What if there was a way to find what part of the content on any given page is consumed? What if you can generate a report that shows if your headline and first paragraph are able to drive visitors to read the next part of the content?

Omniture recently announced a cool new plugin for their SiteCatalyst analytics tool. This plugin allows users to view the percentage of content viewed on any given page vertically.

The plugin is totally free for current SiteCatalyst customers. You can find the plugin code on the Help -> Supporting docs -> Implementation -> Plugins section of SiteCatalyst help section.

Here are step by step instructions on how to install this plugin.

#1. Add a new traffic/property variable.

Admin -> Report Suites -> Edit Settings -> Traffic -> Traffic Variables

#2. Set the new s.prop value to the percentage page viewed function. This variable will record the percentage of the previous page viewed.

#3. Create another s.prop traffic variable. This variable will be used to store the previous page value. Adding this variable will allow us to combine the page name with the percentage page viewed value metric.

#4. Prepare the code for implementation. This is how your final code should look like.

#5. Copy the code in the s_doPlugins() function located in the “Plugin Config” area of the s_code.js file.

(Click here to download the code file)

#6 Finally, copy the following code in “PLUGINS SECTION” area of the s_code.js file and allow SiteCatalyst to populate reports. You should see two new reports inside the Custom Traffic section.

(Click here to download the code file)

Here is a quick screen shot of how the final Custom Traffic report should look like.

Please share your thoughts, insights and comments because it really helps me write more effectively.

Measuring Content Effectiveness with Omniture SiteCatalyst is a post from: Key Web Metrics & Web Analytics Blog

Voice of Visitor approach piggybacks on the VOC concept but goes a step further by promoting analysis of the web visitor qualitative data. Complaints and low ratings are also considered to be the Voice of the Visitor and this data can be used by the companies to changes to their services and/or their product line.

Few years ago, capturing qualitative data required a lot of time and money because of the manual data collection and analysis process. The results were mostly inaccurate because of the smaller sample size and mistakes in manual calculation.

With sophistication and popularity of the web analytics tools, the data collection methods for VOV have also changed. Offline forms and feedback sheets are replaced by sophisticated online surveys, and manual calculation is sidelined by advanced regression analysis of the collected data.

However, it is not easy to quantify the Voice of the Visitor in terms of simple calculations: one cannot say X % of people found this product good and Y % of people found it bad. If Y contains 90% of the company’s most loyal customers, even if X is much larger than Y, the company should consider this as a serious issue and fix it in order to make it suitable for their old customers while laying down several bases for their new customers.

Analyzing and measuring Voice of Visitor data is a fragile business – it has both an emotional as well as a practical side to it. The emotional or the social side deals with loyalty, customer satisfaction or complaints, while the practical or enterprise side deals with completion rates, review scores, speed and ease of use. While customer satisfaction may not always lead to loyalty, it becomes an abstract positive score in comparison to tangible scores in speed tests and reviews.

Here are some best practices for capturing and measuring VOV/VOC -

1. Likert scale model – Always use likert scale model for surveys and feedback forms. Yes/No type surveys popularly used by car dealers are outdated and cannot tell you anything about forecasting customer behavior.

2. Questions – Limit the number of questions per survey to ten or less. There are companies promoting 50 plus survey methodology, and it could only work if you have time, money and patience to wait for months before you can perform actionable analysis.

3. Incentives – Never offer any incentive to your visitors/customers for completing the survey/feedback form. Incentives can influence the user behavior and will result in skewed data.

4. Integration – I highly recommend integrating the VOV data (qualitative) to your web analytics data (quantitative). Integrating both data set can provide you with extremely powerful information about your visitors. You will be able to identify the referral, pathing and buying behavior of your satisfied/dissatisfied customers.

5. Metrics – You can create your own metrics depending on your business objectives and goals. For a retail business, it could be the average acceptance rate of number of steps for an order process, for informational sites it could be the page with the most useful content. Always include the “what is your overall satisfaction with this site/product/service” to get a holistic view of response.

6. Tools – Here is a list of the top five free and low cost tools for the voice of visitor/customer analysis. If you are looking for an enterprise solution then I recommend Foresee.

It is imperative to use this analysis effectively for the expansion and success of your company.

Hope you enjoyed this post.

Please share your thoughts, insights and comments because it really helps me write more effectively.

Here is a list of other helpful blog posts -

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Social Media Analytics and ROI Measurements

Art of Measuring and Analyzing the Voice of Visitor/Customer Data is a post from: Key Web Metrics & Web Analytics Blog

Please provide your comments, feedback, or tweets here.

