Webanalytics tips for your corporate website

4 sep 2007

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Online marketeers, they live with web statistics. A decrease of 0,34% of visitors can cause serious headaches. The questions is: how important are web stats for an online corporate communications professional? In this article Jungle Rating provides you with a number of web analytics tips for your corporate website.

1. How popular is my corporate website? - measuring the basics

Some stakeholders will visit your website frequently, others only once. There are several basic indicators which measure the popularity of your website.

What to measure:

No. of visits
No. of page views
No. of unique visitors
No. of unique returning visitors
Ratio of new to returning visitors
Average time / visit
Average no. of page views/ visit

Measuring these indicators over time enables you to see the effect of specific campaigns (e.g. recruitment event, annual results). Is there a significant increase in the number of visitors after the event?

2. Who is my visitor? – retrieving your visitor’s profile

It is very important to know which stakeholders spend time on your website and where they come from. The problem with web stats is that they will not tell you: “there was an institutional investor, portfolio 200 million, from San Jose on your website”. However, web stats can give a good indication of the stakeholder profile, maybe even better than you would think:

What to measure:

No. of visits & pageviews per main navigational item
- The advantage of a corporate website is that the main navigation often is stakeholder based (“Press”, Investors”, “Careers”). So, knowing which of the main navigational items is the most popular, can give quite a good indication of the information needs of the average stakeholder being on your website.
Country of origin

Combine both country of origin and no. of page views per main navigational item to see how which website sections attract which nationalities (e.g. if your company is based Switzerland, but only Americans visit the recruitment section, this might imply that there is a mismatch).

3. We have some special content, what do stakeholders think of it?

Your corporate website may contain content that is of specific importance: downloads, a strategy section, a highly interactive stock chart, an animated historic timeline, a CEO video, etc. You don’t do this for no reason: you invest time and money in these content features. By measuring, you can determine the use and effectiveness of essential content, downloads and features. You can measure the effect of your external communications as well: the effect of your advertising campaign for example.

What to measure:
Suppose you have an integrated CEO video on one page, during 4:30 minutes, what would you like to know?.

No. of visits of the video page
Average time spent on the video page
- If the average time spent appears to be 0:15 seconds, you know there is something wrong with the content or the user-friendliness of the video.

You can do the same for any page containing specific content, applications or videos, think of:

Downloads: there are lots of them on a corporate website (financial reports, CSR reports, presentations, brochures)
Webcast page
Strategy section
Campaigns
HTML report

Other things to measure:

Top-25 most popular pages

4. Is my website user-friendly?

User-friendliness may be the most important aspect of the website and an important dissatisfier (if not user-friendly people will probably not come back, unless they really have to). A usability test is the utmost method to reveal usability issues. But web stats can also provide hints of limited user-friendliness.

What to measure

Stickiness of homepage and landing pages:
- Stickiness is the percentage of visitors that will proceed their way your website after having seen the homepage (or a landing page). Consider that the homepage and landing pages often are starting points on a corporate website. If they are not sticky, this might imply user-unfriendliness.
Use of search functionality:
- If many visitors start using the search functionality, this might imply they cannot find the navigational menu does not optimally lead them towards the information they are looking for.
Top-25 exit pages:
- Visitors have to leave a site somewhere, but a structural appearance on the top-25 list (multiple months) can be a sign of limited user-friendliness.

5. How many visitors go from the corporate site to our business websites?

We often hear: “a corporate website only costs money”. Consider that many stakeholders (including potential clients) visit your corporate website to find out what your company is about, what products you offer, and how they can get to you business sites.

Why not measure the amount of people that go from the corporate to a business website? This could provide you with some insight whether the corporate website generates leads and whether it contributes to the business, instead of only costing money.

What to measure

No. of click throughs from [corporate.com] to [business.com]

6. What interval to choose?

Most web stats are collected on a weekly or monthly basis. We recommend you to analyse trends over time. Include the current month, but the latest two as well.

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