I’ve now been speaking at software conferences for more years than I can count. Possibly because I think it now stands at a bewildering 11 conferences, and once I run out of fingers I’m lost.
One of the things that I’ve become well known for is repeatedly pushing the idea of metrics, and the importance of using this information in all aspects of your business.
Yet to this day I’m frequently shocked by how many software developers fail to do so. Reasons (or excuses) include not knowing where to start, not having the right software, not having the time and so on.
I find it all quite bewildering. I always thought that developers would love to sink their teeth into some serious number crunching and data analysis, but apparently this is not always the case.
And despite my becoming ever more familiar with this reality, I’m constantly amazed by how many companies don’t even know the absolute basics: how many visitors they get on a typical day, which pages are popular, who sends them the most traffic and so on.
How do you run your business without keeping track of all this?
If you’re not on top of your website metrics, then you really need to read this article. If you’re already as familiar with your web logs as your own nose, then perhaps this article isn’t for you. But read on anyway.
Top Ten Lists seem to be the current vogue, so let’s start by looking at my top eight reasons for getting to grips with metrics.
(1) Improve the functionality of your website.
If you don’t know what your visitors are doing, which pages they go to, which links they click on and which pages they run away from, how on earth can you hope to have any impact on their behaviour?
(2) Sell more software.
Think of a supermarket. Do you think that the order of the products is random? That the layout of the store is completely haphazard? Or have you perhaps realized that large and successful stores carefully study how people behave and buy?
(3) Waste less.
There’s no such thing as a recycled site visitor. Once they leave they’re usually gone for good. If you work hard (or pay serious money) to bring fresh traffic to your website, it’s important to make sure that you retain as many of those visitors as possible.
(4) Achieve targets.
I’m hoping that every single person reading this article already has a business plan, and that it contains a little more detail than “to sell a lot more”. A business plan without goals isn’t worth the paper it is or isn’t written on. And unless you’re measuring traffic and conversions, you can’t possibly know whether or not those goals are being achieved.
(5) Work to a plan.
Here’s an amazing fact. Just like the supermarket, you actually have a fair amount of control over your website visitors. You get to decide what they see, what they click and where they go. Aside from occasional lunatic who’ll be randomly running up and down aisles with his eyes shut, most visitors can be streamlined and sent more or less exactly where you want. But if you don’t know what they’re already doing, this simply isn’t an option.
(6) Improve the customer experience.
It’s a little old fashioned, I know, but it’s generally a good idea to make sure that your website visitors walk away happy, satiated and with the solution that they were looking for. Short of forcing an exit poll on them when they leave (good luck with that) there is no way to achieve this without web log analysis.
(7) Feel the pulse.
I’m guessing that most people reading this article already have reasonably large websites. Unless you have one of those looooooong irritating single-page “websites” with yellow highlights, large fonts and boxed testimonials, in which case I’m not talking to you anyway. Ever.
Assuming that you have a large website, you probably have some pages that are more important than most, right? The main product pages, the really effective sales pitch and so on.
How do you know that people are seeing those pages? And how do you know that they’re spending more than five seconds before leaving?
(8) Identify trends and opportunities.
Your sales conform to trends. I guarantee it. Your website traffic will follow a seven-day cycle, and depending on what you’re selling, certain events will have a massive impact on your sales. National holidays, religious events, vacation dates, tax returns, the new school year, corporate tax deadlines and many more. All of them will to some extent affect your website traffic and sales.
If you don’t know about them they’ll pass by unnoticed. If you are aware of them and plan ahead, you’re ready to jump on a wave of opportunity.
If you’re still not convinced that you should be watching your web site stats like a hawk, then I give up. Stop reading, and take the day off. However, If you’ve decided that this time you really are going to get serious about your web logs, let’s consider three prerequisites, and one advisory note.
(i) Web logs.
In order to properly analyse your web logs, you need access to your raw server log files. Most decent web hosts will already provide this as standard, but some require that you activate this option from within the control panel.
