Adding extra data might seem daunting, but competitive intelligence analysis can be both cheap and easy if you use the right tools, and it’s an essential part of your online marketing strategy in an increasingly sophisticated digital marketplace.

What is competitive intelligence analysis?

In its simplest sense, competitive intelligence analysis is treating the web analytics data of your competition like it’s your own. And though it may be hard to imagine, much of the analytics data you use to optimize your own online efforts, from basic visitor counts to advanced engagement metrics, is available for your closest competitors, and most of it is completely free.

Why is it necessary?

Regardless of which analytics tool you use, traditional web analytics will always be a “silo,” meaning it exists in isolation. You might feel good about your online performance, and you might even see a steady increase every month. But until you understand how well your competitors are performing, as well as how they’re doing it and—most importantly—how it’s affecting you, you’ll never have a true sense of your online success and how it can be improved.

Where does the data come from?

Competitive intelligence data can come from any number of sources, including ISP providers (who maintain detailed records of every user’s online habits), opt-in panels (through which users agree to be monitored), toolbars (which keep tabs on unsuspecting searchers) and self-reported data (usually from sites that want their stats available to potential advertisers).

But no matter where your data comes from you should always be aware of two truths:

1. Every data source has sample biases. There’s no getting around them—all you can do is anticipate them and compare sources for the best picture possible.
2. No competitive intelligence data will ever be 100% accurate. And it doesn’t need to be. Your goal isn’t to pinpoint precise metrics—it’s simply to get a sense of how you hold up to the competition and what you can learn from their tactics.

Is a free tool enough?

If you’re working with a generous budget, you can’t go wrong with a paid tool like Hitwise or comScore, both of which offer incredibly deep competitive analytics insights. But for this post, we’ll look at mining some enterprise-level competitive intelligence using the following free tools, so you can focus your time and effort on analysis.

Alexa

Owned by Amazon, Alexa was one of the first big players in competitive intelligence. It collects data by encouraging users to download its toolbar and then capturing their data as they surf. Alexa is most famous for providing traffic-based website rankings, which were once an important consideration for advertisers deciding where to spend their budget. Think of Alexa as a popularity contest for websites.

Above is a simple example of what Alexa’s best known for. Search for stats on the Toronto Star website, and you’ll see that in terms of traffic, thestar.com generally ranks somewhere above 2,500.

That number is meaningless, of course, without context, so a ranking’s only real value lies in comparison. Throw the sites of The Globe and Mail (a competing Canadian newspaper at the national level) and the populist Toronto Sun into the mix, and you get a quick visual comparison of traffic to all three sites over the past three months.

When compared to The Globe and Mail, the Star’s site ranking suddenly doesn’t look so hot. And it would appear that no one in the digital department at either paper needs to worry about the Sun in the near future.

Alexa has taken steps to go beyond simple site rankings, and you can now access deeper insights, like a site’s percentage of search traffic, high-impact search queries, upstream and downstream visits, and even demographic information about visitors.

But as with any competitive intelligence tool—particularly the free ones—you have to consider the data’s source. And because Alexa’s data comes only from users who agree to download its toolbar, its measurements can be extremely skewed. The data also tends to be biased in favor of Windows and Internet Explorer users.

Overall, Alexa is a decent first step in comparing your site’s traffic to that of your competitors. But don’t expect any level precision, and don’t rely on it for deep analytics insights. The free tools discussed below will better serve those needs.

Compete

Whereas Alexa might be considered a dated tool with a suspect source of data, Compete is a hot up-and-comer with a lot to offer. It’s basically Alexa on steroids. And though its free version pales in comparison to the depth of insights its paid platform offers, its “hybrid” data, which comes from a wide range of both ISP providers and opt-in panels, is far more reliable.

Here’s a quick comparison of monthly visits between the Star, Globe and Mail, and Sun—this time using Compete’s free version.

The data doesn’t look too far off from Alexa’s website rankings, but switch to unique visitors, and you get a slightly different view of the Sun’s viability as an online competitor.

