Web Analytics - The Kaizen Way
I got an e-mail today from Sitelab listing the top 10 reasons to redesign your company website. In reading this e-mail, I thought to myself how overwhelming this process seams. Here you are with dozens of priorities you’re responsible for and then someone suggests a redesign. Yuck.
The idea is that once you’ve fixed your site, everything will be OK. But it doesn’t really work that way, does it? A site redesign is usually a major undertaking. Often, it is so overwhelming that it never gets done or it is not fully implemented. Is there a better way?
You bet there is. The Japanese call it Kaizen. Tony Robbins calls it CANI - Continuous and Never ending Improvement. I just call it continuous improvement. It works like this. You simply make improvements to your website on a continuous basis. Nothing dramatic, really. Just make small improvements on a daily basis. There’s a great book out there called “Web Analytics: An Hour a Day” written by Avinash Kaushik — perhaps you’ve heard of it. Basically, the book details small steps you can take every day to improve your website.
Here are some of my suggestions for using analytics to make small changes to your website:
- Look at your top keywords. Are all of them being advertised with PPC?
- What are your worst PPC campaigns? Do they need negative keywords or alternate ads?
- Are you advertising all your top pages?
- Click map study. Can you re-arrange your navigation to be better matched with actual clicks?
- Study your popular pages. Are they optimized?
- Meta tag study. Do all pages have proper meta tags? Any duplicates?
- Tagging Study. Have all pages been properly tagged?
- Referrers Study. Who are our top referrers? Can you do better? Who are the new referrers? Can you advertise on them?
- Advertising Study. How are your ads doing. Find new places to advertise.
- Product feed study
- Best performing vs. worst performing pages. Both bounce rate and exits on path.
- Shopping cart analysis. Fallout.
- Affiliate study
- 404 errors review
What are some of the small things you do for your website? I’d love to hear your suggestions.
Hurol Inan added the following ...
Kaizen. Arigato gozaimasu.
Thanks, John, for teaching us a new word for a philosophy that I, too, support.
But instead of a lovely Japanese name for it, I could only come up with ‘always beta’ – by which I mean designing and launching web assets rapidly and frequently. The result? The business continually notches up incremental improvements on the user experience.
You’ve provided a great list of WHAT to do in using analytics to make small changes to the site and user experience.
I’d like to add a HOW. Multivariate testing – where you can put some of your ‘WHAT’S’ to the test in a democratic environment.
If you’re interested, I talk more about all of this in my post here: http://hurolinan.com/index.php/2008/05/21/always-beta-sites/