Ideally, they should be separated into daily files and compressed. But the important thing is that you can access them, that they contain referral information, and that they exist.
If your web host doesn’t provide access to your server logs, then move hosts. I’m serious. I know how much of a nuisance this can be, but you have no choice. No logs means no data which means no hope.
(ii) Software.
Unless you’ve already explored the market, you may be amazed by how many different log analysis applications there are out there. What’s even more amazing is that if you run the same set of data through them all, none of them will agree with each other. And the differences between some of the reported “facts” can be staggering.
I myself have worked with more log analysis applications that I can begin to remember. I’d hazard a guess that my current desktop (which is less than a year old) has probably seen about six or seven different applications. So I’m in a good position to make recommendations.
My two favourites are Web Log Storming – http://www.datalandsoftware.com – and ClickTracks – http://www.clicktracks.com. These are two very different applications with very different prices, but both are excellent options to consider.
Web Log Storming is a reasonably fast log analysis tool. At first glance it looks like another variation of the standard idea, but it has one unique feature that blows away all the competition. It allows you to drill down in your data in real time. In other words, you can look at your referrals, drill down to see more on your Google traffic, and then drill down further to show the trends of Google traffic over time, which pages Google visitors are visiting and so on. Very nice.
If you don’t want to spend too much money, then this is a great means of delving into your logs without getting your hands too dirty. At $129 I rate this as an absolute bargain.
If you’re prepared to spend more money, then you might want to take a look at ClickTracks. The standard version of the software starts at $295, and the focus is on visitor behaviour. I have never come across an application that will help you understand what your visitors are doing so quickly. If you want to know the critical facts in the shortest amount of time, then ClickTracks is for you.
(iii) Time.
Every time I speak about log analysis, people come and tell me that they’ve been inspired enough to do something about it, and will be purchasing the software as soon as they get back. I know we’ve sent a fair number of people to both ClickTracks and Web Log Storming.
But all too often I see the same people twelve months later only to find out that even though they purchased the software, they just can’t find the time to use it!
To me this is as absurd as going on holiday, staying in a beautiful hotel, but not having time to leave the room and sample the restaurant, pool or beach.
You have to make the time. You can’t afford not to.
One final note. Most websites come with some sort of built-in free web logs. People sometimes ask me whether these are good enough. The nutshell answer is no, they’re not.
Most are far too basic, horribly inaccurate, and offer little more than a very hazy and blurred glimpse of the important information. Don’t waste your time with them. But do check that the stats aren’t open to the whole world just by entering yourdomain.com/stats in a browser. You won’t believe how many hosts include this as default. What a gift. Maybe they should just install spyware to share your email with the rest of the world, too?
Next month we’re going to look at part two of this article. We’ll be looking at some of the caveats and issues of log analysis, why all the log analysis applications report different figures and what to look for in your log analysis adventures.
Bearing in mind that this will be the January issue, you might want to make log analysis a new year’s resolution.
Be seen, be sold.
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LOWER LITERACY WEBSITE VISITORS
Let’s start with an obvious statement: if you’re reading this article, you know how to read. The question is: how well? The scale between reading fluently and being completely illiterate is wide and fluctuating, and much more complicated than you might have thought. For example, did you know that 48% of the US adult population are classed as being low literacy readers? Figures in other advanced countries are fairly similar.
Traditionally, literacy is defined as being able to read and write on a level that enables you to communicate with other literate readers. If that’s the average, who qualifies as a lower literacy reader? Basically, anyone who can read but struggles with it. If you have trouble scanning text for information because you need to go through it word by word, or if you often find yourself re-reading long, unfamiliar words, you may well belong to the low literacy category. (Struggling with pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis doesn’t count, you’ll be pleased to hear.)
If you have a website, this affects you. As one lower-literacy researcher puts it, nearly 50% of US adults read at an eighth-grade level or below, whereas the vast majority of websites are written at a twelfth grade level or above. Obviously, this presents a problem – and how much you need to worry about it depends on the nature of your business and the product you’re trying to sell. If you’re selling business software to other businesses, or if you’re selling very expensive, scientific or intellectual products, chances are your customers are highly literate. On the other hand, if your product has a broader appeal you definitely want to keep those 48% in mind.