Compete also offers an overall rank metric, as well as deeper metrics, including page views, average stay, visits per person, pages per visit, attention and daily reach, which are available through its paid version.

So what’s the downside? Though it’s more accurate than Alexa and other sources, Compete’s free version is still extremely basic, and its measurements are always at least a month old. You also can’t dial down any deeper than three-month increments. And though the hybrid data allows for greater accuracy, it also means you never know exactly where the data is coming from, so you can’t anticipate and account for the sample biases that come with a particular source.

Google Trends for Websites

Though Google is a notorious data hoarder through its own widely used search and analytics platforms, it also collects third-party market research data and consumer opt-in panel data and makes much of it available through some incredibly powerful free tools, one of which is Google Trends for Websites.

Google Trends for Websites is an alternative to Compete that compares to Compete’s free version but still lacks the depth of insight of its paid version. Like Compete, Trends for Websites lets you compare your traffic to that of your competition, as shown below.

Even better, you can compare traffic trends across custom date ranges, including the last 30 days, and you can drill down to specific geographic regions to see who takes the cake in different areas.

But one of the biggest advantages of using Google Trends for Websites is the “Also visited” data, which lets you see which other sites your visitors are checking out, giving you a clear picture of who your true online competition is. Below, we can see that while the Star and Globe are often thought to be direct competitors in print, the Sun is actually a more proximate competitor in terms of online visitor behavior.

And the “Also searched for” data shows that, while some Star readers are also searching for “globe mail,” even more are searching for “toronto sun,” meaning the Sun is a bigger competitor in terms of brand-name search.

Google DoubleClick Ad Planner

Another powerful free tool from Google, DoubleClick Ad Planner aims to help online advertisers decide where their budget would best be spent. It offers basic traffic and daily unique visitor metrics similar to those found in Google Trends for Websites, but the real meat lies in its demographic and psychographic visitor data. Unfortunately, demographic data is currently available only in the States and the UK, but the graphs below show gender, education, age and income levels for US readers of the Star.

Psychographic data is available in Canada, however, and the following comparison shows the main interests of visitors to each site.

So if you were an advertiser looking to reach sports fans, the Sun might be a better bet. But if you were an online editor at the Star looking to steal Globe readers, you might think about increasing your business coverage. And, similarly, a digital marketer at the Star might run search campaigns aimed at upping the exposure of existing business coverage.

Google Insights for Search

So far, we’ve looked at competitive data for specific sites, but you should also go beyond measuring your competitors’ actual sites to get a sense of the larger search ecosystem. And the perfect competitive intelligence tool for this purpose is Google Insights for Search.

Above we see that, within Ontario, searches for the Star far exceed those for its competitors, and the Sun has outranked the globe in terms of brand-name searches for almost the entire past year.

When you dial down to “Regional interest,” however, you can see that the Globe has a tighter grip on Toronto than the Sun. And if the Star wants to increase its online readership throughout Ontario, it might do well to start with regionally targeted search-marketing campaigns for Barrie, Guelph, Burlington and St. Catharines, where the Globe is dominating the search market.

Another cool feature you’ll find in Insights for Search is the “Rising searches” data, which warns of up-and-coming competitors that your visitors are increasingly searching for. Based on the image above, it should be clear to anyone at the Star that they’re now competing not only in the print-to-online category but also with news outlets from other traditional media, as their visitors are also searching for online news from CNN and CBC.

Microsoft adCenter Labs

Not to be completely left in Google’s dust, Microsoft also offers some interesting competitive intelligence tools through its adCenter Labs. Perhaps the most useful tool, “Search Funnels,” lets you perform a basic search-funnel analysis on keywords related to your brand. Initially intended to be used as a keyword discovery tool (a purpose for which it’s still well suited), it also lets you learn what brands users search for before and after searching for your brand-related keywords.

Below we see that, according to Microsoft’s data, 13.52% of people who search for “torontosun” later query “torontostar” (as part of the clunky user experience, the two-word “toronto star” didn’t register), while only 5.72% of people who search for “globeandmail” do the same.

