tomhubbardgreen.co.uk Ads, social media, games, design & technology

EU privacy/cookie law and analytics tracking – what do you need to do?

Image: scubadive67 (Flickr)

Some new advice from the ICO on the EU privacy law landed yesterday so after some discussion on Twitter and Google Help, I thought I would collect the current advice on getting your site ready for the new laws that come into affect on 26 May 2011.

For analytics tracking using cookies (Google Analytics, for example) there is key advice outlined on page 8 of the document. The most important bits are:

• "An analytic cookie might not appear to be as intrusive as others that might track a user across multiple sites but you still need consent"
• "You should consider how you currently explain your policies to users and make that information more prominent"
• "If the information collected about website use is passed to a third party you should make this absolutely clear"

Asking for consent before you start tracking people is absolutely fraught with difficulty at the moment and, as far as I'm aware, not possible with Google Analytics without a user controlling their opting in/out with browser settings.

However, over at the RK Talks blog, it seems that the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) has indicated that they won’t be expecting compliance from companies for at least a year after the regulations are adopted.  In this time hopefully we'll see more clarification and, most likely, an official Google tool to help users to opt in and out of tracking although what that will mean for the interpretation of your website data is a whole other, bigger issue.

One to keep an eye on for now then but the current advice seems to be to make sure your privacy policy is up to date and visible.

The keyword holy grail: your users

What are the most important keywords for your site? Take a look in your analytics and you’ll find a very comprehensive list of keywords that people used to find your content. So these are your important keywords right? Wrong.

Those keywords aren’t the terms you can use to shape your content because it’s your content that has given birth to those keywords. Let’s say you’re selling a product called Blue Widgets. The top keyword referrer to your site is ‘blue widgets’. Success! Right guys? Right ... ?

This ranking success is only a success for people who are searching for ‘blue widgets’. What if only 20% of your customer base thinks your product is called Blue Widget? What if the other 80% are calling your product Blue Sprocket? The problem is that you don’t know what they call it because your keyword list only contains terms that are already driving people to your site. You need to know what the other 80% are searching for.

And that’s where your users come in and more specifically, your community. Take a look at your social media presences and online forums. What keywords are people using there? What are they calling your product? Collect this information and analyse it. What phrases appear most often? Are there any recurring long tail phrases you could use?

Use these newly found keywords to build content and PPC campaigns which will catch searches related to your old keywords. Sure you might not want to rename your main product but you can certainly incorporate new, recurring keywords into subheadings and into copy.

This technique, of course, works just as well for information provision as it does for sales. Organisations can benefit from taking a break from internally approved language and checking out what everyone else in the world is calling their products and services (a disparity that is apparent all too often) and optimizing their website for these ‘unofficial’ terms.

Don’t have a website that just sells Blue Widgets and don’t have a website that just sells Blue Sprockets. You want to have a website that sells ‘Blue Widgets and Sprockets - the best coloured cogs on the web’.

Bonus tip for vBulletin communities: an easy way to export your thread tags (a valuable goldmine of keywords) is to log in as admin into the control panel, click on ‘Threads & Posts’ and click ‘Tags’. You can copy these, page by page, into a Notepad doc (to strip them of formatting) and then paste them into one big handy spreadsheet. I do month on month comparisons so I can spot new and emerging keywords that can be integrated into site content.

User engagement insights: a case study

This article was published in the August 2009 issue of Figaro Digital magazine.

Although tools such as heat maps and eye tracking provide in-depth analysis of our users' behaviour there is also a wealth of simple user engagement experiments that can be carried out to better understand your users and achieve actionable insights that you can apply to your site.

The first step to generating user engagement insights involves devising robust experiments that will give you worthwhile data to interpret. If you know your site you should have no problem coming up with changes to make based on your hunches about what you think would make your website better but there are other, equally good sources of experiments too. I was looking into increasing sign ups on our events pages so one place I turned to for inspiration were direct competitors: more images, testimonials, a more emphatic call to action - I noted these techniques down along with my own ideas and drew up a plan of action.

Measuring your experiments is relatively straightforward as long as you avoid the pitfalls of choosing the wrong metrics; you only want to deal in metrics that cannot be too easily affected by external factors. I settled on examining four main metrics to assess the success of my experiments: average time on page, bounce rate, exit rate and, most importantly, conversion rate.

Our events pages generally only featured one image related to the event so the first experiment I did was to add another picture to our Great Wall of China trek page. After gathering 3 weeks worth of data I compared my user engagement metrics to the previous incarnation of the page for the same time period. I expected the effect of my change to be positive but minimal so I was surprised at the results the test yielded: average time on page was up 28%, bounce rate was down 25%, exit rate was down 14% and, crucially, conversion rate was up by 56%. In order to make sure that my results weren't an anomaly I added an additional picture to a different event page and received the same gains: bounce rate and exit rate went down whereas average time on page and conversion rate increased. These experiments led me to the insight that multiple images seem to have a positive effect on user engagement and that our events pages should be changed to incorporate this learning.

Taking a look at some competitors' sites convinced me to experiment with a testimonial on one of our events pages so I gathered some feedback from previous event participants and set up the new page. I expected the testimonial to show results similar to my previous experiment but what the results actually showed was a little more complicated. In the first iteration of the experiment the average time on page went up by 37% but the bounce rate went up by 60% and the exit rate by 50%. This all looked very counter-intuitive until I noticed that the conversion rate had increased by nearly 20%. It occurred to me that what I had created was a page that made the event look like a more serious prospect and was therefore driving away the casual enquirer but more effectively converting those users that were strongly considering taking part in the event.

It is, of course, imperative to recognize the limitations of these kinds of experiments. Just because a testimonial or an extra image increased the conversion rate on a certain page it doesn't necessarily hold true that the technique will work for all similar pages. Likewise it may be the nature of the individual image or the compelling copy of the testimonial that made those particular elements so effective in increasing the conversion rate; a different image or testimonial would have certainly provided different, and possibly negative, results.

Provided that you bear this in mind and design your experiments carefully with enough time to gather accurate results you will see how small refinements to your site can result in big rewards.