Web Analytics: The Key to Successful Online Campaigns

How is your Website doing these days? Like most public affairs professionals, you probably rely on the Web more than ever to distribute your message and mobilize your constituencies.  But, what do you really know about your Website? Is there room for improvement? The answer is probably “yes.” 

Can you list the 10 most important pages on your web site? What about the 10 pages visitors find most confusing? Imagine how valuable it would be to know which pages on your site were critical to the success of your online campaign, or which were hindering that success. If your organization is using a tool that analyzes web traffic like WebTrends or Google Analytics, you can find answers to these types of questions. You just have to know what to ask for.

Most people get a report once a week that shows basic web statistics like total visitors and the number of page views.  If this is all you see, it is time to have a meeting! Before you do, however, take some time to answer the following three questions:

1. What is the mission or purpose of your Website in relation to your campaign?
2. What are the campaign goals?
3. How are those goals measured?

Here is an example: You work for a membership based organization and are running a legislative campaign to get members of Congress to pass a new law.  You need to recruit members into the campaign and mobilize them to contact their Congressperson. Your organization’s Website and email system will be the campaign’s primarily means of communications.

In this case, the mission of the site (in relation to your campaign) is to help get a new law passed by Congress. You have three goals. The most important goal is passage of the bill.  But, you also have two operational goals: sign people up for the campaign and get them to send messages to Congress.  You should have realistic, numeric targets for each of these as well as a deadline for reaching them. This is how your goals will be measured. 

Now, there are some very specific questions you can ask to be included in your weekly reports: how many people who visit the site are making it to your campaign’s sign up page? Of those, how many actually sign up? For example, let’s say 100 people visit the site on a given day. Fifty of them make it to the sign up form and five actually fill it out.  In this instance, your sign up page has a completion rate of 10% (5/50 = 10%). You can do the same calculation for your other goal, too.

If you have a goal to recruit 1,000 people into your campaign, it’s going to take 200 days under this scenario. But, what if you only have 30 days? In that case, you will need to increase the number of people who visit the sign up page and/or improve the conversion rate.  For example, if you increase the number of visitors to 200 per day, you could reach your goal sooner. And, if you can increase the completion rate to 20%, you would reach the goal even sooner than that.

Armed with this information, you can now work with your web team or IT department to make this happen. Can you add a link to the campaign sign up form from high trafficked areas of the site? Can you change the sign up form? For example, you could make the form easier to complete by removing unnecessary form fields. Changes to headlines can also have a dramatic impact on the performance of a page.

Because you are keeping tracking of your recruitment goal and monitoring your completion rate, you will know if your efforts are helping or hindering your progress.  And, the best part is you will be able to apply the knowledge you have learned to your next campaign, too. You will be ready to find new ways to improve how you use the web to get your job done. 

Article by Kevin Reid, Vice President of Internet Communications and Social Media at Amplify Public Affairs, LLC.