Similarly, we can see below that 15.16% of users who search for “torontostar” go on to search for “torontosun,” while “6.76% later search for “globeandmail.”

Since both the Star and Sun are Toronto-specific newspapers, the fact that they’re sharing searchers isn’t unexpected. But should the outgoing searches related to the Globe, National Post and CNN increase, the Star might consider ramping up its national and international coverage online in order to retain visitors.

The final analysis

If paid competitive intelligence tools aren’t in your budget, the free tools described above will put you on the path to some incredibly deep competitive analytics insights. But before you start spying, keep these five essential rules of competitive intelligence in mind:

• Go beyond rank: Tools like Alexa were once groundbreaking, but they’re now just a starting point. Don’t rest your site’s success on rank alone, and never consider rank in isolation. Its only use comes with comparison.
• Step outside of your silo: Monitoring your site’s web analytics isn’t even close to enough. The actions of your online competitors will always have drastic effects on your performance, and the only way to understand those effects is to analyze your competitors and respond accordingly.
• Beware of sample biases: Whether your competitive analytics tool uses data from ISP providers (Hitwise), opt-in panels (comScore) or toolbars (Alexa), there will always be a sample bias associated with the source. But by anticipating that bias, and by understanding that completely accurate competitive intelligence will never be possible, you’ll still get a useful picture of what’s working for your competitors and how it’s affecting you. You should also keep in mind that even hybrid data (Compete, Google and Microsoft tools) is flawed in that its inherent biases can’t be isolated.
• Surveil the search ecosystem: Tools like Google’s Trends for Websites and Insights for Search and Microsoft’s adCenter Labs Keyword Forecast and Search Funnels are valuable for so much more than keyword discovery. Use them to understand what your visitors are searching for and what other sites they’re visiting. If you’re like most businesses, you’ll be surprised to learn who your true competitors are on the web.

That’s it. You now have the tools and knowledge to start spying on your competitors with no investment beyond your own time and energy. And if you decide to purchase a paid tool in the future, your experience with free tools will help you understand exactly what metrics—and which data sources—offer the greatest return on investment.

Hospitals In-Common Laboratory (HICL) is a private, not-for-profit corporation that has worked in partnership with Ontario hospitals since 1967.

HICL is Canada’s largest and oldest provider of referred-out medical laboratory services, specializing in complex testing and providing support to academic and industry-sponsored clinical tests. Through its referral network, HICL provides more than 500 medical laboratory procedures.

HICL now occupies a market with stiff competition from for-profit labs such as Gamma Dynacare and Lifelabs. In order to differentiate itself from its competition online and appeal to prospective clients, HICL needed to address the following challenges:

• The website, while functional, was outdated and poorly organized, resulting in regular calls to customer service and obscuring HICL’s long-established credibility
• HICL’s function and its key benefits—experienced staff, leading-edge lab technology, high quality testing and commitment to patient safety—were not expressed clearly through the site design
• HICL’s non-profit status—its key differentiator—was poorly explained
• Without analytics installed on the site, HICL was unable to tell which parts of the website were performing well and which needed to be optimized

HICL Website Before Redesign

Solution

As the first phase in a multi-phase website overhaul project, HICL engaged us to undertake a basic site redesign and install Google Analytics. (Content optimization and other site improvements are to follow in future projects.)

Specifically, we:

• Conducted an audit of HICL’s website pages, reference manuals and online database
• Consulted with key stakeholders to determine priority information and frequently accessed documents
• Streamlined the site’s information architecture, making key information easier to find by combining pages into logical sections and highlighting more resources on first- and second-level pages
• Redesigned and updated the site design to reflect a warm, inviting and professional tone
• Installed Google Analytics to track key pages, database use and reference downloads
• Implemented a regular reporting/recommendation schedule to synthesize Google analytics data and provide strategic implementation suggestions

Results

Since engaging Commune in late 2009, the HICL website has undergone many upgrades.

HICL Website After Redesign

Specific results from these improvements include:

• Improved usability

  The new site features easier access to key company information and the potential to add increased website functionality in the future.

