These business leaders are asking the right questions. In most cases, there is room for improvement – and a strong business case, too, given that online is a low-cost, proven channel that generates measurable results.

That is, attracting more customers, generating leads, creating buzz and awareness, or simply improving business efficiencies.

Quantitative analysis is the fastest and most effective way to find out how you can better leverage the online channel.

Quantitative analysis the key

The best way to understand how well your website is currently working is through quantitative analysis. This strategic tool paints a clear picture of the best and worst aspects of your site; and, as long as you are prepared to act on the findings, your site’s performance will improve.

I have talked in the past about the importance of quantitative analysis, and the message is as relevant as it ever was.

When we help our clients analyse their websites, we start with the absolute basics:

• Are customers coming to your website?
• What are they doing on your site?

From this baseline, we can identify the gaps or pitfalls, develop a roadmap to plug these gaps and ultimately improve the performance of the online channel.

It sounds simplistic, but of course we cannot reach any conclusions without a comprehensive understanding of our client’s business and their strategic marketing approach.

Reassess your KPIs

During the assessment phase, it’s important to cross-check the stated objective of the site against its KPIs. Setting up good KPIs is critical for the ongoing monitoring of a site’s performance, and it ties in beautifully with a quantitative analysis.

With a vast array of measurables to choose from - page views, cost per acquisition, new visitors, the list goes on - there’s absolutely no point in trying to do it all. Rather, you should realign KPIs to match current business priorities and focus on getting accurate, timely data to support these KPIs.

The right KPIs enable you to track issues, identify opportunities and provide relevant recommendations to senior management about the online channel.

Augment with benchmarking

Once you have identified gaps in your website, it pays to check out what the best of the rest are doing. Seek out best practice in your industry and benchmark against comparable sites. This enables you to gather fresh ideas and set a clear direction for your own site.

In conclusion

Rationalising your website. Realigning it. Resetting it. Call it what you will – but any form of strategic re-evaluation of your online channel now will pay off in the long term.

I know it works. Having provided website analysis services for many clients in the past few years, and seen these clients reap measurable rewards from the changes enacted, it’s a proven investment.

Knowing that your website is doing OK is more than just about peace of mind. If it’s not up to scratch, you need to know how you can fix it. If you just ignore the problem, then you run the risk of losing customers – and at a time like this, every single visitor counts.

This article introduces the online form tracking market at its earliest stage, and identifies the needs and measures for form tracking as a subset of web analytics.

KEY ISSUES

Important function for online presence

Form filling plays a significant role for most websites. Often a form is an important market research tool or a key lead generator for further offline and online marketing initiatives. They help you learn about user needs and better shape products or services for them.

However, they are often perceived as the bane of web user’s existence, getting in the way and obstructing them from the content they want.

Given this dichotomy – and the ongoing necessity of online forms – the need to optimise online form usage and fulfillment has never been greater.

What to measure

The items to track a form can be group into four areas: Form Fulfillment, Form Failure, Form Abandonment and Form View Only. The relevant factors to measure vary, but generally include questions that need to be answered as to why a form is completed or not.

Form Fulfillment - The form is completed and submitted with no problems. One or two attempts may have occurred, but you collect the minimum information required. Relevant factors include:

• How long did it take to complete?
• How much information over the minimum was collected?
• Did the form fill sequence work?
• Where was the information entered first?
• What optional fields were left vacant?

Form Failure - The form is completed or partially finished but no acknowledgement from the site that the form was submitted, likely rendering the data lost. This can occur with people who are less web savvy, or if the ‘submit’ button is harder to find. Relevant factors include:

• What information/fields were entered?
• What sequence was used?
• Not entered
• Design/layout
• Browser compatibility
• Use of autofill

Form Abandonment - The form is attempted but abandoned. No attempt to submit. Relevant factors include:

• What information was entered?
• What sequence is used?
• Form length
• Labeling
• Design layout
• Incentives
• Use of autofill
• Distractions
• Security Concerns

Form View Only - A user has merely viewed the form and clicked away. Relevant factors include:

• What sequence is used?
• Form length
• Labeling and/or instructional copy
• Design layout
• Incentives
• Distractions
• Security Concerns

Build or buy

Preliminary research revealed that the preference in the early days (a few years ago) for form tracking was to purpose-build an application. This was mainly because few solutions existed in the marketplace. Today, purchased applications are winning favour and those with an understanding of form tracking’s importance are leaning that way.

Mike Keyes, of Minneapolis-based web marketing consultancy Ciceron, said he built a tracking application several years ago, but plans to replace it with a purchased solution. “We realised there was no way for us to cost-effectively keep up with the innovation that is occurring in the industry right now,” said Mr Keyes.

