As acclimated consumers of the information age, we’ve come a long way from understanding how the blips and lights of the modern personal computer work. We have migrated into an all-encompassing online social grid that seeks to craft the new manner by which we consume, experience, and react to web content. Knowing this about the web, however, is not enough to fill the minds and wallets of those organizations who seek profits today and tomorrow – it takes a larger leap of faith. The key to success for any organization, to sustain a promising future in this post-modern territory, is to manage their website for optimal ROI. How, you may be asking?

I. Know What You Want

As mention in my previous entry, The New Hope, it’s easy for organizations to loose focus, and growth, dedicating endless time to the atheistic woes their website may be facing. However, this isn’t entirely a bad thing to do; it’s just not the first avenue for optimal ROI. Before jumping into everyone’s opinion about the website’s design and usability, organizations need to first ask themselves:

“How can we use our site to achieve organizational objectives?”

“What opportunities are we missing because we have a poor or mediocre web site compared to our competition?”

Common responses:

• Increase Sales
• Generate Leads
• Reduce Support Costs
• Foster Loyalty among customers
• Streamline processes with partners

The list of answers grows continuously due to how we interface with the web. The web’s influential ongoing platform has resulted in the need for organizations to stay aware of their objectives; as a result, creating an effective start on securing opportunity. The framing of these questions highlights the real cost linked with settling for an average website:
the opportunity cost.

II. Know Your Audience

A significant, yet ignored expense by many organizations is the practice of anticipating the visitor’s needs and how to design a web site to address these needs. In a number of cases, decisions are based on vague assumptions in hopes that an average user will recognize the associations. Still, this plan of action fails to meet an organizations acknowledgement of the end user and should take the following into consideration:

• Why are people coming to our site?
• What are they expecting to find?
• How can we make our site easier for them to use?

These questions in turn involve thinking about the site from a visitor’s perspective, and do not rely on assumption. It is valuable because it reminds an organization that not everyone knows what they know.

Coincidently, a priceless tool in developing refined information about an end user and understanding their behavior, is user testing. Once thought of as a tool for the large corporate giants, has gradually made its mark for all size organization through the use of inexpensive software. Lance Loveday and Sandra Niehaus suggest TechSmith’s Morae. Our very own Justin Delbar has a list of goodies in his article, 5 Tips for Agile and Effective Usability Testing. User testing is relatively inexpensive, easy, and far more valuable due its immediate effect on conversion and ROI. We advise that everyone conduct some form of testing and preferably at different stages of production to supply optimal results.

III. Treat Your Website like a Business

Fundamentally, the business of any business is to stay in business. Initially, many may agree that the web has changed business; however, at its core, the web demands similar conventions as precedent business platforms. The utmost of these conventions is having a plan. Creating documentation about design guidelines, functional specifics, or security standards agreeably are substantial, however, the one that encompasses the ongoing list of documentation is a site strategy. It provides a guide for producing better user experiences and less about perfect design.
Having a precise goal and well designed strategy communicates a plan of action that helps an organization know what their doing, and better yet, how they’re doing.

VI. Create a Web Site Strategy

Web Design for ROI suggests that every site strategy should contain its individual components. Those components may vary, but there are eight that make a significant impact.

• Objectives – Should not confused with strategies. The difference –objectives are goals and strategies are the means by which to achieve one or more objectives. Objectives explain what we’re trying to accomplish and strategies explain how.

• Audiences – Create a List of all potential audiences and breaking them out into primary and secondary audiences. Primary being those that organizations expect to gain the greatest return and secondary everyone else.

• Primary audience profile – Create characteristic profiles for your target audience. An organization must investigate from the obvious to the most trivial to determine what is appealing to their audience and essentially what makes them act out. If you’ve heard the word personas turning the coroner at your cubical, don’t be alarmed. It simply indicates the result of an objective profile of a target end user.

• Audience Questions – Develop questions end users may ask when visiting the site. Using the perspective of the end user allow an organization to see a target audiences perspective. This provides a road map during the review period to provide significant flaws.

• Competitive Assessment – Focus on the competition to generate a strong foundation by which to test and reverse-engineer any possible grey areas. Pay good attention to those with fantastic sites and call to actions, which provide a glimpse into how competitors have dealt with previous optimization user experiences and how to decisively tackle their efforts.

• Traffic Sources – Take a moment to survey the source of your traffic. Charting a percentile of expected traffic reveals how you should market your website best. Examples: E-mail Campaign, Banner Ad Campaign, Organic Search, Paid Search.

• Strategies – Recall your objectives and list how you will specifically strategize to achieve set objective. Placing this step near the end allows for all previous steps t he time to be assessed.

• Metrics – Calculated the success of your objectives and strategies.

V. Measure the Right Metrics

Analytic tools become easy to rely on and lend as the source by which many company executives and site managers see their website. Web analytic tools are strong but not perfect because each measures differently and at times provide uncertain and unexplainable results; lacking “actionable intelligence.”

According to Web Design for ROI, there are metrics that matter and those that don’t.

Do Matter -

Business Metrics
Pulled from a Sales/ Leads management system used my a whole company.
(i.e Revenue, Transactions, Profit, Gross margin)

Site Metrics
Provide statistical on site usage. Usually from web analytic reporting tool.
(i.e Conversion Rate, Most Visited Pages, Time on site, Traffic)

User Metrics
Come from user feedback most commonly surveys, focus groups, and user testing – the most valuable user metric.

Do Not Matter (as much) -

Traffic
The most common metric yet not indicative of possible conversions. People can come to your site until they’re blue in the face, but not worth tracking if their is no conversion.

Time on site and average page views
If you’ve created a better system on a certain page allowing more effective conversions, thus creating less time spent on page, this metric becomes an invaluable indicator.

Hits
A hit indication refers to anything that is downloaded from a website and therefore a poor tool.

Surveys
Subjective and bias interpretation. Effective only if questionnaire has been screened to remove areas of contingency.

Focus Groups
Subject anwsers how he or she feels they should and less of how they truly feel. It’s best to pay attention to what subjects do and less to what they say.

Industry Average Conversion Rates
Website would need to be the same to render accurate results because no two sites have the same audience expectations, traffic quality, and or call to action.

VI. Prioritize Design Efforts Intelligently

For most organzations , their web site page hirerachy unfolds like such:

• Homepage
• Category Pages
• Detail Pages
• Forms/Checkouts
• Landing Pages (if they exist)

But if viewed from a potential ROI point of view, it should resemble:

• Forms/Checkout
• Landing Pages
• Detail Pages
• Category Pages
• Home Page

ROI analysis makes the case that it is in the best interest of organizations to prioritize their design efforts on pages were the end user has a pre-defined path because it’s easiest to track and yields trackable intelligence.

VII. Test, Learn, Repeat
Web sites are ongoing fractals of evolving substance that always need adjusting due to their competitive arena and experimental nature . Their existence has clearly changed the platform by which we do business, however not changed the fundamentals of business. The potential and longevity of this new platform lies in our constant assessment and devotion.

“if it were easy, everyone would be doing it.”

Look to next week, where we break down our web site using the hierarchal ROI focused approach and at best gain a better understanding oh how visitors consume, experience, and react to our web site.

Now ain’t that something?