Category : Web Analytics
What is A/B Testing – Multivariate Testing for Websites
A/B testing—or multivariate testing—is an experiment that you can use to increase the productivity of your website. A/B testing shows visitors alternate versions of the same web page simultaneously and randomly, to help the website owner find out what elements of the page need to be fixed.
Although A/B testing can be applied to any website, it is most often used for testing e-commerce websites, because you can directly track conversions, and see just how certain elements of a page are limiting or increasing sales.
E-Commerce Website Testing
You can test just about everything on an e-commerce website, but it isn’t necessary or feasible to test everything at once. There are three key areas that get tested the most often, and are usually the most important parts of an e-commerce site. These are the call to action buttons, the product placement and the shopping cart.
A/B Testing E-Commerce Call to Action Buttons
The call to action button is probably the most A/B tested aspect of an e-commerce website. You can analyze the results of different colors, fonts, sizes and more through A/B testing. The different options will show up for different visitors, and you can test their reactions through conversions. The call to action button that does the best can be placed permanently on the site, and we can continue on to test a different aspect.
A/B Testing Product Placement
How do the products on your website invite a customer to click through and purchase? You can A/B test products by putting them in a different placement on the page, making images larger or smaller, or even renaming some of the products.
A/B Testing the Shopping Cart
They’ve followed your product placement, clicked your call-to-action, but then they abandon your shopping car. Why? There are a number of reasons that people abandon their shopping carts online, and we list a few below:
- Login
No one wants to remember another password! A/B test giving them the option of just checking in as a guest, against having to set up an account.
- Asking for too much information
You don’t need to know their birthday in order to sell them a product! Try A/B testing an option where they only have to fill in the essentials, against the option where they have to fill in everything.
- Using a trustmark
If the customer doesn’t trust you—they won’t buy from you. Try A/B testing with a McAfee trustmark, and see if your customers respond well.
A/B testing is a great tool to see what works and what doesn’t on your website, and it’s a feature that Smart Solutions offers to all of our customers. Get the most out of your website, and let us know if you want to try out some A/B testing on your site.
If you don’t currently have an e-commerce website, but are considering one, we’d love to help you convert your site to e-commerce! Give us a call or send us an email, and we’ll set up a meeting to discuss it.
Twitter Analytics Tools
For businesses using Twitter, it’s always been a hassle trying to track the impact of your tweets and links. Because Twitter has never offered Twitter business analytics or statistics, we’ve all had to use outside sources—Hootsuite, Tweet Counter and other Twitter analytics tools.
Twitter has Announced Twitter Web Analytics
This has now changed for Twitter users. Last week, the Twitter Developers announced Twitter Web Analytics—an analytics tool that you can access right inside of your Twitter account. No more using outside sources to track your reach, now you can do it straight from the source.
This new update is going to be a great tool for people using Twitter for business, and it’s certainly taken long enough for it to get here!
As you can read on the Twitter Developers blog post, the Twitter business analytics tool won’t be released to the general public for another couple of weeks, after the pilot group has tested it.
There isn’t any word yet whether or not this Twitter statistics update will be for a price, but it’s better than paying an outside source for things you can now get from the inside. This could be a hurt for Hootsuite and other Twitter analytics tools—we’ll have to see how it all pans out.
Let us know if you see the Twitter Web Analytics inside your Twitter account anytime soon, and follow us on Twitter for more updates like this!
Straightforward Ways to Improve Page Speed (Part 2)
This continues our discussion about “page speed” and what’s needed to stay competitive in organic search rankings. If you missed first blog, go here.
Though Google said that it expects fewer than 1% of search queries to change as a result of incorporating site speed ranking to their algorithms, many site owners want to improve page speed now. Here’s three simple, straightforward ways you can.
Optimize Your Images
If your images are not optimized, they can significantly increase page load times. The problem comes when images are scaled down to fit the application rather than physically being resized. What this does is require the browser to load the full high-resolution image, when it only needs a fraction. Several free file size calculators can help you do this.
Optimize Your Files
Having clean HTML, CSS and other files can speed up your site load time. A good idea is to remove extraneous and old code from your files.
Reduce HTTP Requests
Trimming the number of components on a page can reduce the number of HTTP requests required to render a page—and in turn, shorten your page load times. Combining files using CSS Sprites is an additional way to improve page speeds.
All of the ideas above are good, but the most important strategy to keep your users and Google happy is continuing to deliver relevant content. Relevancy will always be a priority to Google; site speed a bonus.
Is Your Web Page Fast Enough? (Part 1)
That’s the question heating up blog airwaves since Google incorporated site speed as one of more than 200 signals used to determine search rankings.
To get answers, site owners are using the Google Page Speed Tool and Google Webmaster Tools > Site Performance to track the speed of their site. The tool is bringing relief to some and heartburn to others. For those of you who are experiencing the latter, let us help you interpret what the tool compares—and what comparisons would be more valuable.
