Web Site Traffic Verse

Maximizing ROI via Web Site Traffic Analysis

We are clearly well past the innocent “golden age” of the Internet – Darwinian economics have become the order of the day today. Any company worth their salt must maintain a web site as an information resource and/or to generate incremental ecommerce revenue. Qualified traffic is the name of the game, as it’s the oxygen that keeps a good ecommerce web site thriving. Consequently, it’s very important to have an understanding of your web site traffic or visitor activity; i.e. baseline information that includes the number of visitors during specific time periods, originating location (domain), where the visitors went on a site and how long they stayed on specific sections or pages of a web site. The de facto industry standard traffic analysis tool application is Web Trends, manufactured/supported by netiQ, Inc., which we will focus on in this article.

Fundamentals and Jargon Watch

All traffic analysis tools rely primarily upon information that is extracted from log files; i.e. files that are maintained on your server which show where a visitor came from, what keyword(s) they used to find your site (if applicable), what Operating System and Browser versions they are using, etc. There are literally hundreds of excellent log file analysis tools that can be located via CNet’s Download.com or TuCows – both sites are excellent resources for software and information.

It’s critical in today’s bottom line business environment to have the ability to analyze web traffic (visitors) and patterns and then integrate this knowledge with your overall business processes – what do you pay for traffic, is it converting (people are buying your goods and services), how long are people staying on specific sections or pages of your web site, what marketing expenditures are working and which aren’t!

You know your entering the reality distortion field (we marketing types need to justify our fees & services) and need to raise your jargon filters to stun level when you here and/or see these keywords; i.e. clickstream traffic (fancy way of saying traffic or visitors delivered via mouse clicks to your web site), ebusiness solutions (meaning - selling your products/services via an ecommerce site) or my all-time personal favorite, “ebusiness intelligence” (what’s ebusiness and what determines if it’s “intelligent”).

Traffic Counter Applications

First and foremost, do you really need a comprehensive product like Web Trends (more on the different applications later) or can you get by with a click (traffic) counter application like the Hit Box? The latter company provides a free plain vanilla traffic counter which can be easily set up in minutes via your web site. Hit Box is a great product and used by hundreds of thousands of web sites, so it may be sufficient for your business, if you just want very basic info (“Page Views and Daily Unique Visitors) and don’t mind advertising for another company via your web site.

But, there are some downsides to utilizing Hit Box, you must install their “button” on your Index (home) page and it only provides you with basic traffic information (how much per day with a forecast based on these numbers). You can upgrade to their HitBox Professional which is very similar to Web Trends basic application (“Web Trends Log Analyzer”) – but, you have to pay for this service on a traffic basis which can get expensive, depending on your overall traffic.

Web Trends Applications and Interface

Web Trends (the company) was acquired by netiQ, Inc. the parent company about 18 months ago due to their strong market leadership position with web traffic analysis software. Like many good web-focused software companies, netiQ enables you to download all of their apps for a 30 day trial period. Estimates range from 60-80% market share for one of their three primary products; i.e. “Web Trends Log Analyzer,” their baseline $500. USD application which is a good solution for most web sites that have a single domain or under 25 in total; “Web Trends Analysis Suite” (SRP $2.5K USD), which incorporates the functionality of the Log Analyzer product and adds more features for managing bandwidth usage (interior and external), monitoring and alerting an IT Manager or Department for server related problems and handles up to 100 domains (sites); the “Web Trends Intelligence Suite” is their top of the line product (pricing varies depending on bundled services) geared for enterprise customers, it includes integration and training services for integrating the application with Online Analytics Processing Tools (“OLAP” yes another ebiz acronym) or other types of reporting tools.

We’ve been using and recommending Web Trends to clients for years primarily because of its interface and functionality. It’s a browser-enabled app, meaning anyone with a browser (IE or Netscape) can view reports and data. The reports are presented in a straightforward manner that includes basic pie chart or bar types of graphics – you can easily tell at a glance what your visitor traffic was for a given period, where they came from, what pages they visited and how long they stayed on specific pages. You don’t need to be a technologist or a marketing geek to use this application – see below for practical tips.

