Paul Rouke - Usability Professional

At PRWD our work involves working with SME’s all the way through to blue chip brands. With usability, or making websites more affective at generating leads and sales, at the heart of what we do, this is no surprise.

What is interesting is to look at the key differentiators between our SME clients and our other much larger, well known clients.

• Budgets - of course budgets vary significantly, from a few thousand pounds to ten thousand pounds and upwards
• Expectations - SME clients tend to feel like online can’t always play an integral role in their sales and marketing activities, but bigger brands expect much more from the online channel
• Traffic versus conversions – SME’s will rely mainly on traffic generation techniques to increase enquiries and sales, where bigger brands look at both traffic generation and visitor conversion (to varying degrees I must add!)
• Are all visitors potential customers? – SME’s will tend to treat all site visitors as ‘potential customers’, especially when viewing web analytics, whereas bigger brands focus on segmenting their traffic information to identify which visitors are more likely to convert into an enquiry or sale

What Usability Doesn’t Mean for SME’s

There are a wide variety of services within the ‘usability’ field which, realistically, aren’t going to be used often by SME’s due to budget constraints. These services include:

• user testing in labs
• field studies
• focus groups
• expert evaluations
• card sorting
• in-house usability consultancy
• full user-centered design processes
• information architecture planning and development

What Usability Does Mean for SME’s

This isn’t to say that SME’s can’t benefit from the principles of ‘good usability’ to help them improve the effectiveness of their website and online marketing activities.

Primary ways for SME’s to embrace and benefit from usability include:

• using the free web analytics tool Google Analytics to track and monitor visitor activity
• carrying out guerilla style usability testing (more on this explained in this presentation on improving online performance)
• consider how your website currently caters for your key target customer (messages, information, services, useful tools, easy contact methods)
• use another free tool Google Website Optimiser to test a different version of your primary action page on your site
• calculating the potential sales and profit improvement you can expect to get using a ROI calculator (either for lead generation websites or for e-commerce websites)
• treating your website not just as a complimentary promotion of your business but with the potential to become an intregal part of your sales and marketing activities

Masterclasses for SME’s and Micro Businesses

I am delighted to not only be taking part in the first official LEAD programme (a leadership and business development programme) delivered by TMI with 17 other managing directors of micro businesses, but I am also delivering a masterclass to these business owners on ways in which they can start to improve their websites to generate more business. The first masterclass I am delivering is on Monday 15th March 2010, and it is open to non LEAD business owners by prior arrangement.

What SME’s Can Learn About Usability To Increase Profits

For the masterclass which is delivered over two and half hours, the outline of what I will speaking about is below:

• Google Analytics – how you can use this free tool quickly and efficiently to understand whether your website is performing well
• Online enquiries – how you can encourage more visitors to make an enquiry
• E-commerce – best practice advice if you are selling online to encourage more people to buy from you
• Case studies – how to improve online enquiries
• Making the move from offline to online sales/marketing strategy – myths, considerations, opportunities

Masterclass Plans and Objectives

My plan is certainly to make the masterclass sessions very engaging with lots of participation from the SME business owners who will attend. I would say the three main objectives for this masterclass are:

1. Generate genuine awareness of what tools and techniques SME’s can use to improve their websites
2. Demonstrating that ‘usability’ isn’t just for big businesses, and that any size business can benefit from better measurement and usability led improvements
3. Planting the seed for business owners to consider making online a much more integral part of their sales and marketing strategy

Summary

As this article points out although there are many usability led activities which aren’t feasible for many SME’s, there is absolutely no doubt that micro businesses and SME’s can benefit from improved usability of their website and online marketing. If you are in this position or have friends and colleagues who run small businesses, feel free to give us a call to see how PRWD can help increase your sales and leads from the online channel.

It seems like Google are on a constant drive to push Google Analytics further and make it even more powerful and dare I say enterprise class in some areas.

New features that have recently gone live are expanded and more intelligent conversion goal tracking, and new Intelligence reporting and alerts.

You’ll see the videos below which give a great overview of both of these new features:

Expanded and More Intelligent Conversion Goal Tracking

Intelligence Reporting and Alerts

Looks like we’ll have to make our Advanced Google Analytics Training Course a bit longer to squeeze these new features in!

We have published 2 case studies of our Advanced Google Analytics training, which is a 3 hour intensive session delivered in-house for our clients.

Take a look at the Speedy Hire and VoucherSeeker case studies.

Client Testimonials

Both case studies feature client testimonials, some of which are below:

VoucherSeeker

Within 30 minutes of our 3 hours session we were sure it’d paid for itself.

Neil Ainsworth, Director

The training course on analytics provided by PRWD was excellent. It gave our team a good insight of analytics and the useful tools available. We’re more equipped with tools to analyse visitor behaviour than we were before

Duke Tanson, Director

PRWD helped me to realise the power behind Google Analytics whilst, at the same time, enabling us to understand and simplify the way we use it. Up until the course, we had all had a go at using certain parts but, mostly, without success. With the help of PWRD we will now be able to better assess and improve our sites and, in turn, their conversion rates.

Mark Dunne, Senior Affiliate Marketing Executive

Speedy Hire

I have been consistently impressed with Paul’s very practical approach to helping us improve our online offering. In the Google Analytics training session, Paul kept the training to the key areas which he felt we should focus on initially, according to our level of understanding and having taken the time to understand the needs of our business.

