Uncover your most valuable page to yield great insights

It's an important question. It's a big question. And if you can't answer it, you're in some serious trouble.

What's your most valuable web page (MVP)?

Don't just say 'my home page' because it may not be true. It could be deeper in your site than that. The answer could even change every month.

First of all, you have to know the goal of your site and your traffic breakdown. Look at absolute revenue and conversions - where are they all coming from? (Hint: Look at e-commerce and goal-completion tabs.) Identifying your MVP will allow you to observe the behavior of your customers, and also to have a great impact on revenue or conversion once you've identified opportunities for optimization.

[Video] Devices are tracking and optimizing our lives

For internet-oriented people, it's easy to lose sight of the bigger picture of how data and electronics are changing our world. I mean that in both the personal sense and the literal sense - how we design everything, from cars to the streets they're driven on, are now based on thoroughly collected and analyzed data.

Of course, we know that websites track how we use them, but as this IBM video points out, our clocks and cars can be networked and tracked and optimized to make our lives more efficient

Check out the video...

Forget web analytics – being a web analyst is hard

I have been stewing all week over a great blog post I read by Evan LaPointe, a digital marketer out of Atlanta. The post was entitled “I don’t want an analytics job”, and it seems to carry over the same feelings and themes of an earlier post he wrote called “Web Analytics Sucks, and it’s nobody’s fault.”

These posts both excited and annoyed me at the same time.

On one hand, it was almost liberating to read that someone is living in the same trenches that we are at Napkyn. A lot of the points of frustration that Evan talks about – like navigating both internal politics and sub-par data as well as having the role of web analyst considered a low-level technical job rather than a high level executive job – hearing someone else say this stuff will make any analyst grin and buy in. It’s like reading a good Dilbert cartoon and thinking “Hey, that is SO where I work!” - it’s cathartic, but not productive.

Hence my annoyance. Evan touches on all the challenges with being an analyst, and outlines all the skills (data analysis) and opinions (Always Be Testing) that good analysts bring to the table. But his conclusion is that good web analysts don’t actually want to be web analysts, they just represent the next generation of executives-in-waiting – web analysis is beneath them. He says that web analytics actually want to be the ‘shepherds’ of a business, who use data to help guide the organization to ongoing successes. There’s already a job title for that – it’s a CIO.

So while I totally agree with the sentiments, I thought I would share my thoughts on what the real issue is.

One great idea for catalog businesses going online

We're in the thick of working on our monthly digital analysis reports here at Napykn. At this point, we're bringing together ideas developed from last month's reports, looking at the most recent month's data and refining our techniques based on our readings from numerous online sources.

Recently, we've been working with a few catalog-based companies who are increasingly shifting their focus into online sales. One proven segmenting technique that we've been recommending to these clients is to register alternate domain names and direct their catalog-based traffic to these domains.

Don’t let your thesaurus eat your leads

We don’t claim to be a copywriting company. We let each clients data guide the recommendations we make on their digital business and optimization strategy. That said, we fully appreciate the importance of good copy in the persuasion/conversion process, and there is no place worse for brutal copy than B2B.

Tell me what you do or you won’t get my business

I have worked exclusively on the vendor/consultant side in B2B for my entire career. After over a decade of looking at business websites, I have a pretty good idea of how to cut the wheat from the chaff to find out what a given firm does.

I look at the homepage, and if I still don’t know what they do, I click on “About Us”.  If I still don’t know what they do, I click on “Products/Solutions”. At this point I will click on “Clients” and if I see some big names, I will just call the receptionist and ask... ”What do you guys do exactly?”

I have been doing some vendor research today, and I have bumped into at least 10 websites where I don’t really know what they do.

A few quotes for context:

“...leading center of excellence for catalyzing online direct to consumer interactions.”

What?