The tool may report your site is slower than XX% of sites on the Internet because it’s comparing very simple pages with a few images and little or no dynamic content. More valuable comparisons are whether your pages are faster—or as fast—than your ranking competitors and comparing actual page types. For example, if you have a blog, what are the page speeds of other blogs? If you have an ecommerce store, what are the speeds of other ecommerce stores?
Another tip about learning if your page is speedy enough for search rankings, is to assume sites that have achieved first page rank in certain categories already have a page speed that is acceptable to Google. So learning how you compare to these sites is also a valuable guideline.
Read Part 2 blog that shares simple, straightforward ways to improve page speed.
Twitter Background Design Concepts
So, you’re a business and have taken the leap to setup Twitter account, congratulations! One element that often gets overlooked when using Twitter for business is creating a custom background image that speaks to your business objectives. (See our Smart Solutions Twitter Background…heck, follow us as well!) If you have questions on the information below or would like us to create a Twitter background for you, just give us a call, we’d be happy to assist!
Consistent with your main marketing brand and messages, your Twitter background should include:
1) Your logo/brand mark (typically set vertically)
2) Your tagline/brand message
3) Main contact information
4) Call to Action
5) Visual Image(s) that connect to your brand and are appealing
Image Considerations:
1) The national standard screen resolution is still 1024 x 768 – develop your image to meet that requirement and beyond (we recommend 1600 x 1200 pixels)
2) For a 1024 x 768 resolution, you have approximately 120 pixels on the left to work with your message (otherwise Twitter window will overlay on top).
3) For your avatar, use a 73 x 73 pixel image
4) Twitter limits background image size to 800k (although for speed, you want to stay away from the upper end of that)
How to implement a Twitter Background
5 Steps to Edit Twitter Background
A Reputable Twitter Example….
Zappos CEO on Twitter
Tips For Launching a New Website While Keeping SEO In Mind
We have potential clients call frequently with the intent of retooling their web site. The redesign is brought on typically by a multitude of reasons: “The design is old.”; “We have a new brand.” ; “We want to get found by more prospects.” Businesses and organizations that come with a goal of creating a successful balance of creative, search and content are the ones we know are serious.
Before moving or launching your new site, read the tips below and take note:
1) Define your goals
A redesign should focus on ways to impact your business, not just look pretty. What that means is every decision, from design layout, site architecture and SEO should be focused on your goals. Determine your goals in two ways:
The first is to determine what kind of traffic you would like to drive to your site.
Keyword research applies here.
Second, determine what you would like your visitor to do when they land on your site.
Conversion planning applies here. Conversion planning is a guide to the hierarchy of your site so that you guide your visitor to the conversion point (be it a page to read, a product to purchase, a form filled out, a phone call, etc.) and take them through a preplanned path to meet your goal – more leads coming through the door.
2) SEO Assest Inventory
One of the biggest mistakes you can make in launching a new site is to not protect your previous and current marketing efforts that have brought you awareness and conversions to date. In other words: great content, keywords you’re ranking with, inbound links to designated landing pages (and all important pages), successful conversion paths. This is SOOO important.
Many web design experts miss this when the design focus is more important than internet marketing. Discuss with your web designer and developer a plan to setup 301 redirects from your previous indexed URLs (the pages Google and other engines know about) to your new site structure.
3) Setup your Site Architecture To Match The Needs of Your Audience (both Human and Spider)
I’ve heard the saying that “spiders are like 4 year olds with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD).” With the growing statistic, even of your human audience, of having a total of 7 seconds to make your first impression online, you can see that both site visitors need the ability to consume information quickly. A spider needs to see keyword directed content in the HTML of your page (like meta data for each page and content of the page as close to the top as possible, lean-mean code basically) – a human needs to quickly navigate and consume content specific to their interest. Setting up the site to create strategic landing pages, then drill down to topic specific pages through links (i.e. siloing) is a helpful advantage to delivering clean, clear content to both audiences.
4) Plan for an Ongoing Content Strategy
One of the best ways to grow awareness and traffic to your site and convert visitors is to develop a strategy for ongoing development for content. Quality, UNIQUE content (i.e. do not copy/paste from other sites) is king to attracting your audience (both human and engine spider) and keep them coming back for more. Build content, build your business faster.
