roadmap of how businesses should be optimizing their digital assets, and with what priority. I learned a ton of great concepts from working with Bryan Eisenberg, but the Hierarchy of Optimization might be my favorite.

Take a quick look at Bryan’s hierarchy video linked above, and then I’ll apply the model to real-life design elements that most sites should be taking a look at. Note that the Hierarchy has 5 levels:

  • the Persuasive
  • the Intuitive
  • the Usable
  • the Accessible
  • the Functional

While you can apply the 5 levels at a “macro” level on your entire site, you can also apply them at the “micro” level on a single landing page or even small design elements.

Example 1 – Call to Action Buttons

  • Persuasive – Do all the layers of the pyramid work together as a cohesive whole? Are you actively testing your buttons? Do all your calls to action pair an imperative verb with an implied benefit? Do they answer WIIFM?
  • Intuitive – Do your buttons look like buttons? Do they look “clickable”? Do they feature 3-d effects, shading, or rich surfaces?
  • Usable – Are your calls to action always located in a consistent position on pages? Do they follow the prospect’s eye path as it travels down the page? On your forms, do the buttons line up with the “scan line“?
  • Accessible – Is there alt text behind your calls to action? If you use graphics, do they load and render in all your supported OS/Browser combinations?
  • Functional – Do all your pages even have a primary call to action button? Are any of them broken? Is anyone responsible for occasionally testing them?

Example 2 – Testimonials

  • Persuasive – Are your testimonials architected to answer questions and overcome objections throughout the prospect’s buying process? Are your testimonials as ‘real’ as possible, using pictures of the customer? How about video testimonials? Are you constantly testing to find the right testimonial content/format for your business?
  • Intuitive – Do your testimonials follow common design patterns for displaying quotes? Are relevant testimonials placed on key pages to answer your prospects’ unanswered questions? Do you attribute quotes with name, location, and other relevant information?
  • Usable – Are your testimonials readable? Are they an appropriate font size and contrast? Do prospects have to go hunting for them, or are they spread throughout the site?
  • Accessible – In this case, Accessible and Usable can be thought of as essentially the same layer of the pyramid. See Usable.
  • Functional – Do you have testimonials? Are they legitimate? Do you have permission to attribute the author with at least a first name and last initial?

Besides what I hope are useful questions to ask yourself, the point of all this is to encourage everyone to start today on optimization, take baby steps, and work your way up the Hierarchy. As the old saying goes: You can’t eat an elephant in just one bite!

[Originally published June 29th, 2009 on GrokDotCom.com, an award-winning, but now defunct, Marketing Optimization blog.]

The Shopping Cart: Are You Answering These 5 Silent Questions?

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The ecommerce shopping cart is a great place to run tests because simple changes (layout, copy, color, etc.) often yield fantastic results. But once you’ve hit a point of diminishing returns with “easy” A/B tests, you’ve got to dig in deeper and find out if you’re answering customers’ silent questions. I call them “silent questions” because customers don’t ask them of site owners directly. They simply buy from you if their questions are answered, and buy from your competitor if they go unanswered!

There are unanswered questions in the minds of our customers that we think are obviously answered on the page, but guess what? We’re blind to the truth that our customers miss things that we put in front of them. We’re too close to our own designs and user experiences to be objective. (If you’ve ever witnessed a usability test, you know the pain I’m referring to).

If you’re not sure about what those unanswered questions are, specific to your business, you can back up a few steps and use personas or user testing to uncover them. Personas help you empathize target customers (not you) and imagine their specific shopping questions. User (usability) tests can be designed to uncover customer questions by assigning a shopping task and asking the subject(s) open ended questions and encouraging them to “think out loud.”

For example, here are 5 key, unanswered questions (beyond shipping costs) of the shopping cart:

  1. Do you offer alternate forms of payment (aside from credit card)?
  2. Are you safe and secure?
  3. Why are you asking for this information?
  4. Do I have to set up an account to buy?
  5. Do I get to review my order before we transact?

I recently bought a Father’s Day present online from a gift retailer, and their overall shopping cart process was “OK.” I would give it a “B-” grade; it was good enough to get me through the purchase without bailing, but not nearly good enough to earn brand loyalty. But, they did a good job of clearly answering the 5 Questions, and it was enough to help them “Get The Cash.”

Are you adequately answering the 5 unanswered questions? You won’t know unless you’re doing customer research and experimentation. Whether your confidence level is low, high, or somewhere in between, I know you could run some interesting tests to validate your assumptions about how well you’re doing, and you might increase your funnel conversion rate in the process! Want help? Let me know.

[Originally published June 22nd, 2009 on GrokDotCom.com, an award-winning, but now defunct, Marketing Optimization blog.]

6 Stages of Developing an Optimization Culture

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One of the things that makes being a Digital Marketing Optimization expert/consultant fun is watching clients » partners » friends grow as professionals within their organizations. Many start off skeptical about the process of site optimization, or unrealistic about what can be gained in a given time frame. But after working through some of the challenges, it’s great to see them thinking about their marketing and their businesses in completely different (read: better) ways, and subscribing to a culture of continuous improvement.

Here’s my breakdown of 6 stages in developing an optimization culture:

  1. Acceptance – this is the stage where a business realizes that Optimization has value, and in order to reap the rewards, the status quo isn’t going to work. Something additional has to be done, which calls for some combination of the following:
    • shift in focus
    • additional resources
    • new tools
    • working with outside experts
  2. Testing the Waters – this is the stage where the business starts testing and optimizing, and often gets some big wins just by making minor changes to their site, or removing basic conversion roadblocks.
  3. Infatuation – after getting some wins from “low hanging fruit,” clients sometimes become fixated on testing and optimization. They check their test dashboards multiple times a day, they cheer when they see green in their testing tool’s dashboard, and they wring their hands when they see any yellow or red indicators. The less-disciplined business will often lose focus at this point and miss out on all the fun (and profit.)
  4. Thinking About Resources – after things have settled down, there have been a few wins, and a few inconclusive tests (inconclusive changes still give you incredibly valuable data and piece of mind), the business starts to think about how to support an optimization process long-term. They realize that this process isn’t free; it takes hard work and resources to create, administrate, and analyze tests. It takes even more work to take action on the findings of all those tests. They evaluate their current teams and whether they can properly support a culture of continuous improvement. This is a magnificent stage to witness, and once an organization knows their resources, it’s much easier to stay on target.
  5. Getting Analytical – once in the habit of optimization, I start to see clients question their assumptions, their vendors’ assumptions, and generally why the data is the way it is. This is when things get fun! Often, clients write me with test ideas or analysis of their very own, and I know that the “training wheels” have officially come off. 🙂
  6. The New Way of Doing Business – this stage shows clients becoming calm and nonchalant when a site change gives them double or triple-digit improvements. More impressive is that they are equally happy when a test has a negative or inconclusive impact, because it’s all part of the continuous improvement process. They realize that even single-digit increases achieved on a regular basis will have incredible effects on their bottom line, kind of like compounding interest in a financial investment!

I hope this proves helpful in developing an optimization culture within your organization. These stages are ones that I’ve observed occurring naturally. You could of course try to “encourage” a different course of development if you’re up for more formal organizational change management. How are things developing for you?

[Originally published March 19th, 2009 on GrokDotCom.com, an award-winning, but now defunct, Marketing Optimization blog.]