SayWhat? Locating Verbal Miscommunications

Web analytics are about making change. The tool is only good insofar as one can take the insights and better optimize their website for users. However, not all changes need to be major changes. You don’t have to completely redesign an entire website to make a difference for users. Minor changes, such as word choices, can make a big difference. Here’s an example of how web analytics can locate a miscommunication.

Finding Inconsistencies

I was looking the other day at some top content reports. I was interested to find that after the homepage, the most popular page was a publication list from 2009.

Interesting, sure. But I didn’t think too much of it. Later, as I was considering changes to the front page, I turned on the site overlay to see where users clicked and how often.

This is what I saw:

Recent publications is the link that takes people to the 2009 publication list. Yet, no one, not a single person clicked on that link. Clearly, this is a problem. If my second highest piece of content is somehow hidden behind a confusing link, I’m not doing my job on this webpage. I may not be able to direct people to the content I find most exciting and interesting, but I can at least not somehow obfuscate the content that users actually want to see.

Investigating sources of error

Returning to the top content report, I clicked on the link for that piece of content. Then I decided to find out where exactly users where coming from to get to this page. To do this, I clicked on entrance sources.

This gave me the following report:

I can see that the majority of my traffic is coming from google, while a smaller amount is direct. The direct traffic I understand since the publication list is often included in an email newsletter. However, I wanted to direct traffic from the frontpage to this piece of content.

Experimenting with Small changes

In the end, all this took to fix the problem was a little tweaking of the word choice. I set up two alternate versions of the menu item. I made one page to read Publication Lists and one to say Find Recent Publications. At this point, these are just guesses. I have no idea which one will actually direct people toward that content. Of course, there is always a possibility that users visiting the front page do not actually want to find publication lists and the search traffic is going to remain the dominant point of discovery.

However, I don’t need to leave this mystery to just wild guessing or conjecture. I can easily test a few different word choices and see how people respond. So, after creating two different versions of the frontpage with this mild change, I loaded the experiments into Google Web Optimizer. This will give me an idea of how the changes are working by randomly showing different patrons one version or the other and then recording how the respond. In a month or so I’ll report back with the results.