You are Sherlock Holmes, i.e., Understanding your Web Users

There are many ways to track usage on your site. There are plenty of services out there where you generate a snippet of code, put that on your pages, and voila!, you've got tracking.

These are great, because they tell you about what is being done on your site, who is visiting, where they are from, when they are coming, how many pages they've seen, how long they've been here, what browser they're using, and so on.

Although these services provide you with information, do they provide you with insight? Do they tell you anything about what people are looking for? Why they came here? What they are expecting or hoping to find?

The answer is no, not really. You can, of course, study stat reports and infer some things. You can be like Sherlock Holmes and make conclusions based on certain pieces of evidence. But these are inferences, after all.

This is where I will argue for having some kind of search functionality on your site. You know, that helpless little search bar at the top right hand corner of your site which every web developer puts on just for the sake of it, and because "that's what everyone else is doing anyway."

The search bar provides you with more opportunity to gain insight into not just usage, but also an understanding of what people want, hope, and expect from your site.

 Take a look at the image to the left. This is a tracking function that we developed for a medical device client of ours. The red bars on the left hand side are graphs that show the number of specific keywords that were entered into the search bar on the web site. The right hand side shows the number of results that the search function provided based on the keyword. If there were results, you could then see which pages produced those results.

In this case, most searches did not produce results of any kind for users that were utilizing the search function. What does this tell you?

If you can simply know what your audience is looking for, you can start to create content that will address those needs and desires. In the case of this client, we developed a CMS where meta keywords were the determining factor that drove search results. If people are looking for a particular product, for example, and this manufacturer does not produce that product, but produces one similar, the manufacturer can then create keywords based on queries which will produce relevant results for the user.

Thus insight. Which is a little more than just tracking, and really brings into focus just why you have a web site in the first place.

Us vs Them on Technology

Ok, so the title may be a bit misleading. I'm not really trying to start some kind of class warfare on the use of technology. Instead, I simply want to level the playing field.

We've all seen big business, and the cool and fun things it can do with the Web. Denny's, for example, with its live social media feeds, Pizza Hut with its pizza ordering app, Dominoes with its "Check your order status real-time", and so on. Small and medium sized businesses, however, don't always have easy access to this kind of highly customized technology and almost never have time to really think and spec it out.

Dynamic is fun

If you have a Website where you do some kind of dynamic user interaction, like make a sale, receive a customer request, or track an order, you have access to gems of information that, if presented in the right way, can be fun, interesting, and engaging.

MaggieMudd received orders online. We had built out a system for online cake orders that did everything from upload photos to create collaborative spaces so customers could interact with the cake decorator to design their own cake. It was nice for the customer. But there was also a valuable and interesting by-product: Data.

Take a look at this information. Through simple calculation, the company was able to dynamically feed data about their orders. Most interesting is the delivery miles, which turned out to be an overall distance of almost once around the earth for the city of San Francisco alone. There are other data points as well that talk a little bit about the kinds of orders that MaggieMudd got, which also gave a little bit of insight into the character of the company.

Social media is an open publishing platform

MaggieMudd was able to publish dynamic data through the Facebook platform. This was particularly useful when it came time to engage in so-called social commerce. What is social commerce? Isn't all commerce social since it takes place between humans who must interact in some way in order for a commercial transaction to take place?

Well, yes, all commerce is social, but some types of e-commerce can have a social overlay which can help to distribute products through certain social media channels. The jury is out on how effective this type of commerce is for a company like MaggieMudd, but as it goes in any kind of business that sells consumer goods, more distribution points are better than less.

The positive side is that to set up social commerce on Facebook does not require a bunch of new work because the data and the processes were already designed and set up years ago.

Status reports are always appreciated

Lastly, I wanted to show a page that MaggieMudd did to show customers the status of their orders. Order status was already tracked in the order management system, and to make that data available to customers in real-time only required that the data be re-hashed in a fun and playful way.

In fact, this page was really a no-brainer, since all the data points that were already being used by the company employees were now able to be used to engage the customer.

You might be sitting on a gold mine

If you have data about your customers, you can always use that data to further engage those same customers. And that is as good as gold, because if your customers like to engage with you, they almost certainly will come back when they are again in need of products or services like the ones you offer.