49. The importance of being lazy

To truly re-energise your web site you must pass the donkey work back to the site, its supporting databases and your back-end systems. Maximise your time and let the technology take the strain.

A happy technology is a labour-saving one. So cheer your web site up and use it properly. Now repeat: I will be lazy, I will be lazy, I will be lazy…

It’s Already There

Other than updating and improving the web site, which is a full time (and often a team) role, your web site should be looking after itself and leaving you time for a spot of golf (I mean more time to attract visitors and ship orders for existing customers). With good back-end systems you should be able to capture all the data you want, and then be in a position to interrogate that data in any fashion that suits you. When customers order or register with your web site they leave bits of information behind, not least their email address. This amounts to nothing less than a self-building mailing list that comes free of charge, from people who are already interested in you. Assuming that you offer an opt-out facility, all the email addresses left on your records have agreed to be contacted at a later date about your offers and promotions – so go for it.

Your back-end systems should also be able to tell you who ordered what, and when. Your customer service team needs only to access the data to answer any phone or email queries straight away.

Some deeper data mining will soon reveal obvious trends, from the most popular items and downloads to sales patterns, by day, by month or season. What you do with this data is very much determined by what sort of company you are and what resources you can devote to analysing it. But the last thing that should happen is for the data to be completely ignored.

Your databases will also have the location recorded for every shipment sent from your warehouse. If you marry this information up with the average amount spent in these areas, you’ll soon be able to create a customer map and can advise marketing where it would be best to advertise (they’ll like that!) and what sort of return you can expect.

Finally, an often overlooked piece of information that you should be capturing is the referral page that brought users to your site. By capturing the referrer you’ll be able to see where users were last and, in the case of a search engine referral, the exact word or phrase (including typos!) that the user typed to find you – absolutely priceless. From this information it becomes very obvious which of the links you have set up are actually working and which search engine is serving you best.

Everyone Gets A Play

To maximise your staff’s effectiveness on the web, it’s important to provide the necessary tools, and not to assume any technical knowledge. If you have the right GUI (Graphical User Interface) in place any idiot can update a web site (although it’s best to leave the idiots out of the process if you can; someone’s got to run the company) with absolutely no technical knowledge or understanding of the processes going on behind the scenes. Any jobs that IT can pass on to other departments will both make your site more effective and reduce the number of errors. If an editorial team is responsible for creating most of the site’s content, go the extra mile and give them the power to update the content live on the web. Having the information piled up for IT staff to add is counterproductive: if they can concentrate on making improvements to, and launching new features for, the web site, it is better for the company.

How did it go?

Q. The marketing department really appreciate the stats but argue that the search engine site I want them to target with a campaign is already providing a healthy amount of traffic for our site. Why pay them?

A. If you leave it alone, the chances are your visitor numbers will increase slightly (especially if you alter your metatags to reflect the areas you had missed) without your company spending a penny. But you are not looking for status quo (they hardly tour nowadays anyway), you are looking for growth.

Q. Our CFO wants to know if we should stick with one search engine or spread ourselves around. What shall I tell her?

A. If the majority of users are finding you through one particular search engine then you can assume that your customer base will tend to favour this search engine on the whole. By investing in a targeted campaign you’ll be appealing to other like-minded individuals who are far more likely to visit you, and ultimately consume.

Here is an idea for you…

Through your own database/s find out which sites are referring visitors to you and in what quantities. Make a list or even a graph showing where people are coming from and, in the case of search engine referrals, what those users are actually typing to find you. First, check to see if all of those words are contained within your metatags, and if not, add them. And secondly, approach the marketing department with the proposal for a targeted advertising campaign on the search engine that is best serving you already, using the statistics you have to support your argument.

Defining idea…

‘Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy.’

Edgar Bergen

Defining idea…

‘Progress isn’t made by early risers. It’s made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something.’

Robert Heinlein