Analytics meets Art
An approach that I nearly always end up using with my clients (and kick myself for not starting with) is to draw their website. It is a simplistic diagram, featuring Page Types rather than all pages and with arrows showing navigation paths. Getting it down on paper (and getting it right) exposes an incredible amount of information to be used in setting up the analytics and understanding performance.
Outputs from these diagrams include:
- Identify all key areas of the website
- Understand how visitors are likely to navigate through the website
- Develop the structure for a page naming convention
- Identify location of conversion actions
- Identify useful supporting information (visitor, visit or page level)
- Identify KPIs, particularly for navigation completion rates
This will be a practical workshop, I want to give one or two examples, highlighting how I use the information. Then to get everyone to draw the website of their own company or of a client. Ideally have a couple of people copy this to a whiteboard/flipchart so we can go through it as a group and see how to use the diagram.
Note that I have depressingly zero artistic ability (unless you count making numbers dance in Excel or the beauty of an elegant page naming convention).