Here is a list of other helpful blog posts -

Bounce rate…Does it really matters?

Bounce rate Calculation in Site Catalyst Omniture

What is Web Analytics?

Is Web Analytics Right for My Small Business?

Why People Follow You on Twitter? is a post from: Key Web Metrics & Web Analytics Blog

I would like to start this post with a startling fact – there are on average 8000 searches done on Google each month for keyword “site conversion” and only 91 searches for “visitor engagement“!

You can frequently find tons of quality discussion on conversion optimization in forums and groups but rarely on visitor engagement optimization. Conversion experts can tell you why your site is not working, and what you need to do to fix it i.e. call to action, credibility indicators, resistance to purchase, conversion funnel leaks.

However, I rarely come across a post that explains how website visitor engagement directly impacts the website conversion. Some of you will argue, but I am yet to see a website with low visitor engagement and high conversion.

You must have realized by now that this post is about visitor engagement and if you are conversion $$ centric then you might think of bailing out but just hang in there. Let me explain on how visitor engagement can make or break your site conversion rate. Once you understand the concept, the first thing you will want to look at on a low converting site is the visitor engagement.

There are different processes used to analyze visitor engagement. Some of the key methods used are analyzing total visits to top pages, time on site & internal search count. I suggest using avg. page views metric to understand the overall site conversion. The beauty of this metric is that it not only tells the story of the depth & length of a site visit but also provides a great deal of actionable insights.

The pageviews and avg. pageviews reports are located in the visitor sub section of the Visitor sidebar section.

Page views report shows the total count of pages on your site with breakdown of pages views by date. Average pageviews report shows the overall page views/site visits and also provides the calculation by date.

In the screen shot below, I am looking at the Google Analytics page view report of a site with average pageviews of 1.46. It means that on average a site visitor views only 1 page on this site . Can you make a guess on the site conversion rate of this website? I am not going to reveal it for privacy reasons, but it’s not something to talk about.

Excited! Well, with this report we are just touching the tip of the iceberg. The real fun begins when you start segmenting this report with different metrics and segments.

I mentioned the word segmentation in this post quite a few times because I am a big fan of segmentation. The data that you can get after segmenting the avg. pageviews is pure gold! Don’t worry if you are new to segmentation because Google Analytics has made it easier than you can imagine.

All you have to do is to click the “Advanced segment” drop down located on the top right hand corner. This will bring up a segmentation option box.

Notice that “All Visits” segment is checked by default. Uncheck “All visits” and check the “Visits with Conversion” (last segment in the Default segment box). Click Apply and viola! The avg. pageviews number will automatically change to a secret number that is access code to your conversion success.

The new page/visit number is telling you that on average it takes X many pageviews for your site visitor to become your customer/lead/member (whatever your site goal is). Can you beat that? From this point your goal is to increase pageviews and use this number as a benchmark.

I am not saying that you can simply throw lots of crappy content pages and expect the conversion to skyrocket. I am also not saying that you should not optimize your conversion path and form fields. Each step is equally important in the conversion optimization process.

Remember, always be testing principle is always true. The moment you stop testing your competitors will gain advantage.

Please provide your comments, feedback, or tweets here.

Here is a list of other helpful blog posts -

Bounce rate Calculation in Site Catalyst Omniture

What is Web Analytics?

Is Web Analytics Right for My Small Business?

Visitor Engagement or Site Conversion? is a post from: Key Web Metrics & Web Analytics Blog

Eric Peterson, the analytics expert and the owner of the popular web analytics demystified blog has partnered with Comscore to take customer/visitor engagement to new heights.

The result of this partnership is a new metric “audience engagement”. This new metric can change the way how marketing manager, CMOs and media buyers make ad planning and media buying decisions.

The Audience Engagement metric is a simple modification of the visitor engagement metric (also created by Eric).

Visitor Engagement = (Ci + Di + Ri + Li + Bi + Fi + Ii)

Audience Engagement = (Ci + Di + Ri + Li)

(Notice that Bi (branding index), Fi (feedback index) and Ii (Interaction Index) are set to zero in the Audience Engagement key metric)

By definition the Audience Engagement is a function of the number of clicks a visitor generates at a site, the amount of time they spent at the same site, the frequency at which they return to the site and their loyalty to the site as a member of category for all the sessions to that site during the reporting period.

(http://blog.webanalyticsdemystified.com/weblog/2008/10/visitor-engagement-comscore-audience-engagement.html)

Wow! That’s a mouthful!!

Let’s dig deeper and try to understand on how Audience Engagement can show us new direction to market our site. We will discuss the sub metrics of this key metric one by one to make more sense of the mathematical equation.

