Measuring your Online Reporting Susan Bradley

When a user looks at your website, data can be captured including what they looked at, for how long, how they found your site and in what part of the world they are based. This is generally termed as Web Analytics. This article is written to give a simple introduction and overview of the benefits of web analytics. It considers how basic data can show initial website effectiveness, while highlighting any weaknesses to be addressed, to improve the response from your corporate/IR website and to demonstrate use of your online annual report.

Ask your average executive about the use of website analytics and they may well look a little dumbfounded. However, web analytics provides a wealth of information at your fingertips that can be used to understand the metrics around how your site and its users currently interact and allows you to devise ways to improve these statistics and improve your site’s effectiveness.

So much information can be overwhelming, but fundamentally it is about the collection and analysis of data relating to website visitors and how your website is being used. So how can you get the most from this data? The most important first step is to be clear about your objectives.

What results do you actually want to see from your website? Perhaps you want visitors to complete a specific task, or visit a particular destination on the website (in other words, a specific ‘call to action’).  You may want your visitors to subscribe to receive update alerts, to ‘contact us’, or view a corporate video. Alternatively, you may be looking for visitors to spend a specific amount of time onsite, or to visit a specified number of web pages per visit. From an online annual report perspective, you can easily measure the number of visitors, return visitors and pages of interest within the document - feedback you would never receive about your printed report. This can add significant value to an online version and ultimately enable energy to be focused on refining content in the future.

The important thing about web analytics is that you should be examining trends over a period of time, and not focusing on specific numbers during a couple of days or weeks. Short time frame analysis will only prove useful if you are looking at a specific online campaign with a view to measuring its comparative success.

All websites should have established goals and the measurement of these will help monitor its return on investment (ROI). Depending on the nature of the website, these should be in line with your chosen marketing or investor relations objectives.

Web analytics easily enable you to track some of the most likely goals such as:

1. A particular page being viewed - if you have a specific page you want the visitor to reach.
2. How long they spent looking: Time on site goal – measurement of the time a visitor has spent on site in a specific visit.
3. How many, and which pages were viewed: Number of pages per visit goal – the specified number of web pages visited during a specific visit.

To show some examples let’s take a look at Google Analytics which is a free tool that can be used to analyse virtually any type of website. Assuming you have your Google Analytics account set up and have added the required tracking code to your website pages, where do you start to analyse results?

Google Analytics - the Google Dashboard and beyond

Google Analytics Dashboard will provide you with an overview of the basic data you will wish to consider.

Visitor numbers, page views, new visitors, average time on site and bounce rate. These can give you a good indication of trends and the success or otherwise of your goals. What you initially see is the default setting for the Google Analytics dashboard but you can easily customise this with data that you may find of particular interest.

For example, maybe you are keen to find out about the number of new visitors you are receiving compared to the returning visitors. This could give you a useful indication of how enticing your site is to returning visitors and, if not, highlights an opportunity to look at your content again.

In addition, conversion funnels are a simple way to examine the visitor flow within your website and can be easily set up for monitoring within Google Analytics.

They show the pathway or progress visitors take to achieve the specified outcome and comprise a number of stages at each of which there will typically be a drop-off in visitors. So, for example, if your goal is to get visitors to view your online annual report, view the Business Review section of your online annual report or sign up for RSS alerts, you can set up a pathway through the site and measure its success. If your goal is for your visitors to sign up for an e-newsletter, your funnel may consist of page visits to a subscription page requiring completion, which then leads to the confirmation page following the submission of the e-newsletter sign-up form.

Illustrating the complete process, the funnel will show where visitors are spending most of their time and the stage at which they abandon the funnel completely. Whilst not offering an explanation, the funnel does identify the number of visitors leaving at each stage and measures those who started and completed the conversion, identifying areas for improvement.

The bigger picture

You may also want to make comparison with your own site and other off-site analytics tools. Tools such as Alexa and PageRank provide a wider context to the metrics considering the whole Internet, so you can consider your potential audience, your visibility and the general ‘buzz’ about your company online. Though some of these tools can often prove expensive, they provide a unique perspective of the wider audience. Off-site analytics can also provide data on websites in your sector but away from your own. In this way, you can look at competitors and how traffic is driven to them, the IR community, customers, and wider search engine results.

Conclusion

Analysis of your website is essential to check its effectiveness, ensuring that you are getting the return on investment you require. The process involves continuous re-evaluation, testing and amendment to ensure your website is continually optimised for best results, but this need not be onerous.

Google Analytics provides a vast amount of data but if you consider this in relation to your own objectives for your website and examine certain key items, you will be able to analyse trends over time, examine why these trends are happening, and consider what you should do about them.

Remember, web analytics software is the ONLY form of direct feedback on the success of websites and can equally be used to measure the success of blogs, podcasts and online videos. In a world where good advice often comes with an expensive price tag, Google Analytics is an accurate, accessible yet free tool!

This article was written by Susan Bradley - Marketing Executive. We welcome your feedback and thoughts and would love to hear any questions you have.

Worth a read...

Understand more about our corporate reporting products and services

Find out more about our approach to getting the right media mix

Find out more about our clients

Read more about Jones and Palmer

Find out more about Google Analytics

Jones and Palmer is focused on the development and delivery of corporate and investor communication media.

Established in 1906, Jones and Palmer has, for the last 40 years, printed annual report and accounts for public listed companies and currently has over 150 plc clients. We are the UK's largest on-site manufacturer of investor websites and printed annual reports.