Traffic management: Use website analytics to boost business development

Director David Sealey of Quba reveals how to develop new client leads through website analytics

Four things you will learn from this Masterclass:

1. How to measure traffic to your website

2. How to track visitors’ behaviours, actions and experiences

3. How to improve the data analysis process

4. How to generate client leads from your website

 

Thumb through any web analytics report and you’ll discover a host of unique terms. I’m talking about unique visitors, bounce rate, conversion percentages and goal funnels, not to mention the all important cost-per-acquisition. It’s important to understand not only what these mean but also how to use them, because web analytics can help you to make client-winning improvements to your firm’s website.

In a nutshell, website analytics capture essential information about each visitor to your website. It records such things as where they came from, the size of their screen, the speed of their connection, the exact time and length of their visit, plus the pages they viewed, what they searched for and at what point they left the site.

Google Analytics is one of the most widely-used website tracking systems in the world today. It uses JavaScript technology to record information on each session, visitor and page to their database, and it’s free. All of this data is then grouped, segmented, summarised and collated into the reports available through the system.

At last count, 90% of the UK’s top-200 law firms used Google Analytics; it’s the de-facto standard for measuring user interaction. Sure, there are more advanced web measurement tools available from the likes of Omniture and Web Trends, but these are costly and won’t necessarily provide better value.

Avinash Kaushik, a leading authority on web analytics, suggests there are three key components to understanding website visitors:

• behaviour – what visitors do;

• experience – how visitors feel; and

• actions – what visitors achieve

Standard metrics

Basic terminology for analysing website usage includes:

• visitor – an individual identified by a cookie, which is a small piece of code that sits on your machine after you’ve visited a site for the first time;

• session – a unique visit to a website;

• time on site – the average time a session lasts;

• bounce rate – this is very important and represents the sessions or page views that have lasted for less than five seconds;

• page views – how many pages are viewed on average in a session;

• conversion rate – the percentage of visitors completing a given action, such as filling out a search form or requesting a call back.

Understanding visitors

To a degree, Google Analytics can track both the behaviour and the actions of visitors to a website. But if you want to get a better understanding of these crucial areas, the following tools are useful.

• Trovus – used by some of the top corporate firms in the UK, Trovus tells you which companies have visited your website.

• AdInsight – this allows you to track the number of phone calls coming through your website. It also lets you see which traffic sources and keywords are generating those calls.

• CrazyEgg – this is a fantastic tool which records precisely where on the page visitors are clicking, which enables you to accurately measure how people use your web design.

These tools provide quantitative information about a visitor’s behaviour and actions. The third crucial area, their actual experience, has to be derived from this data. This is something which even experienced analysts struggle with, since it’s all about interpretation.

For instance, if you change the private equity page on your website and the time a visitor spends on that page drops from three minutes to one minute, is that good or bad? It’s bad if visitors are leaving sooner because they can’t find what they’re looking for. On the other hand, it’s a good thing if it means that they’ve found what they want more quickly. What the visitors do next is a good indicator of whether the update has improved their experience.

To find out even more, you need to conduct user feedback sessions, also called usability tests. This involves gathering together a group of typical visitors and getting them to perform tasks on your website whilst recording their thoughts and actions. The insights gained from these tests are highly valuable and can identify multiple problems with the site’s design, content and imagery.

Ensuring returns

You may be wondering why you should spend valuable time analysing visitor behaviour on your website. In a world of bulging inboxes, time charge-out targets, increasing competition and ever-more demanding clients, taking the time to browse reports can feel like something to put on the backburner.

However, taking the time to review and act on these figures is critical to improving the effectiveness of your digital marketing programme. A website has to create interest, generate leads and ultimately deliver profitable work. Knowing how many visitors you get, what they’re looking at and searching for, and then how many go on to phone you, is critical to both tracking and increasing the business generated through your website.

When measuring traffic to your website, it is useful to generate the following reports.

• All traffic sources – watch out for any traffic source with a higher than average bounce rate (typically 30%).

• Top landing pages – this shows the first page a visitor lands on. Again, look out for high bounce rates or low conversion rates. You should begin considering how to improve these pages to generate more goal conversions.

• Goal conversion rates – a goal could be completing a ‘contact us’ form, downloading a brochure or signing up for your email newsletter. Monitor what percentage of visitors are taking these actions, where they came from and what services they were interested in.

• Search usage – knowing what visitors are searching for on your site is a good way to discover what content people want. Taking this data, you can use a service such as Wordle to turn it into a word cloud, making trends easier to identify.

If you are sending a marketing campaign to a big prospective client, create a specific landing page just for them so that you can track if they actually visited it.

When sending an email marketing piece to clients, use a proper email sending system. This will enable you to see which clients opened the campaign and who clicked on the links.

Finally, use an advanced monitoring system such as Trovus to identify the organisations which visit your website and track what they do there. For instance, if you see that BP has viewed the webpage on your firm’s litigation practice, no doubt you’ll want to follow it up.

When and what to review

Some experts suggest that we should spend an hour a day on web analytics, but this isn’t really necessary for law firms which aren’t heavily dependant on internet enquiries.

Instead, a monthly report – a dashboard if you like – should be circulated around the firm. This report will give you everything you need to improve your website on a month-by-month basis.

The report should contain:

• a chart of the past 12 months’ traffic, with the former 12 months’ overlaid;

• a table showing the following metrics for the past 12 months:

  • visitors,

  • percentage visitor increase,

  • bounce rate,

  • paid search engine traffic,

  • non-paid search engine traffic,

  • direct traffic,

  • referring sites for traffic,

  • goals completed (broken down into individual goals), and

  • goal conversion percentage rate.

• popular site categories for each month (e.g. the employment practice);

• popular partner profiles;

• top landing pages;

• keyword tag cloud;

• organisations which visited the site (if Trovus is installed);

• clients or matters won through the website;

• screenshot of click tracking (if CrazyEgg is installed);

• search keyword tag cloud; and

• digital marketing activities executed and planned.

Discussing the monthly statistics report will help you to understand the relevance of the data and successfully interpret this in a way that improves the performance of the firm’s website.

Topics for discussion should include:

• how to increase the number of goals completed;

• the types of clients you want to attract;

• how much business you want the website to deliver; and

• whether the content is correct.

The whole process is made easier if you have a digital marketing strategy that one person oversees. And don’t forget to review what the competition is doing too.

The most important thing about website data is that you don’t ignore it. Use it to make informed decisions and you’ll be more efficient as an organisation.

Data is also a leveller: it allows you to put forward a case for change rather than blindly relying on the HIPPOs (highest paid person’s opinions).

Endnote

1. See Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability and Science of Customer Centricity, Avinash Kaushik, John Wiley & Sons, 2009