Click depth Index (Ci) = There are two reasons why your website visitors will like to click too many links on your website. First, your website provides relevant content and visitors are interested in clicking different links to learn more. Second, your website is confusing and visitors are clicking every where in vain to get the answers or solutions to their problems. Clicks density analysis can give you some information about your visitor engagement but click analysis alone cannot give you any solid structure.

Duration Index (Di) = If your website visitors are happy with the information presented then they will want to spend more time on your website. The more time they spend on your site the easier it become to sell your products or service. The duration index captures the time spent on your site by your website visitors. The index is displayed as a percentage.

Recency Index (Ri) = Most visitors would like to visit the same website more than once if the content of the website is constantly update. Top content websites such as Yahoo, CNN, and MSN provide fresh content to their visitors consistently and the result is millions of visits each month to these sites. Are you adding new content to your website regularly? There are many different ways to add new content to your website – blogs, newsletter, videos, podcasting. Recency index capture the visitor recency data.

Loytalty Index (Li) = This is my favorite J Everyone loves loyal customers. The more your customers are loyal to your brand or product or service the more they would like to do business with you. Loyalty is measured across time. To measure your customer loyalty you must find out how long a customer has been your customer. Similarly, if a visitor visits a website for a lets say a year or 6 months then the visitor is considered to be loyal. Loyalty index can instantly give you a clear picture of your website visitor’s long term interaction with your site.

Currently, Eric and Comscore are working hard to create new system to present and deliver the Audience Engagement data. Until then, you can use your web analytics tool to group these sub metrics and watch the resulting Audience Engagement key metric closely.

What you think about this post? Will love to hear your feedback, insights, suggestions

- Sameer Khan

Another Feather in Customer Engagement Hat! is a post from: Key Web Metrics & Web Analytics Blog

The rapidly changing economic situation is causing more business owners to rethink their market and business growth strategies. Most fortune 500 companies are cutting back on their marketing expenses. According to AC Neilson, online advertising purchases have decreased compared to last year. People are cutting back on luxury item purchases and focusing more on things they need the most.

I am not trying to paint a gloomy picture. I want to bring to your attention the importance of ROI, conversion, customer value and customer engagement. These are the words that were considered to be the last thing a business owner wanted to focus on because they were “busy” getting new business; however, recent developments in the national and world economy have made it mandatory for all of us to focus on the metrics that can turn around a business nightmare into a business success.

Customer or visitor engagement is one such metric that has gained more limelight than any other in recent times. Customer engagement cannot be measured directly because of several factors influencing customer behavior on the website. There are, however, some key sub-metrics that can provide quantitative data on customer engagement. Measuring the customer frequency, recency, and time spent on a website can provide the quantitative data required to understand customer engagement and visitor behavior.

Business owners are trying different strategies to keep the customers engaged and to influence visitor behavior on their websites. Most business owners use blogs, newsletters, midgets (mini application) and videos to increase loyalty.

A new buzzword in the website design market can become the ultimate customer engagement tool. Web 2.0 technology and customization programming (AJAX, dynamic html) are tied together to create what is called a Rich Internet Application (RIA). RIAs are the Internet version of your normal desktop application. iGoogle is a brilliant example of an RIA web page. If you have an account at Google.com, then iGoogle helps you create your own customized search page by dragging any toolbox to any part of the webpage. You can see your Gmail inbox, your website statistics, and Google news on the same page and add more RIA apps.

You can now implement the same technology on your website and increase the time customers spend on the site. Instead of providing a plane webpage to your visitors and customers, you can create an interactive page that allows them to customize your website’s appearance . The more time your website visitors spend on your site, the more they are likely to buy from you. Similarly, your customers will want to buy from you again. RIAs help the customers become a part of your business process by adding value to their purchase.

If you do not have access to high-quality website designers to produce an entire RIA website, you can add RIAs to a small portion of your site. Probably, a single RIA webpage could be a great starting point. You can find many RIA Web designers for pennies on the dollar at websites like rentacoder.com or elance.com.

RIAs act as interactive Web toys for average Internet users who are used to seeing a flat webpage. Possibilities are endless on what you can design using this technology. Even if you provide a service that cannot be customized, you can still add RIAs to your website to improve customer engagement significantly. A dentist can include RIAs in a webpage to help the customers understand the teeth cleaning process; a hair salon can use RIA and help customers visualize how they will look with different hair styles, a car dealer can provide customized paint RIA apps.

RIAs are truly a new frontier in the customer engagement arena.

Customer Engagement At The Speed of Light is a post from: Key Web Metrics & Web Analytics Blog