• Renewed focus on HICL’s test database

  This key tool for users (and an important selling point for prospective clients) has received increased attention, and plans are now underway to make it more user-friendly. Google Analytics data revealed that many users were receiving an “Unavailable” result when searching for tests, prompting HICL to work on improving its test search capabilities.

• A more contemporary design

  Colour schemes, typefaces and images were all updated, giving HICL a contemporary face that more closely mirrors industry norms.

• Greater understanding of visitor interaction with website

  The ability to track visitor behavior and performance of key pages—right down to the most searched-for lab tests—has given HICL data it can use to launch further improvements to its offering.

The projects have been—ahem—educational.

For one thing, we’ve all mastered a whole lot more French vocab than any of us learned in high school. “Accueil,” for example, means “Home” (in a website context, that is). And “homepage” is “page d’accueil.” Now we know.

We’ve also discovered that most school boards in Ontario—English and French, public and Catholic—have websites. But their ability to track visitor behavior and online marketing ROI varies wildly, from sophisticated analytics configurations to no apparent tracking ability at all.

But we’ve come to another, more far-reaching realization as well.

It isn’t only businesses that benefit from tracking website performance and keeping tabs on online marketing ROI. Public organizations—even ones, like school boards, that might not appear to emphasize marketing and sales—need accurate, customizable, comprehensive reporting tools.

And although this post has “school boards” in the title, the benefits of analytics tracking applies to any organization that wants to improve its marketing effectiveness and maximize its online ROI.

So, with that in mind, here are the top five ways school boards (read: any public organization) can benefit from Google Analytics.

1. Justify online marketing expenditure to trustees and other stakeholders

By capturing more robust return-on-investment data—which promotional campaigns are working to drive qualified traffic to the site, for example—trustees and other decision-makers can make informed decisions about prioritizing marketing budgets.

2. Determine whether the website is communicating effectively with parents, students and staff

Analytics data can tell you whether you’re effectively communicating key messages. For example, checking pageviews and bounce rates for a page about school closures will help determine whether the page is being used to its maximum effectiveness, and provide some context for improvement.

3. Gain understanding of qualified traffic sources

One school board discovered that, although government sites weren’t sending large amounts of traffic, they were referring highly qualified visitors, indicating that further partnerships with government sites would be in the board’s best interests. Analytics information helps you avoid unfruitful partnerships and see exactly where your ROI is coming from.

4. Tracking key activities that have direct impact on ROI (like downloading registration forms)

By tracking registration form downloads (something that hadn’t been previously done), one school board was able to gather data that will ultimately inform navigation, design and site architecture optimization to encourage more conversions. Websites are living entities—by keeping tabs on how your visitors use your site, you can encourage them to take significant actions.

5. Determining areas for potential expansion

Using Analytics’ map overlay tool allowed one school board to determine that they had a small contingent of foreign visitors to the site—providing key information for promoting the board’s offering to a small but significant secondary market. You may have interested prospects in places you never would have predicted—and analytics data can help you pinpoint where they are.

What’s your experience using Google Analytics for public organizations or non-profits? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

How do I know? A fascinating report on new radio ratings systems shows that when people self-report their classical music listening habits, they inflate their estimate by that margin—probably to give the impression that they’re smarter.

The discrepancy revealed itself when radio surveys were switched from paper-based diaries to more accurate pager-like “people meters.”

Classical music listening went down. Soft-rock listening by men went up—by 16%.

The takeaway? Don’t trust what people say. Trust what they do.

Objective data shows that interest in analytics is gaining on interest in surveys

This is particularly important with web marketing. With the ceaseless launch of new websites and technologies, it’s easy to get caught up in hype. And people don’t want to seem like they’re getting left behind.

Online video and social media marketing are some recent examples. People love to say they’re on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social networks, and using them extensively. But often they want to appear savvier than they are.

There’s a similar bias with market research and advertising focus groups. Often, ads that work well in the field perform poorly in testing—a phenomenon discovered in the early days of direct marketing. Why? Because people don’t want to admit how they would really respond to more direct pleas rather than those that are more artful.