At this point, it’s probably worth taking a step back and making one thing extremely clear: lower literacy does not equal low intelligence! People struggle with reading for all sorts of reasons, and if you think that taking lower literacy users into account is a waste of time, you may well be the one with an IQ in the lower figures. Neglecting half the population is never clever!
The good news is that catering to lower literacy users doesn’t necessarily involve completely redoing your website. In fact, many of the recommendations are identical to general usability guidelines. In other words, if your site already qualifies as user-friendly, lower-literacy users shouldn’t find it overly problematic. If you’re unsure, here are five general guidelines to follow:
- Make sure you place the important, valuable information at the top, and avoid starting a page with long, dense paragraphs of text. Lower-literacy users will probably avoid them like the plague, and they won’t appeal to anyone else either. Prioritise information and make your main points as clear and simple as possible.
- Avoid unnecessary distractions. Flashing images, animations, moving text and pop-out menus are annoying at the best of times, but if you need to concentrate on reading, they’re a nightmare. Keep it nice and simple – it is not the same thing as boring and dated, and illustrations can still be very helpful.
- Avoid long sentences and parenthetical text (don’t start talking about flowers, hippos, the general state of the galaxy and the latest episode of Stargate SG1, the latest change to the menu in your favourite restaurant or perhaps some other vaguely related thing that seems like a good idea at the time but might not be so clever after all now that you think about it) because some readers will struggle to remember the point your were trying to make! Using an active voice and a conversational style of writing can also be helpful, but again, you need to keep your target audience in mind.
- Simplify navigation. If you have one navigation bar at the top, one on the left, one on the right and several additional text links throughout the content, it’s time to trim things down. Guide your visitors through the site, make it clear where you want them to go. For the textual content, try using headlines and sub-headlines in a bigger font – it’s an oldie, but it really does work.
- Make sure that the page structure is consistent throughout the site. This should really be self-evident, but we still see a surprising number of sites that leave out vital elements on certain pages. If you use a top menu, all pages should have it. If you include a side navigation bar, don’t leave it out on certain pages. This is confusing at the best of times, and can create an even bigger struggle for low literacy readers.
These are the main points. If you suspect that a significant proportion of your visitors fall under the lower literacy category, you’d be wise to take a good look at your site. Try to meet the needs of all your potential customers, not just a percentage. To be crass, lower literacy does not equal empty wallet. Don’t scare your visitors away, but welcome them with open arms and clear and accessible information!
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ON A LIGHTER NOTE:
December is a month of many different things to different people. Christmas, Chanukah, Yule, Festival of Shiva, Winter Vacation, Time Off, Snow, Sun, Rain and more.
Yet irrespective of where we live, what we do and what we believe in, December also seems to be the time of year when we start adding items to our to-do lists.
I’m a great believer in to-do lists, which is why I use three different applications for them (really), and could do with a basic database to keep track of my lists. Perhaps all I need is a list of my lists, but if I categorise the lists, there may need to be more than one. And then I’ll need a list of my list lists.
On top of everything else, many people find themselves making New Year resolutions. Aside from the inevitable “eat less and exercise more” ideas (good luck with that), many of us also seem to be struck by Getting on Top of It ideas for our businesses as well.
Maybe this year we should take a step back. Instead of adding to our multitude of bloated lists, perhaps we should go through them all and ruthlessly eradicate every item that’s been there longer than four weeks.
Be honest. Chances are you’re never going to get round to them anyway. Then you can start the year with one empty list. Apart from the web log analysis entry of course.
Whatever you believe in and whatever your plans, I hope that 2007 will be a happy, healthy and successful year for you, those close to you and your businesses.
See you in 2007.
The Competitive Edge newsletter is a monthly in-depth look at the issues faced by independent software developers today.
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