Tools
We don’t believe in one tool for one job. Understanding your online visitors, recommending improvements to your Website as well as monitoring the results require a range of tools.
We look at results from your Web site in a number of ways – the hard numbers from tools like Google Analytics, feedback from customer surveys and usability testing, as well as drawing on our 10 years’ experience in e-commerce.
Only this way can we get an accurate and complete picture of how to optimise your site and increase revenues, sales, donations and repeat business.
Visitor experience and behaviour
Quantitative Tools
Qualitative Tools
Google Analytics
What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics (abbreviated GA) is a free service provided by Google that shows detailed statistics about the visitors to a website.
If you haven’t installed Google Analytics click here, alternatively ask us to check that your installation of GA has been done correctly.
What is the benefit of Google Analytics?
Google Analytics as well as being free, is suitable for use by both large and small organisations. It is being constantly developed to include features supported by far more expensive proprietary tools.
It allows you to track conversions (goals) on your site as well as the results from on-site search. Google Analytics also integrates with Google Adwords and gives you precise ROI figures on your online advertising.
Heat maps
What are heat maps?
Heat maps, sometimes called site overlays or click density tools, show you in graphical form where the highest concentration of clicks has occurred on a particular Web page.
Heat maps, although visual representations, are based on the number and frequency of clicks on Web links and images contained on a Web page.
According to research performed by Jakob Nielsen, users tend to read Web pages in a F-shaped format.
What are the benefit of heatmaps?
Heatmaps quickly show us what content visitors clicked on next, it also shows us what content was ignored. This is often because this content was not placed in the right place; such as within the F-shaped eye-scanning pattern or above the fold.
Heat maps can also show us content that visitors found useful but was located ‘off the beaten track’. Since many websites fail by not putting useful content in the right place for the visitor to find, heat maps are extremely useful.
Split tests
What are split tests?
Split tests have been around since the early days of newspaper advertising. Now, like then, they can tell us which offer, creative, headline, price-point, etc gives us the highest response, or conversion to sale.
Split tests, or multi-variant tests, can be used to test a range of different combinations of changes on a website page.
How do they benefit you?
Split tests are designed to produce statistically significant results, that signify that a particular change or changes to your website, is directly responsible for an increase in sales, email sign-up, downloads, etc.
The results are based on what visitors actually do, and split tests are very useful in testing a number of hypotheses about what is important to conversion.
It means the end to what your boss/manager/client ‘believe’ is important on the site, instead the focus is on facts. The results of split test are difficult to argue with.
Usability sessions
What are they?
If people find something difficult to use, the majority won’t use it again. Websites are no different.
Transacting online often puts people in a mild state of anxiety, any obstacle to completing the transaction results in an increase in that anxiety, and ultimately, the abandonment of the process.
Usability testing gives us a rich picture of what these ‘obstacles’ are and what we need to fix.
What are the benefits?
AWA use a panel of usability testers who can be profiled to be representative of your customers; gender, income, age, experience with the web. We can complete usability test normally within 48 hours, giving you quick results and an immediate idea of what problems your website has.
We then produce a priority list of fixes based on impact and cost, so we can start fixing the problems that will quickly have the greatest positive impact on your site.
Online surveys
What are they?
Online customer surveys are ways of getting insightful feedback on what your visitors think of your website. Surveys fall into two main categories, on-site and off-site. We generally use on-site surveys to understand what visitors think of the website during their visit. Off-site surveys occur after the website visit is over, but visitors are generally poorer at remembering the website experience.
What are the benefits?
Different surveys perform different functions – we are particularly interested in why people came to your site, whether or not they completed their task, and most importantly, why not. Surveys can also help with capturing feedback on key pages, rather than the site as a whole.
Surveys also signify to the visitor that you are taking the experience seriously and want to know what they think. All surveys benefit from being easy to report on, although free text comments require some form of classification.
Expert reviews
We have been active in e-commerce – as either business owners or consultants – for over a decade. Unfortunately, the mistakes that were being made over ten years ago, are still being made now.
For example, the visibility of delivery charges remains one of biggest reasons for shopping cart abandonment – and still many websites insist that their visitors go digging around to find out how much they’ll be charged for delivery. Incredible!
What are the benefits?
Expert reviews allow you to fast-track your understanding of what works in e-commerce, and what doesn’t. We won’t blind you with jargon. We’ll explain to you what Twitter/Facebook/blogs means and whether they could help your business.
We’ll also tell how to improve your back office functions – your fulfilment, call centres and returns process – since this is all part of the ‘customer experience’.
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