Analyzing the Effectiveness of Your Website

Transcription

1 Analyzing the Effectiveness of Your Website By: Larry Port Rocket Matter, LLC Presented at: ACLEA 48 th Mid Year Meeting January 28 31, 2012 New Orleans, LA

2 Larry Port Rocket Matter, LLC Boca Raton, FL Larry Port is the Founding Partner & Chief Software Architect, Rocket Matter, LLC. One of the leading experts on cloud computing for the legal profession, Larry speaks to an international audience on technology, productivity, and the business of law. Thousands of legal professionals have tuned in to his monthly webinars on emerging topics for the legal profession. Larry creates original educational programs and speaks at CLE events and conferences around the country. He is the author of Legal Productivity: How Project Management, GTD, and Tomatoes Can Transform the Way You Practice Law and also writes extensively for legal publications, including Legal Management, Law Technology News, Law Practice Today, ILTA's Peer to Peer, Lawyerist, FindLaw, Chicago Lawyer, and Rocket Matter s widely read Legal Productivity blog.

3 Do you want a functional website or do you want a brochure? Websites are great interactive marketing and dissemination vehicles, but they can be absolutely useless if you don t know what you re doing. The first step to knowing whether you have a successful website or not is to measure it and analyze it. But what exactly do you measure? You need to measure what I call the before-during-after phases of website usage: 1) How do people find your website? (before) 2) How do people use your website? (during) 3) Are people leaving your website with something valuable for both you and them? (after) And of course, once you start measuring, you can start improving. One of the beautiful things about measurement is that it s empirical. Arguments are snuffed out by looking at data. It keeps personalities inline. It also is one of the core principles of The Rockefeller Habits, a powerful management tool derived from the business processes of John D. Rockefeller. In fact, if youʼre not measuring, youʼre not really marketing. Youʼre doing an art project. Measurement is so critical that Iʼm putting it on this slide 3 times. Your organization must develop a culture of measurement if youʼre going to succeed with your web site.

4 What happens when you measure is that you can then improve. The first time you measure youʼre taking a baseline. Then you come up with some ideas, make some changes, and measure again. Only then can you determine if youʼre moving in the right direction. The best place to start analyzing the effectiveness of your website, IMO, is Hubspotʼs Website Grader. They look at the before, during, and after. Hereʼs an analysis of Acleaʼs website. The number one issue it finds is thereʼs no blog. And, as Hubspot points out, Businesses that blog at least 20 times per month generate5x more traffic and 4X more leads than those that only blog a few times per month. For our before section, Getting Found, we ll take a look at traffic boosting techniques and how to measure them.

5 SEMRush has a free and paid dashboard product for taking a look at search engine traffic and keyword usage. It can be addictive to compare yourself to your competitors. SEOQuake is also made by the SEMRush people, and is an at-a-glance toolbar. Google analytics is a treasure trove of information for the before - during - and after phase. I will demo how Google Analytics works, including 1) whatʼs involved in setting it up on your website 2) the keyword analytics functionality.

6 For this section of the presentation, the during part of presentation, we re going to stay in Google Analytics and I m going to demo how to understand your visitors from various perspectives: do they find your site interesting at all or do they leave right away? What locations they coming from? What websites are they coming from? And what content do they find most interesting? Now when we talk about the after, we re talking about the ability to reach out to your visitors after they ve left your site. So in order to do this, you need to capture information while they re still on the site. That s what landing pages are for. Notice that when we want to collect lead data, thereʼs no distractions. They can do one, two things most. In this case, we turned off navigation and only have a form and a big button to sign up for a demo.

7 Then we can track the effectiveness of our conversions. How many views versus submissions? How good is my content? How compelling is it? You can see on the right, that when someone fills out a form, they get entered into an automatic lead nurturing, or drip, campaign. To make your website better, you constantly have to use analytics and make gradual improvements. In addition to the tools I demonstrated, there s something else you can use to see what s effective on your website. Remember this slide? Well, one way to really see what s better and what isn t is by using what are called A/B tests and Multi-Variance testing.

8 Google Website Optimizer is a free tool among many paid tools that allow you to test multiple versions of your website to see which ones have the best conversions or click throughs. These only work once you ve adopted the culture of measurement. Now, we ll demo how this works. To sum up what to measure in order to make sure your website is doing its job, this slide lists the eight most important elements. To sum up what to measure in order to make sure your website is doing its job, this slide lists the eight most important elements.