So beware self-reported survey data. At the very least, temper them with objective analytics.

Focus on bounces for actionable insights

In the pecking order of analytics metrics, bounce rates place pretty close to the top. They’re tough to misinterpret, and they tend to be standardized across all analytics tools. More importantly, they immediately tell you what’s wrong with any of your site’s landing pages, meaning bounce rates are a highly actionable metric. No matter what tool you use, your bounce rate report will tell you the number of people who called up your site, did absolutely nothing, and left. In other words, it measures people who quickly realized your site wasn’t for them, and who clicked the “back” button just as abruptly as they arrived.

While the bounce rate for your entire site is an important barometer of its relative suckiness in the minds of your visitors, you should be especially concerned with the bounce rate for each of your top landing pages. Whether intended or not (remember that, thanks to search engines, people don’t always land on the pages you expect), these are the first pages that most of your visitors see, so a high bounce rate for any of them tells you whether your inbound links, keywords or pay-per-click ads are sending the wrong type of visitor to the wrong page. Fixing these leaks could be as simple as providing some introductory copy or a call to action on pages you didn’t think anyone landed on.

To make this report even more actionable, check the bounce rate of each of your top referrers. It’ll let you know, at a glance, who’s really driving qualified visits and who’s not pulling their weight as a referral partner. Next, check your bounce rate for each of your top keywords—both paid and organic. A high bounce rate for an organic keyword will tell you if you’ve optimized your site for a useless term, while high bounce rates for paid keywords will let you know if you’re wasting money driving untargeted visits.

Don’t be distracted by exits

Bounces are exciting, informative and immediately actionable. Exits, on the other hand, are sorely overrated. Your exit rate tells you exactly how many people left your site, regardless of what they did before they left. But while some people think this bigger picture of site “leakage” should be even more useful than immediate bounces, it’s not actionable in the least. Why? Because everyone who visits your site has to leave at some point. Even if they spend 20 minutes in spellbound appreciation of your content and they perform every desired action and goal completion your analytics tool lets you track, they’re still going to leave. And the vagueness of this metric means you can’t distinguish people who leave your site happy from those who leave frustrated, angry and determined never to return.

The exit rate exception

There’s one exception to the “ignore exit rates” rule: If you’ve cleverly planned your online conversion funnel in hopes that your prospects will follow a structured path from your intended landing page to a specific product page and all the way to a conversion page (and hopefully a “thank you” page), an exit from any of the pages before the conversion takes place—now called an “abandonment rate”—is definitely worth looking into and is definitely actionable. While bounce rates might help you assess the worth of an intended landing page for your funnel, they’re powerless when it comes to measuring the success of any of the equally important intermediary pages.

The distinction should now be clear: Bounces, which refer to people arriving and immediately wishing they hadn’t, are one of the quickest, easiest and most actionable glimpses into your site’s overall performance. And exits, which tally a notch every time someone leaves—whether for the right or wrong reasons—are essentially useless outside of your sales funnel. Plan your measurement accordingly, and you’ll gain quicker access to actionable information without wasting time on pointless metrics.

Well, here’s a secret. When we provide web analytics services, we know that one of the biggest wins is simply configuring goals and goal funnels. By doing this, you can evaluate metrics according to objectives, giving you insight rather than just information, such as which traffic sources and content are most valuable for your business. In fact, by assigning actual values to goals, you can even sort content according to its revenue value—guiding you to add, optimize and delete content according to its measurable worth (not just how “cool” that guy in the cubicle next door thinks it is). Something like this:

Setting goals in Google Analytics adds functionality such as dollar-index value that adds insight into your return on investment

Setting goals is fairly straightforward (and obvious) for people like us who spend more time with web analytics tools than with family members. But if your life’s more balanced, and you haven’t set them up, here’s a quick step-by-step guide:

