I have noticed that many businesses selling things on the web for the first time suffer from a common problem. They don’t understand what to expect from their web analytics. When you don’t know what you should expect, it is easy to be happy with whatever you get and not dig any deeper. In some cases, just a simple shift in expectations can revolutionize a business because it makes people start looking for the right things.

Consider this analogy. If someone has absolutely no experience with an automobile, they might assume that a vehicle that breaks down and needs to go to the shop every week is perfectly normal and just accept it as part of life. However, once they learn to expect something different, they will start looking a whole lot deeper at what is happening.

My goal for this article is to give you a few base level expectations about analytics in an e-commerce setting. If it seems overly simplistic it is likely that you already know what to expect out of your web analytics.

Expect to know where people leave your sales funnel

Do people fill up a cart with items and then leave when they see your payment options?  Do they leave after adding an item to their cart, but never clicking on checkout? These are questions you should be able to answer easily. You should be able to see exactly where people are leaving and then test small changes to see if they can improve your conversion rate.

Expect to know the value of a keyword

You should know exactly what a visitor who comes to your site for “blue widget” is going to spend on average. This ability is vital for knowing how much you can invest in targeted advertising to get visitors. If you are doing pay per click search engine marketing, you should know exactly the return on investments for each keyword and it should be trivial to remove the losers and up your spending on the winners.

Expect to know where your visitors are

You should be able to get a very good idea of where your visitors are geographically. You should be able to compare this information to sales data by keyword in order to focus on specific areas where the conversion rate is greater and avoiding those where it is too low.

Expect to track sales data

While it is implied in the expectations above, your analytics setup should know about a sale. It should be able to tell how much the sale was for and what items were purchased. You should be able to segment this data to answer questions like, “which entry page has the largest average order size?” and “which advertising campaign is producing the greatest ROI?”

So there you have four base-level expectations that you should have for your web analytics. If you aren’t getting at least those things, then it is probably worth digging a bit deeper.

There are a lot of businesses that could benefit from custom software. Unfortunately many small companies hire a firm to create software, have a horrendous experience and decide the custom software simply is to expensive to be cost effective. This is partially the fault of software developers that don’t know how to work with a client. However, many businesses looking for custom software, don’t really understand how software is made.  They go into things expecting a magical process and do all kinds of things that make things that makes the process worse.

One of the biggest problems in creating custom software is knowing when to focus on look and feel and when to focus on functionality. A good software engineer is going to use a number of tools to automate things in the early stages of development. This means if you need a screen where you can fill out employee information, he will be able to get a functional form up and working without needing to write the code to display the words, “First Name”, the code to display the words “Last Name”, the boxes to type in the first and last name, etc.  Instead he should be able to just program the screen to automatically create a form that lets you fill out the standard employee information.

This automatically generated form, may not be as pretty as what you’d like.  It might have a blue background instead of the green you prefer and it might have some fields in a different order than what you want.  However, it allows the developer to get something functional very quickly. This is vitally important because you may have a very different idea of how the application should work, once you are able to click through and actually do whatever that software does. Once the functionality is working and you know the software performs as expected, then it is time to go back through and make the software look the way you want.

The problem comes because many people are very visually oriented and will start asking the developer to change the way things look from the first meeting. You don’t want the developer spending 20 hours making a screen look pretty only to later discover that the screen isn’t needed after all. Lock in the functionality first and then come back through with a graphic designer and create the look and fine tuning to make it polished.

Since most users don’t click through to the second page, many websites will see an increase of 400% or more for a term simply by moving to the first page. Since this type of search engine optimization focuses on reinforcing terms for which your website already ranks, it requires minimal effort. We have setup self-optimizing systems on a number of sites.  These systems automatically identify second page search results and modify the internal linking structure to emphasis the desired terms. If you are interested in using this method to increase your natural web traffic, contact us for a free initial assessment.

According to research done by Dell, the majority of your data sits unused once written. You can gain a distinct competitive advantage by including even a small portion of that unused data in your business decision-making process. Given the amount of data that is currently ignored, there are certainly a number of easy-to-implement business intelligence that could produce significant ROI.

In 2003 researchers were able to quantify the value of a photograph on direct mail offers for the equivalent of pay-day loans in South Africa. They sent out offers with various interest rates and various pictures of different races and genders. The rates used in this experiment were randomly assigned from 3.25% to 11.75% in simple interest per month. The results:

• Race didn’t make any significant difference in the response rate.
• Women’s response rate was not influenced by the photograph.
• Men ‘s response rate was the highest with a photograph of a woman.
• Adding a woman’s photograph increased response among men by the same amount as lowering the offered interest rate by 4.5% per month.

If you don’t know, it may be time to invest in web analytics. The software itself is free or low cost and once implemented can provide you with key insights for years to come.  Here are some things you should be able to find easily:

• Search terms that best convert to sales or leads.
• The revenue that each dollar of online advertising produces by keyword.
• How many times people visit your site before buying.
• Specific pages of your website where improvements would increase profit.

The result that design changes have on sales.

In fact, for many businesses, open source customer relationship management solutions offer great value and an excellent return on investment.  Every system has different strengths and weaknesses, and there are a very large number of products to choose from where the software is free.

Some of the best solutions offer workflow features.  This allows you to systematize the human processes in your organization so no steps are forgotten. Xeric has installed a number of these systems and can help match software to your company’s needs.

They trick the end user into installing a program that then threatens to destroy data if they don’t pay a fee to make it uninstall itself. It is best to make sure that your systems are protected both by a good antivirus program on each machine and a spyware blocking content filter on the network level.

Together the small contributions can have significant value.  Wikipedia is the most common example. Sentence by sentence volunteers have created an encyclopedia more comprehensive and just as accurate as Britannica. Many online stores use crowdsourcing to create and rank product reviews. A newspaper in the UK has created a system to let the public review over half a million pages of government expense accounts. So far, the politicians will be paying back £478,000 for inappropriate expenses.

Amazon has built a programming interface and service called MTurk that allows companies to submit tasks that require human effort, receive the completed work, test for quality and then pay for the work.  This is being used for everything from identifying the addresses in drive-by photographs, to translating documents, to audio transcription. The system gives you access to a very large number of workers from around the world—all paid on a per piece basis with appropriate quality controls and error checking.

The current crop of college graduates expect to change jobs much more rapidly than their predecessors. This means businesses are going to face a lot more employee churn. On one hand, there may be some benefit of bringing in new employees with different perspectives, but it also means employees are going to walk away with a great deal of informal knowledge that their successors will have to spend time to acquire.

Systems that capture and retain free-form knowledge can position your business to survive more rapid employee turn over. Technology like internal wikis are inexpensive and easy to implement.  The technical part of many knowledge retention systems are trivial to obtain and implement but it isn’t a silver bullet. To be effective, your organization will require cultural changes and a mental shift in how employees see their jobs.

Careful planning of both the technical and cultural requirements will help minimize disruptions from increased employee churn and increase the benefits from a constant influx of fresh perspectives.