Blogs have the history for frequently updated content, and spiders know it….a blog on your website is good. Not a blog as your website…I said a blog on your website. (future post)
5) Have Web Analytics In Place; Monitor Results
The only way to know whether you are satisfying your goal (and delivering results to your business to make up for the investment!) is to track and monitor your increase in visitors and conversions. As a general rule, if your end result is too design focused, you’ll see fewer leads; If it’s too search focused, you’ll see fewer conversions. With balance in mind, results you will have…your boss will thank you for it! Read more on Analytics
6) Test, Test and Test
“Oh testing, how we love thee.” What a way to determine what’s working and what’s not? Become friends with Google Website Optimizer. Testing is like a focus group, a controlled science experiment (9th grade science comes to mind). Testing demonstrates whether the influence your agency, design firm, neighbor or web developer offered is good advice. Let your visitors tell you what works best for them…then adapt 
Use Web Analytics To Guide Online Success
When we polled our recent SmartGroup how many had Google Analytics installed, less than 1/3 raised their hands. When we asked how many reviewed their analytics and changed their site based on the results, they were all ears.
March’s SmartGroup was dedicated to education around setting up, reviewing and morphing your web site around web analytics as well as a brief overview into On-Page and Off-Page Analytics. Here is the Web Analytics PowerPoint review of these types, why analytics is important as well as differences between Log Files and Page Tagging Analytics.
As clients of Smart Solutions, all sites record log files and you receive training on reviewing these log file analytics through AWStats. Our monthly narratives, delivered via email, are a summary of these metrics.
Google Analytics (Page Tagging Analytic Tool) is a free tool from Google that enhances your analytics through better visual graphs, customizable metrics, conversion goal setting measurements and segmentation.
1) To setup your analytics, register your site domain with Google Analytics.
2) Email Smart Solutions with the code (to place on your site) received at the end of registration and validation.
3) Edit your settings, including Filter your IP address (so that your visits aren’t counted!) Here’s a site to help you find your IP address.
4) Setup your GOALS (this is very critical and offers a way to setup a value amount for your goal).
5) View your reports and take a baseline measurement of traffic, content, visitors, bounce rate and referring sites/engine traffic.
6) To understand the Google Analytic metrics, download this helpful PDF from WAA (Web Analytics Association).
7) Consult with us or test variations on your web site to better enhance your content, traffic and overall conversion goals.
Smart Solutions is here to help guide your understanding of Web Analytics, why they are important and what changes to your web site may help increase your overall conversions. Contact us if questions arise at 541.388.4398!
Bend Oregon SmartGroup Adds Valuable Insights to Website Success
SmartGroup is a local usergroup setup for our Smart Solutions clients and prospective clients. We’ve covered monthly topics such as: SEO Basics, Newsletter Best Practices, Everything Images, Local Search, etc. Throughout the presentations, now offered in a both a day and evening session, we offer insights to best practices and tips and tricks to help our customers succeed.
Although our clients get the benefit of using the advice within our system, truly the SmartGroup is valuable to anyone in Bend, Oregon looking for some additional information about building successful websites and is open to come to a presentation. SmartGroups are free and beverages and snacks are provided!
Since we are on the phone daily answering client’s questions for best practices, we decided to bring education into a group setting and have the opportunity for our clients to learn from each other and discuss various web topics.
So, join us for the SmartGroup (the last Tuesday of every month) and position your business at the forefront of your competition. Signup now or view upcoming topics online!
Analytic Confusion – AWStats vs. Google Analytics
Some web site owners or webmasters use AWStats to view and analyze their web site traffic, some install Google Analytics on their site for additional insight, and some use both. What are the differences between AWStats and Google Analytics? One of the main differences is they generate their data using different methods, and each has its advantages and disadvantages. This is why they sometimes generate very different traffic results. Below are some of the reasons for this.
AWStats (AWS) uses log based tracking. Every time users perform actions on your website, the server records or logs details of those actions. AWS puts together log data into a meaningful format. Advantages include the ability to track bots, downloads of PDFs, images and documents, and tracking failed requests. Disadvantages include not tracking some views of cached files, inflated page views due to tracking every file requested for a page because it can’t tell all those files are assembled into a single “page,” and the inability to see the number of users behind firewalls and shared connections.
Google Analytics (GA) uses script based tracking. It relies on JavaScript, cookies, and a remotely-hosted piece of code to collect, process and interpret user data. Advantages include GA seeing a page the same as a user, rather than a collection of files and images (thus giving a more accurate page view count), reports that communicate business value better to the webmaster, and better data collection inside web pages and paths to determine things like where a user abandoned filling out a form. Disadvantages include not being able to track user behavior if they have JavaScript turned off or don’t allow cookies, and the inability to track search engine visits since search engine spiders (in fact, many automated agents or ‘bots’) don’t run JavaScript by design.
The bottom line is that it gets complex, and the only way around it is to make assumptions as to what constitutes a unique user or visitor, and simply accept that inaccuracies are inevitable. Google Analytics reads low, AWStats reads high, and that’s the way it is.
If you would like to explore this more in depth, read our complete article on the differences between AWStats and Google Analytics.
Some of this information was also derived from these articles:
Google Analytics & AWStats Work Really Well Together
Google Analytics vs AWstats log file analysis – the differences
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