Practical Usage

So what do you want to measure and what type of custom reports do you want to run once you get the software installed? You will want to measure how much traffic (visitors) is coming to your web site per day, week, month, where they are coming from (country of origin), and where visitors going on your web site; i.e. home page, internal pages and of these what specific pages; i.e. About Us Products, Services your Shopping Cart, etc. Pay careful attention to usage times, how long people are staying on specific pages; too long may indicate they can’t figure out your content, or your content is so good its meaningful and educational. For example, if your “White Paper Resource” section is the most frequently visited and the visitor sessions (time elements) are long (2-4 minutes) then this means your content is being well received. But, if everyone is just reading your White Papers but not filling out your response forms then you may need to alter some aspects of your business processes and how you communicate them via your web site.

Web Trends compliments ongoing advertising campaigns and processes - it lets you capture critical ROI (“Return on Investment”) information by giving you an accurate picture of traffic and usage patterns that should correlate with what your ad agency or marketing partner is telling you or confirming with their own reports. For example: If your deploying an opt-in e-mail campaign and bringing people to a specific “landing page” (specific page where people are directed to that may include an “offer”) you need to carefully monitor if people are clicking through to the page and how long they are staying and/or going to your shopping cart to purchase a product or a registration fulfillment page. If the session times (how long they stay on a page) are short and people aren’t filling out a form or converting (purchasing or taking a specific action) then you clearly have some work to do on your web site content and or business processes.

Author, Lee Traupel, has 20 plus years of business development and marketing experience - he is the founder of Intelective Communications, Inc., http://www.intelective.com, a results-driven marketing services company providing proprietary services to clients encompassing startups to public companies.

Return On Investment Serenade

Measuring The Return On Investment Of The HR Function

Traditionally measuring a Return on Investment followed a fairly standard calculation method - look at the profit generated and divide that by the value of the assets being utilized in creating that profit.

Pretty simple until you start applying the calculation to non-profit generating divisions such a HR. Using traditional ROI we would logically conclude that the HR function needed to be cut but we know that HR provides value to the business. So if we know that value is being created by the HR function how do we get to that value and how do we then manage HR activities to maximize that value for the benefit of the business as a whole?

First of all we can start by looking at what the HR department is actually doing. For instance, how many training days are being delivered by the department or how many experienced staff are we keeping within the company? How much are training programs costing the company or what is the cost to the business of retaining experienced staff within it?

Some of these values can be found with a fair degree of certainty; we will be able to relatively easily find the cost of delivering training for instance. Some costs may not be so amenable to identification, for example, what expenses are being incurred in making experienced staff decide to stay with the company rather than leaving for pastures new?

Once we have identified these metrics we can then start looking at how we can ascribe value (as opposed to cost) to these activities. Taking the training costs and the amount of training that is being delivered, it would be useful if we could then identify the value that is being created by this HR activity by increasing sales revenue or decreasing costs by more efficient customer services and order fulfillment. Comparing the sales performance of a sales person A with x number of training days to that of a colleague B with y training days will give an indication of the value of x-y training days to the differential in sales performance of A-B. Performing iterations on this formula will provide a value for a training day in terms of sales value. We now have a KPI that can be used to monitor performance of the HR training activity.

Fine, so how do we get to an ROI?

Actually from here it becomes a more simple matter assuming that we relax our traditional ROI calculation a little.

In this example, calculating the ROI of training would look something like this:

ROI = ((Sales Value per training day x training days delivered) x 100%) / Cost of Training Delivered

How about staff retention, how would we look to calculate an ROI connected to this?

HR will be the first to advise you that there are many factors that determine whether a staff member will leave or stay and for many, financial incentives are only a part of the equation. In terms of managing cost in HR however, you are fairly readily able to calculate an approximate ROI for incurring costs that are designed to contribute to staff recruitment and retention.