1. Define the business objectives for your website. Sounds like a no-brainer. But you would be surprised how many people haven’t clarified the why for their website. Is your site supposed to generate leads? Reinforce existing relationships? Start with the end in mind.
2. Map a sales funnel to your objectives. What happens on the web at each step towards your objective? For example, if your objective is to get people to visit your contact page, how do you get them to your website? And how do you get them from their to your contact form?
3. Establish a conversion page or action. How do you know if someone completes your desired objective? For example, if you want to track contact form submissions through your website, you’ll want to set up a conversion page (or, if you want to get nifty, trigger virtual page views through JavaScript as on our contact form). With new features from Google Analytics, you can now also configure non-page conversions such as time on site.
4. Determine the value of your conversion. How much is your desired action worth? For example, if 10% of people who submit a request through your contact form become a customer, and the average sale is $500, each contact form submission is worth $50.
5. Input your sales funnel, conversion action and conversion value into your analytics tool. If you’re using Google Analytics, here’s help setting up your goals and funnels.

It sounds complicated, but often the hardest part is simply clarifying your objectives. Far too many people, when you ask, often respond with means rather than ends, such as “get more traffic.” Once you know your objectives, the rest is just following instructions. And if you’re really struggling, or have complicated goals and funnels, feel free to contact us for web analytics service. We’ll happily track that conversion and help you out.

In Web Analytics 2.0 (required reading for anyone who cares about doing well on the web) analytics guru Avinash Kaushik discusses the difficulty of separating the people (visitors) from the events (visits) with some tools, and a brief summary is in order.

Visits are typically simple to gauge. Most tools refer to them as such, or they call them “sessions,” which is still descriptive enough to get the job done. Some tools, however, confusingly refer to visits as “visitors,” making it difficult to distinguish between these basic metrics.

But things get a little more shaky when it comes to measuring unique visitors. While telling visits apart is easy, tools like Google Analytics have to distinguish between the people who visit a site by setting a unique cookie on each person’s browser. So if they visit again, the tool, which will now recognize them, will tally a new visit but not a new unique visitor.

Why some tools inflate visitor counts

Because some browsers don’t accept cookies or reject third-party cookies (an unavoidable fact that web analysts simply have to deal with), developing an accurate picture of your unique visitors is fraught from the start. And some tools further complicate this inaccuracy by breaking up the metric into “daily unique visitors,” “weekly unique visitors” and “monthly unique visitors.”

If you’re shopping around for an analytics tool or you’re using one that offers these additional metrics, you should probably understand just how useless these metrics are. Why? Because daily unique visitors will register as unique for every consecutive day they visit. The same goes for weeks, so if you’re analyzing your site’s performance over the course of a month (which you likely do unless your site is massive), your unique daily visitors and unique weekly visitors metrics will throw numbers at you that are completely out of proportion. In many cases you could easily end up with more visitors than visits.

The only visitor metric that matters

The answer to this visitor inflation is, of course, the “Absolute Unique Visitors” metric. If you’re used to using sophisticated, user-friendly tools like Google Analytics, XiTi or Nedstat, you might take this metric for granted. (You might even mistake it for jargon.) But know this: Not all tools are equal, and not every tool offers this complicated and (mostly) accurate metric. Your “Absolute Unique Visitors” report is the result of extremely complex and time-consuming calculation. It’s an extra mile that lazier tools with their “additional” metrics have simply avoided—much to the user’s detriment.

The lesson here? First, you should always question the importance of a particular measurement. Differentiating between daily, weekly and monthly visitors might seem like due diligence, but it’s really just laziness that can easily skew your data if you aren’t careful.

And when choosing an analytics tool, you should always place an emphasis on user-friendly naming conventions. Ask your vendor what they call a visit. If they say “visitor,” you might want to keep looking.

Most importantly, make sure you pick a tool that measures absolute unique visitors. Measuring unique visitors will never be a completely accurate process, but monitoring your absolute unique visitors is the closest you’ll come to correctly tracking this important metric.

