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Your Website is Not a Website

By Jim Sterne, President, Web Analytics Association

When you think about your website, do you think of thousands of pages of hopefully current data about your company and your products? Do you think about how often those pages are viewed? Do you budget for the number of additional pages, photos, graphs and charts you want to add to it?

If so, your perception of your website is doing more harm than good.

Your website is not a library. It's a software application, created to help your visitors accomplish the tasks that bring them to your website. They come to:

• Buy
• Configure
• Compare
• Estimate
• Ask
• Choose
• Solve
• Complain
• Return
• ...and a host of other things you can add.

Even if your core business is publishing, your audience comes to the site to learn, discover, and be entertained. Your whole website needs to support the tasks that your visitors want to accomplish. It's no good having the best content, for example, if nobody can find it through your navigation bar.

Don't measure your site success by how many pages people view. Ask instead how well your visitors could complete their intended tasks. Remember too that different people will have different objectives at different times (perhaps making a research visit before returning to buy another day).  

When you change your perspective, your website stops being about the company and starts being about the customer. Instead of being about website and product features, it's about solutions for customers and how their pain can be resolved. When you go to a website that's been designed with the customer in mind, it's easy to see how to accomplish what you want to do.

Six Sigma is a methodology used to drive errors from manufacturing processes. You can look at your website as a factory for attracting prospects and converting them into happy customers. Ask yourself, how efficient is your factory? How can you remove errors and make improvements? Can you use Six Sigma principles to improve your online processes?  

Avinash Kaushik is senior manager of web research and analytics at business and financial software company Intuit, responsible for more than 50 websites. At the last Emetrics Summit, he presented his view of 'the perfect trinity of measurement'. This is made up of behaviour, experience and outcomes:

• Behaviour is all about what people do. Did they click? Did they abandon? Did they take advantage of PPC search engine keywords? Which A/B split generated the most successful clickstreams?
• Experience concerns customer satisfaction, heuristic evaluations and the impact the website has had on the brand. How do visitors make decisions? How do they feel about their ability to follow the scent of the information they are pursuing? Did they feel their visit was successful? What does the voice of the customer have to say about how well the website worked?
• Outcomes are all numerical: leads, orders, revenue, conversion rates, downloads. Did all of your efforts conclude in positive financial results?

Successful websites get that way by first measuring behaviour and outcomes as baselines. Then they listen to customers' opinions, frustrations and body language for insights about where changes might be made on the site. Once the changes are made, the behaviour and outcomes are compared to the baseline and the impact of the changes can be evaluated. Repeat with rigour and best practices become evident.

Everyone who's spoken at the Emetrics Summit agrees that engaging in an eight month website redesign is the wrong approach: the right way is to make small, incremental changes so that you can attribute behavioural changes in visitors to the changes you make to the site. It's useful to find that you increased clickthrough by 3% by changing a button colour from blue to green. If you replace everything at once, you can't tell which changes worked and which didn't.

To get a well rounded view of the customer experience at your website, you need to combine quantitative (web analytics) and qualitative (usability analysis) measurement. Using analytics, you could find that people drop out at page three of your transaction process. But only by watching people use the site and asking them to express their doubts and questions can you discover that a problem on page two causes people to abandon on the next page.

Look at your website as a tool for helping visitors accomplish tasks - as a software application for the completion of processes - and your chances of success will improve dramatically.

If you only have one metric to use, make it customer satisfaction. If you can change your website to improve customer satisfaction, you'll end up succeeding. Profits follow happy customers.

About the author

Jim Sterne is president of the Web Analytics Association. Since 1994, Jim Sterne has devoted all of his attention to the internet as a marketing medium. A consultant to Fortune 500 companies and internet entrepreneurs, Sterne focuses his twenty years in sales and marketing on measuring the value of a website as a medium for creating and strengthening customer relationships. He is the author of Web Metrics, Proven methods for Measuring Web Site Success, and the founder of the Emetrics Summit.