An example would be placing an ROI on the value of a staff medical plan. You will know fairly exactly what the cost of the plan will be but ascribing a value to that plan will not be so easy. You can start by asking employees who have the requisite experience with the company for their thoughts on how high they rank the importance of a company medical plan. It's subjective but it will give an indicator as to how many of your staff think this is important for them. Look at this employee cost to profit metric

(Senior Employee Payroll Expense x Profit) / Total employee payroll

Now you have a value in profit terms that is determined by the value you place on your senior staff by virtue of what you are paying them. Applying the results of your survey on the medical benefit scheme wil give you a further idea as to how much of the value you have identified is being positively influenced by the proposed scheme.

Now consider the cost of replacing senior staff in terms of recruiting costs and you have a direct correlation between the effect in terms of the influenced value of your benefit scheme and the cost saving represented by not incurring recruiting costs. The difference between the two will be the value that the expense of the medical benefit scheme is going to deliver and from there you have a simple ROI calculation based on ascribed value and the scheme cost

Written by Sam Miller. If you are interested in learning more about measuring HR ROI, check Sam Miller new web-site: http://www.strategy2act.com/solutions/hr_metrics_excel.htm.

Music Investment Opus

How to Increase Your Return on Investment by Organizing Your Music

How many times have you said to yourself?
- This music keeps falling off the piano.
- Where is that song? I can never find the page.
- When am I going to do something about this music?
- I'm tired of stopping in the middle of the piece just to turn the page.
- I can't believe it, the recital was only three weeks ago, and I forgot how much I liked that piece.

Think about how frustrated you have been by trying to deal with the majority of your musical material constantly in such a mess!

Think of how many times you couldn't face going to the piano simply because the thought of pulling your music together was far too overwhelming.

Wouldn't you like to maximize the return on the investment that you have made and continue to make in your musical development?

As they say in the business world:

What's your ROI (Return On Investment)?

After countless hours of practice, many years of piano lessons, hundreds of dollars spent on instruction and sheet music, you're stuck, frustrated and immobilized.

Why not take advantage of your freer summer season schedule to stay connected to your musical favorites?

Here's how: just follow this simple step-by-step method:
1. Pull all of your music books together into one place
2. Look through one book at a time to remind yourself which pieces you enjoy playing and mark each piece with a post-it note or paper clip
3. Make photocopies of each selection
4. Sort all of the music into stacks of categories.
5. Here are some suggested types of groups:
a) Classical and popular styles
b) Fast and slow tempos
c) By composer, group or singer
d) Key signature
5. Pick an organizing system
a) Looseleaf books with non-glare page protectors
b) Pocket folders (put labels on the front)
c) File folders: staple each piece onto a folder and put these into a portable filing system
6. Experiment: once the music is organized in one of these three ways, you can change the order or arrangement of music for a few practice sessions until it feels satisfying.

One Final Note

Organizing your music is a surefire method for increasing your return on investment.

Yes, it will take some effort, but it will really pay off.

You will have created a dependable tool which is guaranteed to energize your musical growth and development.

You will gain a whole new perspective on practicing the piano, and you'll feel great about yourself!

It's Not Too Late!

Ed Mascari has been teaching piano privately to children and adults for nearly three decades. He is a seasoned performer (pianist/ jazz organist) of show tunes, jazz and popular music as well as a published classical composer and church musician. Ed combines his extensive experience to guide students in a variety of styles as he helps them achieve their unique potential.

Ed teaches group classes for piano students in the tele-class format. All of the programs at http://www.mykeyboardsuccess.com focus on specific topics that are designed to give participants the tools and techniques that will help them to play piano better and better.

To receive special subscriber bonuses: free sheet music and audio files for "Six Simple Songs to Make You Smile", the helpful article "The Key Is to Get to the Keys: How to Set Up and Maintain a Successful Practice Routine", a free lesson "How to Arrange a Song in 12 Easy Steps" and a subscription to our ezine "Conversations at the Piano", sign up today at http://www.edmascaripianostudio.com.


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