Site Optimization and Targeting

All visitors are not the same, they can come in through different marketing channels, enter your site at different pages and view different parts of your site. One of the great things about the Web and the tools that we have, is that you can not only know that your visitors are doing different things, you can measure and then act on it. TV for example has to rely on sampled, panel services (i.e. Nielsen) where you might make an estimation about the different groups of people that saw your ad. On the Web, we know what visitors viewed and exactly who viewed it! If you have a robust analytics solution, you already have this data. The question is, what ,if anything, are you doing to act on it?

As an Omniture user, I have always relied heavily upon tools like Omniture Discover, because of the fact that it lets you segment your visitors into more meaningful groups. So, I can easily see for an e-commerce site, that the people clicking on the “View Larger Image” link on a product details page have a conversion rate that is 200% higher that those visitors that do not click on that link. Shouldn’t I be doing something about that? Like running a test to optimize that link for the visitors that have not been clicking it?

If you are currently or will be running a site optimization solution like Omniture Test&Target, you should always be running monitoring campaigns on your site. This can allow you to always be tracking and reporting on how different segments of your visitors are converting on your site, allowing you to quickly act by launching a test that is targeted towards a high-value segment of your visitors.

You should consider targeting your site optimization efforts towards different segments of visitors such as:

• Logged in visitors (vs. not logged in)
• Visitors from paid search campaigns
• Visitors from natural search
• Visitors using specific keyword phrases on search engines
• Visitors from email campaigns
• Visitors that stop at a certain point in your conversion funnel
• First time visitors
• Repeat visitors
• Visitors that enter your site via a specific page
• Visitors from a specific geographic location

Targeting your site optimization efforts to segments for visitors is usually more effective than just launching a test that is served to all visitors of your site as if they were equal. The reason, is that with different segments, you have an idea of their intentions. For example, if you are targeting a test that changes laptop product imagery for visitors that are entering your site after searching for “laptops” on Google, you know that your test is being served to the segment of visitors that is actively considering purchasing a laptop at this time or in the near future.

When considering site optimization, always ask yourself for which group or segment of visitors is this test targeted? You should see your site optimization efforts paying off more quickly if you are targeting your tests.

Content Site Optimization

Most of the blogs and literature that you will see on the Web about site optimization is going to be about e-commerce Web sites. The reason? Anyone can understand your results when you say you’ve increased conversion rate by 20%, thereby seeing an incremental lift in revenue of $100,000 over the next 30 days. The case for optimization here is pretty obvious. This doesn’t mean that content sites and publishers that aren’t selling a product on their site should not be optimizing their sites.

One common excuse on the part of a lot of content and publisher sites is that they are not selling anything. If you are in business and making money while not selling anything, please let me know what business you are in so that I can start one up too! The reality of the situation is that often, it’s just harder to measure revenue from online activities and marketing for a content site or publisher. Your are in fact “selling” some product or service to the visitors to your site, whether or not that “sale” is made online. Once you’ve realized this, you should also realize that your site could be better at selling to its visitors. In order to start optimizing your site, the first step is to identify and track your “converions,” not just basic traffic data. For publishers or lead generation sites, these conversions could include (but are not limited to) any of the following:

• Page views
• Ad views
• Completion of a registration form
• Registration for a newsletter
• Completion of a contact form

Once you have identified your conversions on your site, you are ready to optimize your site so that you can get your visitors to view more ads, visit more pages, complete your lead generation forms, and sign up for your newsletter more than ever before.

Many site optimization platforms, such as Omniture Test&Target, will integrate directly with your already existing Web analytics solution, making it even easier to optimize your site since you won’t have to re-tag all of the conversions on your site. All optimization solutions should let you track “non-ecommerce” events in some fashion though, but if you can leverage your existing Web analtyics tagging, you should do so.

In terms of content sites, here are a few tests that you should be running on your content. These are what you might call the low hanging fruit common to a lot of content sites:

• If running paid search campaigns, test different ways of presenting calls to action for your conversions
• Test what you have above the fold of your homepage so that you can decrease bounce rate and increase conversions
• If you have search on your Web site, change how you are presenting search results

These are just a few, very generic options. The options available are unique to every company out there, and you each have your own opportunities to optimize your existing content.