A best-practice model for content governance

Taking a best practice example from ourside the industry.

A great internal communications video from AutoDesk on how to govern content and keep it fresh and relevent through streamlined engagement with subject matter experts.

 

Advanced segmentation in Google Analytics

I frequently read or hear about the desire to filter out internal visitors from analytics reports, however, this is a very important group to measure if you are trying to build profile or engagement from the people within your organisation. This article gives you the steps on how to do it.

Covered in this article is:

• Setting up an advanced segment
• Specifying the dimensions
• Applying the segment to your report

• Reports which you can’t view with this segment

Setting up an advanced segment

Log into your Google Analytics Account. Once in, enter your dashboard and from the left hand panel, click the @ Advanced Segments link under the My Customisations box.

Choose the +Create new customised segment link at the top right.

Specifying the dimension
Now, we need to drag and drop the dimensions from the left hand box.
The important tag we want is the Service Provider dimension.

You will need to identify your organisation in this list. For smaller organisations this might be more difficult if you have a shared broadband connection, or doesn’t have a static ip address.

Find the Service Provider dimension (Under >Systems) and drag it to the dotted ‘dimension or metric’ box.

Now, you need to set the value. If your organisation has more than one entry (for example, I see 3 entries, Lloyds TSB, Lloyds TSB Plc and also Halifax Bank of Scotland), use the ‘Add “or” statement’, and drag another Service Provider dimension across.

Once you have set the value, you just need to name your segment. For me, I call mine ‘Lloyds Banking Group Visitors’.

Choose Save Segment.

Applying the segment
In the top right of your dashboard, click the ‘All visits’ and from the drop down screen, you will see your custom segments.
To view traffic from only your custom segment, un-tick the ‘All visits’ checkbox, and choose your new segment and press apply.

Your report will regenerate, and now your reports will show visitor behaviour from this segment only.

Reports you cannot view with this advanced segment
Currently, the following reports cannot be viewed when an advanced segment is applied

• Absolute unique visitors
• Keyword positions
• Goal and funnel reports

Google provides more detail in their Analytics help section.

Why measure internal engagement?
There are a number of great reasons to review and report on internal usage of your website.

• Quantitative measure of internal communications activities
• How employees accessing the site (i.e. via intranet and which pages, search, other websites?)
• What messages or content resonates with employees, and how does this compare to customers?
• How are they viewing content? What browser is it in, what device? This can help inform development to ensure your internal stakeholders see what you see.

Internal measures are an important metric to ensure you have internal support to keep momentum in your website strategy.

Introducing Lloyds Bank Corporate Markets

Our baby is almost two months old now, hence the long period of no posting.

http://www.lloydsbankcorporatemarkets.com/

Have a look at the walkthrough video to see the features and capability which have come together to produce a market leading site.

Commonwealth Bank - Augmented Reality for Real Estate Searching

As per my post a while ago regarding the Commonwealth Bank of Australia's 2013 vision, they have released an update this week regarding their first iphone application which builds on the much buzzed 'augmented reality' technology being developed on many smartphones now.

Users spend only 20% of their attention looking below the fold

From Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, March 22, 2010

Web users spend 80% of their time looking at information above the page fold. Although users do scroll, they allocate only 20% of their attention below the fold.

In Jakob's latest alertbox column, his research revives the age old debate about whether users scroll below the fold.

His findings show they do scroll, but their attention levels rapidly decrease, reinforcing the F-shaped scanning model which i have discussed previously in how users read online.

Image sourced from www.useit.com

Online web forms to generate leads? good or bad?

I rarely complete web forms to download a whitepaper or similar, as I know from past experience I will get telephone calls and emails harassing me to buy a product or solution.

For corporate and investment banks, most of our websites are very much glorified brochure ware sites, that look to provide information with a generic call to action generally around an offline telephone call, or option to email a business development representative.
With that in mind, how can we use the valuable content we provide online to provide avenues to establish new business relationships, without annoying visitors to which they don’t return.

Economic research and whitepapers
From my own research, it is clear that economic research is a key segment of content that banks provide at this level to prospects.

However, a significant number of corporate banks have begun to place this content behind ‘subscription’ brick walls, requiring you to tell them your life story and the names of your 3 children to even see what kind of information is available. Then no doubt you will have one of their business development team ringing you even before you have downloaded and printed off your first report!

So what’s more important? Capturing a cold lead before they have even made up their mind about you... or giving them the option to fill out their details, if they choose to let them fill it in when they feel more comfortable about your organisation?

It’s all about getting your report to the audience, and placing targeted call to actions discreetly, on the visitor’s agenda and when they are ready to talk.

The first instance sets an unequalled value balance relationship, forcing the visitor to give up quite private information (which online we always are more protective of) without giving much in return. Is this how things are going to be? I wouldn’t stick around for this if I was the customer.

Getting our position out globally
It’s also important to consider, that this kind of information although may be written for ‘customers’ and prospects, there are many other user types exist which we want to get these key facts out to.
Journalists are the most significant audience group that spring to mind, and the business TV programmes are always featuring economists and analysts from the major banks as well as private equity and hedge funds.

When these people appear on mainstream media, traffic for that hour sees a significant uplift from the ‘curious’ visitor, with on average 90% of these being new visitors.
What is an interesting statistic to watch is how many of these turn into return visitors and ultimately enter the sales channel (you need some significant resource available to get this kind of analysis!)

So what is the best approach?
So you can see from this, I personally believe dropping all your insights and whitepapers behind a sign up form can have a detrimental effect in relation to building the initial trust with your visitors online.

In theory, the content you are looking to protect should be so valuable to the reader that after reading it, the call to action or its contents should itself inspire and motivate them to get in touch with you.

Weekly Tips: writing great links

Over the next month I am writing a series of tips to help improve your website content. The first, is writing great links.
Tip 1: Don’t click here
Users scan pages; don’t make them read the surrounding text to understand what the ‘click here’ will do.
So often I hear others working in marketing (even with the ‘online’ in their title) using the ‘click here’ phrase when talking about a call to action in a web page or email campaign.
We know how users read on the web, they scan.
Look at the below piece of text:

With Corporate Banking Centres across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, you will find that our local Relationship Directors can work with you closely bringing ideas and enthusiasm to meet your aspirations for business growth. Click here to read more. Their considerable expertise and experience shines through in the value and commitment they can offer to your business. Click here to read more.

If you scan it briefly, you will quickly see that to understand what the 'click here' does, you have to read the preceeding sentence. Even worse, you aren't even sure what will come up if you click.

As good practice, if your linking text matches the title or heading 1 of the page your linking to, and build this into the sentence, it will really help visitors understand more quickly, and you will see greater click-through rates.
Our example reworked could be:

With Corporate Banking Centres across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, you will find that our local Relationship Directors can work with you closely bringing ideas and enthusiasm to meet your aspirations for business growth. Their considerable expertise and experience shines through in the value and commitment they can offer to your business.

The naughty usage of 'click here', is the most established, but there are some other baddies to watch out for.
- Read more, more and more information
- Download report, download now
- > and >>

Often when taking copy from print to online, its best to look at reworking it to best optimise the opportunity to get visitors clicking through.