Jim Cuene ,who works for a large financial services company, said has been looking for a form tracking tool for some time. He had previously used Atlas Net Conversions usability service but felt it was cost prohibitive. “It’s ( Atlas) a great snapshot of how forms are used, but it is too expensive,” said Mr. Cuene.

Consequently the buy option in relation to form tracking is becoming more realisable as the need for overall ‘out of the box’ web analytics solutions grow. Providers such as Web Side Story (HBX On Demand) and Speed Trap are including form tracking as part of a fully featured web analytics package.

Thus as the cost comes down and the functionality increases, the buy option is fast becoming a no-brainer.

FORM TRACKING SOLUTIONS

Speed Trap Form Intelligence

We need more space to describe Speed Trap’s solution, because it seems to be the only provider with a targeted service to track forms, offered as part of its Prophet e-business intelligence suite. Called Form Intelligence (FI), the application helps business decision makers understand how users interact (or not) with the online form and use the information to reach conclusions.

Simon Burton, VP of sales at Speed Trap, said that FI markets itself as a simple “one tag does it all” solution. It’s goal is to provide a complete picture by monitoring every visitor as they complete the information (rather than sampling). Furthermore, FI can capture real time forms that have been partially completed or abandoned. The program has a dashboard interface addressing information such as number of attempts, time to complete or abandonment rate, for example. An interesting function is the ability to monitor the number of fields that have to be re-entered, showing possible confusion with labeling among users. Sessions can also be replayed like a video.

Speed Trap offers an ASP service and a stand alone license. Apparently the program can be implemented in a manner of minutes because of the so-called “one tag” function.

CONCLUSION

Form tracking is an important subset of web analytics, and it is starting to take shape. Market leaders in web analytics solutions are initially seeing the need to not only include the function, but promote as a useful functionality. Speed Trap seems to have a head start in aligning its brand with the practice of form tracking. But all the major vendors are sure to be watching closely to see the response.

As competition proliferates, developing solutions in-house will become redundant simply because “out of the box” solutions are cheaper and usually more innovative. As always with the web analytics industry, vendor consolidation should occur. However form tracking should play an ever more important role in product sets and marketing tactics in the future, no matter who leads the industry.

Many commented they had no idea how effective their internal communication has been, which is delivered via their intranet in the forms of news items, Q&As, banners, streaming media, etc. Let’s call all of these content for simplicity.

Basic content usage analysis techniques that some of you might be familiar with from website analysis are transferable to intranets.

The objective is to understand how the content is being used on a site, and develop strategies, tactics for more effective content development and promotion.

The basic ingredients of the content usage analysis are:

• content viewed
• date of viewing
• duration of viewing
• person viewing the content

This information is captured in your webserver’s log files, or via your browser-based measurement solution, or could be even in your content management solution. Consult with your intranet manager / webmaster to find out how you can get hold of this information.

Glancing through a simple consolidated report produced from this information might provide amazing insights.

To produce the report, first decide on the reporting time interval such as monthly or weekly, and produce a report that lists the content items, total number of times they have been viewed and average viewing duration. You can do all of this in an access database or a spreadsheet. Focus on top few, up to 15 – 30 content items. Look at which content items are ranking higher in terms of page views, average duration of viewing. Look at the same data in different time intervals and in an aggregated way. Compare high ranking content items across time intervals to spot trends, similarities. Work out the ratio of visits vs. high ranking content items. This would tell you what percentage of people view your content. If there are spikes, and there would be some, try to understand what might have caused them.

When I do this with my clients, this is when I get the vows. They often say they had no idea that so few people were reading these news items…

To expand on this, include additional elements to your report and start segmenting it. For instance, you can analyze the same information by content type to see the relative popularity of different types. By promotion techniques to establish which ones are more attractive in bring people to the site. By department and location to understand the differences across these segments.

Producing content is expensive. Through simple content usage analysis, you can develop content closely aligned to the interests of your target audience and select suitable content promotional techniques that have been proven effective.

There are more advanced topics of content usage analysis such as:

• intent in viewing the content
• success in fulfilling the content objectives
• affinity / influence of content on other content items
• profiling users by interest areas

For example, in one of my recent projects, we have found out that the feature stories targeting executive managers were mostly read by job-seekers and we had to develop alternative techniques to reach executive managers with these feature stories.

Please note that there is a research disciple called “content analysis” which is completely different than “content usage analysis”. Content analysis deals with the quantitative analysis of texts, transcripts, and images used in various forms of communications.