1. Apps: Anyone with an iPhone already knows it. But the appification of Facebook, Salesforce, Google and other web titans suggests there’s more to apps than handheld video games. In fact, Pincus believes (and he seems to have a knack for this web stuff) that the traditional web battlefields are wide open. Even search, he proposes, has no clear leader in the app space. So just because your business dominates the web doesn’t mean it will dominate web-connected apps.
2. Measurement: As a company focused on analytics and measurable results, we’re happy to hear about this—and we’ve noticed. As people increasingly turn to the web and apps for things they previously got elsewhere (like books and newspapers), the ability to measure their activity has become both more important and more possible. That’s why so many web analysts and marketers were excited by Google’s recent announcement of new mobile- and app-tracking features in Google Analytics. Such measurement enables rapid testing and optimization. And if your company’s not doing it, you will almost certainly get left behind by more savvy competitors.
3. Paid content: Could it really be? Are people finally willing to pay for web content? Well, yes and no. With over one billion downloads, the Apple app store reportedly makes $1 million a day in application sales. Traditional websites, however, still tend to fail at pay-wall experiments. So it appears that just because something uses data from the web doesn’t mean people treat it like a website. That’s of important note for your business, as it’s possible you can develop an app that people will actually pay for (like Kraft did). Why? I think there are a few reasons. First, people treat the web like public space, but treat their mobile devices like private space. They expect public space to be free but understand private space takes investment (they’ll buy patio furniture for their yard but not for their nearest park). Second, as internet access costs drop to nothing—and they will, facilitated by Google’s better-than-free operating system plans that will encourage companies to give away mobile devices and data access—people have more money to spend on digital content. There are many other factors, of course, but the bottom line is that consumers appear ready to pay for some digitally distributed content and web-enabled applications.

Call it what you will, but it’s clear these trends will impact your business.

And you should probably act now, because you can bet web 4.0 is on its way.

The Conseil scolaire de district Centre-Sud-Ouest (CSDCSO) manages the French-language public schools in the central southwestern region of Ontario. Currently, the board oversees 38 schools in a territory that stretches from Windsor and Sarnia in the south to Barrie and Penetanguishene in the north. Over 7,000 students attend CSDCSO schools.

To support French language education throughout its territory, the CSDCSO needed to increase registrations. To achieve this in a way that was both cost-effective and compelling, the board had to determine its most effective marketing channels. To do this, it needed to monitor the performance of its website and determine where its marketing dollars would be best spent.

In 2006, the CSDCSO began to upgrade its existing website, recognizing that, even in a time of tight budgets and reduced spending, the potential for using the site as a communication and marketing tool to both new and existing students justified the investment. Although the CSDCSO had run both on- and offline marketing campaigns (aided by community partnerships and government-sponsored initiatives), the board still needed to address some very real challenges, including:

• Determining which marketing channels would bring the highest return on investment and avoiding investment in initiatives or partnerships that might not yield results
• Justifying marketing spend to trustees and other stakeholders with concrete, tangible results
• Focusing on its regional marketing efforts and assessing its penetration throughout its territory to determine key areas for targeted student and staff recruitment efforts
• Assessing which sections of the website were best serving student, parent and staff needs and deciding how to optimize under-performing pages
• Tracking key website activities that had direct relevance to return on investment—such as downloads of registration forms—rather than just generic metrics like “hits”
• Gathering accurate website performance data through the installation of web analytics tools that, despite prior investments in website upgrades, had yet to be added

Solution

Although the CSDCSO was headed in the right direction, the board needed help to create an end-to-end reporting plan to ensure future marketing decisions would be firmly rooted in hard data and based on past successes. To assist, we implemented a comprehensive system, enabling the board’s marketing team to determine which web marketing initiatives were realizing a robust return on investment.