Shelley Kemp, Head of Marketing

Well delivered, thought provoking, providing us with useful tools.
As we develop our campaigns, web content, digital marketing programmes etc it will be good to use what has been learnt to ensure we are going out at the right times, to the right people, using the correct words and then being able to report back to the business.

Leanne Ferry, Marketing Communications Manager

If you are then you may like to head over to Econsultancy to take a read of forum post by CEO Ashley Friedlein.

The post (and subsequent comments) is titled Conversion Optimisation and Site Performance Consultants – please step forward!.

The reason I posted about this is if you read through the comments you will see an interesting mix of responses, and by the end of the responses you will certainly have a better understanding of which suppliers and consultants are out there and how their services are either a dedicated specialism or part of a wider portfolio of digital services.

Naturally I provided PRWD’s response to Ashley’s request, and below is an excert from the response:

Alongside ourselves featuring in the Econsultancy 2009 User Experience Buyers Guide, I’m so far surprised not to see more of the other 25 usability specialists that are profiled putting themselves forward. In this buyers guide I was also pleasantly surprised that almost all of my industry insights that I provided as part of our profile submission are featured.

Echoing comments you made in your post and what others have shared in their responses, my insights are very much centered around the definite shift in client focus, investment and expectations.

The shift in investment is from:

• new technology
• more features
• more functionality
• more acquisition spend

to:

• genuine customer centricity (not just the company statement)
• conversion optimisation
• advanced web analytics (segmentation, purchase/process funnels and simply using analytics to make real commercial decisions)
• testing

Analytics and Conversion Optimisation – Career Advice Too!

Towards the end of the comments you will see a request for career advice from Peter over in Australia.

Peter asked:

Hi everyone,
What advice do you have for a young professional looking to get into this field?

I’m fresh out of university and have started my career as a junior web analyst at one of Australia’s largest online publishers. I have a background in SEO/PPC, but conversion rate/landing page optimisation is something I’ve always been interested in and would like to specialise in the future.

Thank you Ashley for starting this thread and thank you to all that have posted.

I was pleased to be able to provide Peter with some advice from my 1st hand experiences in the fields of analytics, usability and conversion optimisation.

To save you a click my advice to Peter was as follows:

Hi Peter,

My advice would be to learn as much as you can hands-on in a commercial environment, and your current role certainly appears to tick this box. This is the approach I took and you can’t put a value on building expertise in this way.

You should aim to become the analytics/conversion optimisation evangelist within your organisation, continually providing key insights and presenting the business case for investing in on-going conversion improvement.

If you haven’t already I also strongly recommend you ‘get in to bed’ with testing, both A/B and multivariate. Having an understanding and appreciation of what to test and what tools are available will become invaluable for you, especially with you already having a good understanding of analytics.

Good luck with your career development in conversion improvement and optimisation, and message me if you would like some more advice.

Over at PRWD we have published details of our Advanced Google Analytics Training Course, and below I have provided details of what the course is about and who the course is aimed at:

Why Google Analytics Training?

Google Analytics is a free tool which is generally very simple to be installed on a website. There is an ever increasing number of websites using Google Analytics as their analytics tool of choice, but that isn’t to say businesses understand how to set-up Google Analytics correctly and how to get the most commercial value out of the statistics and reports available.

Google Analytics provides both basic and enterprise class features and functionality, but understanding what is available and what applies to individual businesses and users does not come easy.

This course, delivered in-house to ensure key stakeholders from the same company can benefit simultaneously, aims to help you and your business colleagues begin using Google Analytics effectively.

Objective

The course aims to provide you with the knowledge of how best to use Google Analytics on an on-going basis to gain the most valuable visitor insights and commercial value

What you will learn

• Personalisation – how to personalise your experience to enable you to access the most important areas for you in your specific role
• Goals and Funnels – how you should use these essential features to enable you to to track vital visitor behaviour and potential site issues
• Segmentation – how you can use segmentation to monitor specific visitor behaviour from highly targeted segments of your visitors
• Reporting – how you can create and manage reports most relevant to you and your business to help make genuine commercial decisions
• Marketing Activity Accountability – how you can best use Google Analytics to track all your marketing campaigns for full accountability
• Tips and Best Practice – essential tips and best practice on how to use your new found knowledge and expertise on an on-going basis

PLUS – Google Website Optimiser

An introduction to this essential tool and how you can use it to make continual improvements to your on-site conversion rates

Who is the training suitable for

• Offline Marketing Managers
• Online Marketing Managers
• Marketing Directors
• E-commerce Managers
• IT Managers
• Project Managers
• Marketing Assistants
• Business Analysts

Duration, delivery, location and cost

• Duration: 3 hours
• Delivery: training provided in-house for 1-10 employees
• Location: UK wide, and in particular Manchester and London
• Cost: £400 + vat (excludes reasonable expenses)

How to book

Easy, simply call us on 0161 918 6729

PRWD training clients

We have been privileged to train people working at the likes of Speedy Hire, The Scout Association, Mencap, Abbey, Yell and Pod1.

Further reading

• Case Study: In-house training for The Scout Association
• Econsultancy training course by Paul Rouke: E-commerce Usability and Best Practice