Monthly Archives November 2018

If you’re considering updating or redesigning your website, there are five key steps that you should consider undertaking.

1. Heuristic Analysis: Evaluation of the user interface and assessment of overall site usability. The focus of this exercise is to outline what aspects of the site can be improved to enhance overall usability and business value.  You’ll want to examine the interface and judge its compliance with recognized usability principles (the “heuristics”).  Areas of attention may include:

• Navigation
• Page Layout
• Visual Design
• Mobile Experience
• Calls to Action/Interactivity
• Forms

2. Content Audit: Next, you’ll want to look at your site’s content in order to identify content gaps and areas of emphasis from a content-perspective that can inform site enhancements.  Questions should include:

• Does this support goals and/or have strategic value?
• Is it factually accurate?
• Do we like it?
• Is it redundant or trivial?
• Shareable?

3. Competitive Review: See how your site stacks up to the competition by comparing the site’s content and User Experience to up to four or five competitors identified by various stakeholders in your organization.  You can look at many of the same elements outlined above.

4. SEO Audit: Does your website conforms to best practices for high search engine visibility?  Work independently or hire an agency or consultant to

• Ensure all on-page elements (meta data, etc.) that can affect SEO are in place
• Identify any crawl errors
• Identify opportunities to promote optimal site crawl

You can verify your review against Flightpath’s SEO checklist which can be found here: https://www.flightpath.com/resources/seo-audit-checklist/

5. Analytics Validation: Most site use Google Analytics or a similar platform to track website activity.  Work independently or hire an agency or consultant to identify what should be tracked at the website and validate whether or not it’s being done effectively.

Depending upon where you net out on these five important site aspects, it may or may not be time to initiate a website overhaul. Good luck!!

At Flightpath, an ever-growing percentage of our work involves deployment of business-building paid media campaigns.  While all campaigns are different, we’re typically using some combination of display, programmatic, paid social media advertising and paid search (SEM).   The one constant is the creation of a smart measurement plan that helps us understand the effectiveness of our campaign.

When we set about to create a measurement plan, we start by identifying our campaign audience – who are we trying to reach and why?  Then, we map out the following:

Objectives

• Identify the business objectives
• Why does your campaign (or website) exist?
• Think of acquisition, behavior and outcomes

Goals

• Identify goals for each objective
• Requires critical thinking from management, marketers and analysts
• Specific strategies we’ll leverage to accomplish the business objectives
• Conversion goals are always of utmost importance and can range from an ecommerce transaction to a video view

KPIs

• Identify the KPIs
• Those metrics that help us understand how we’re doing against our objectives

Measurable Metrics

• The specific metrics that will be monitored through the tools we utilize.

Targets

• Targets are numerical values you’ve pre-determined as indicators of success or failure.
• An absolutely critical step.

Segments

• Identify valuable segments for analysis.
• A group of people, their sources, onsite behavior, and outcomes.

Once all of these items have been identified and all the pieces are put in place, we kick things off. Every campaign requires a test and learn phase before we can ramp up spend and maximize conversions.  It’s important that expectations are clearly shared between client and agency.

Reporting is typically delivered on a monthly basis along with quarterly and annual reviews, though in many cases, such as acquisition campaigns, weekly reports are necessary – but the measurement plan remains our north star throughout.