Specifically, we:

• Conducted an audit of the CSDCSO through personal interviews to fully understand the board’s objectives—and how well its web marketing efforts were supporting them
• Created a strategy defining key website metrics relevant to the board’s objectives and our plan for installing and configuring an analytics platform to measure and report them
• Installed Google Analytics in the CSDCSO’s website content management system and customized tracking code to measure key performance goals such as registration form downloads
• Configured profiles in Google Analytics, filtering irrelevant data and ensuring that the data the board received was relevant and actionable
• Educated key stakeholders in interpreting analytics data, ensuring the tool was usable and useful and helping to establish a culture of data-driven decision making

Results

Installing Google Analytics in mid-2009 has already given the CSDCSO relevant, actionable data to optimize marketing performance, including:

• More robust return on investment data
  The CSDCSO has done some on- and offline promotions, and there are government-funded programs designed to highlight the board’s offering. With analytics data, the board now has details on which initiatives are working and which aren’t. For example, while government websites aren’t driving a large amount of overall traffic, they’re top referral partners for visitors who download registration forms, and have the highest conversion rate of any referral site. This important source of traffic would be missed with a simple focus on hits or page views.
• Greater understanding of qualified traffic sources
  Too often, website success is measured simply in terms of visits or impressions, without thought to where visitors are coming from or how they engage with site content once they’ve arrived. With specific goals for the website—such as encouraging registration form downloads—the CSDCSO now has data about where qualified traffic comes from, allowing the board to optimize its website and marketing not just for traffic, but for performance that actually matters to its objectives. For instance, one referral source with a high conversion rate is a government site providing information for new immigrants, giving the CSDCSO a prospective new partner.
• Potential areas for expansion
  As with referral partners, analytics data also revealed differences between top cities for website traffic and top cities for registration form downloads. These differences provide information for geographically targeted student recruitment campaigns that are likely to be most effective. And while the vast majority of visitors are from Canada, there are small contingents from France, South Korea and Belgium, all of which indicate some level of foreign traction, and an opportunity to reach a powerful secondary market for foreign students.
• More information on site usage
  After the home page, a website page illustrating the board’s territory and listing its schools is the most popular choice for external visitors. Such information allows the board to create linking and promotional strategies to drive registrations from high-profile pages. The board can also determine which content items are under-performing to avoid investing in content that fails to engage visitors.
• More detailed data to inform website capabilities
  One interesting observation is that many visitors to the board’s French site use Google Translator and other online tools to convert key pages into English. As well, 38% of visitors had their browsers set to English, indicating that more comprehensive English resources on the website would be a worthwhile investment.

One of our clients, Consulting-Portal, brought this meme to our attention via Twitter at the height of the Kanye-bashing fun. Since we’d redesigned their site and recently launched some upgrades, it seemed like uncanny timing and we all had a good laugh. The link was promptly buried by a steady stream of tweets and Google alerts, and, along with the rest of the world, we forgot about Kanye.

That is, until Consulting-Portal’s monthly analytics report rolled around.

Now, for those of you not familiar with our analytics reporting service, we synthesize a month’s worth of Google Analytics data and produce a report outlining relevant trends and strategic recommendations. And, as I took a look at their traffic sources, lo and behold: the top referring site for that month was that stupid (albeit hilarious) Kanye app.

Fine. Yes, things can go viral and drive traffic. We try to avoid that kind of campaign in favor of more measurable initiatives, because—most of the time—it’s not like the traffic actually matters. It’s not like it converts, or does anything other than click, glance and bounce.

But—surprise, surprise—the Kanye app didn’t just send traffic. It sent qualified traffic: the time-on-site for visitors from Kanyelicious was higher and the bounce rate was lower than the site average, and visitors from the Kanye app looked at just as many pages as visitors coming from more…ahem…traditional traffic sources.

Hmm.

So, what to do with that surprising information? We took away a few points:

• It’s hard to tell what’s going to drive traffic. So don’t be afraid to experiment. Sometimes, discovering what will resonate with your target audience is a bit like throwing spaghetti at the wall—eventually, something is going to stick.
• That being said, for your efforts to be successful over the long term, you must track everything. It’s easy to get swept away by the latest marketing fad, but unless you can prove your campaigns are working, you’re probably wasting your money.
• Beware of making long-term decisions based on one-time anomalies. Sure, Kanye was successful for one month. The next month, Consulting-Portal’s referral traffic went back to its usual patterns. Trends are far more important than random blips—no matter how successful those random blips.

The final word? (With small apologies to Kanye….) You know, that app was pretty good…but trackable campaigns are one of the best marketing tools OF ALL TIME!