by Lori Goldberg

Know Your Customers

Converting your users into satisfied customers is far more challenging than merely getting traffic to your site. Customer acquisition is what makes sites like Amazon successful, while the now-infamous British ecommerce site Boo.com was a dismal failure. The conversion rate (or customer acquisition rate) is the key metric to a site's business success, according to many industry analysts, including Bill Gurley, a well-known analyst and venture capitalist.

With increases in your conversion rate, revenues increase and marketing costs decrease proportionally. A good user interface is the most important factor in successfully acquiring customers. Bill Gurley writes: "Sites that are confusing, where it's not obvious to the user how to proceed, have horrible conversion rates."

Already Analyzing Logfile Data? Many web businesses already analyze logfile data, but they perform analysis from a marketing perspective. Adrenaline's Information Architects focus on different key metrics that reflect user behavior. We make actionable recommendations to improve how visitors are using your site.

In order to improve your site's user interface, you need to understand how visitors are using your site. Your web server's logfiles capture usage data from all of your visitors, every day. Web log analysis yields valuable data, such as the most common click paths through your site and where most visitors enter and exit the site.

Learning from Logfiles

Logfile data is a very useful way to understand how visitors use your site, but is often overlooked at most companies. According to a Forrester report entitled "Why Most Websites Fail," only 8% of companies surveyed used web logs to measure ease-of-use. This statistic shows most businesses are not taking advantage of the understanding and information power that can be derived from logfile data.

In-depth logfile analysis uses factual evidence to help resolve many issues which may seem to be matters of opinion or aesthetic judgement. Some common problems include:

• Customer Drop Off
• Valuable content hidden too deeply
• Sites that resemble corporate org charts.

Logfile data can provide you with evidence to decide potentially political situations such as prioritization of features on your homepage and throughout your site.

Case Study: Client X had five items on their top-level navigation. Web log statistics showed that despite the easy accessibility of these features, two of them were rarely used. When we took a closer look at the logfiles, we also learned that the most popular areas were buried two or three clicks deep. We recommended changes to the top-level navigation, to give easier access to the most popular areas.

Result: Traffic to these areas nearly doubled within weeks. The average time users were spending on the site also significantly increased.

Analyzing clickstream data can provide valuable insight into what your users want. Clickstreams provide accurate pictures of the where, what, and how users click through your site and the tasks they accomplish. This factual data gives you a clear and factual understanding of how your site design helps or hinders users.

Analyzing exit data helps you zero in on those pages and features that don't work. Data on traffic drop-off details is another crucial statistic that requires close scrutiny and is almost always overlooked. Knowing where users leave can help you dramatically increase your conversion rate. Analysis of your most common exit pages can help understand what sort of improvements will encourage users to complete their tasks.

Conclusion: Most home pages still fail to highlight the services and information customers desire most.

The Impact

Adrenaline Information Architects are aware of the impact of usability on your site's ability to retain customers. Jakob Nielsen, "the" guru of Web usability explains that increasing your site traffic is not as simple and as beneficial as addressing your site's usability. Nielsen states, "(t)he business of a website is a product of two numbers: number_visitors x conversion_rate. So to double your business, you can double one number, or you can double the other number. Considering that conversion rates typically run around 1%, that's where I would invest first."

Usability is one of the most important factors to your conversion rate. Nielsen writes, "Usability becomes a barrier to entry: a new site will fail unless users can grasp it in a few seconds." Site changes based on logfile usability analysis can clearly increase a site's business.

Case Study: Adrenaline performed a user interface evaluation including logfile analysis for an ecommerce site owned and operated by traditional vertical publishing company. When starting the project, Site X ranked 4th in every category when compared to the other sites the company operated. Adrenaline addressed navigation issues, interaction requirements, search difficulties, and purchase hurdles.

Result. One month after the site re-launched with the new UI, Site X rocketed from 4th to 1st in total revenue generation and overall performance.

Our approach is based on aligning usability, technical feasibility and the site's business objectives. While we have extensive backgrounds and experience in usability principles, the recommendations we make are also based on a solid understanding of the underlying technology used in your system.

Adrenaline's analysis and recommendations take into account critical ROI criteria. Our Information Architects understand which changes are quick and easy, and which ones will involve more extensive programming. We also understand your business, and how changes to user interface development can affect your business goals.

Conclusion

If your site offers a less than satisfactory user experience, merely attracting visitors will not increase your customer base. Logfile analysis offers a detailed and decisive way to determine how your user experience can be improved. When we understand how visitors use your site, we can recommend changes that make users decide to become customers. Visitors will be able to accomplish their goals more easily, and far more of those visitors will become customers. Ignoring your logfiles is ignoring your customers, which in any business will greatly reduce your chance of success.

Delivering Success

Adrenaline's User Interface Development group provides a complete logfile analysis report on a monthly basis. The report includes:

• Goals for user behavior on the client's site.
• An overview of the logfile analysis results highlighting key metrics that can affect conversion rate, such as the
  • relative popularity of features,
  • the most common entry pages,
  • the most typical clickstream patterns, and
  • the most common exit pages.
• A comparison: How did actual user behavior differ from the goals?
• Expert recommendations for feature presentation, user interface development, and usability improvement.

For more information, contact Wayne Bovier, User Interface Development Practice Lead. You can also download our data sheet in pdf.