Analysing Corporate Sites
Benchmarking corporate sites can require a different style of analysis.
For commerce sites, profitable online business outcomes are typically fairly clear-cut in terms of sales or leads generated. The benchmarking of performance can therefore quite happily rotate around these key performance indicators, and alignment of site and business goals is relatively straightforward.
Corporate sites are powerful communications tools, but on the face of it cater to a less mainstream audience and the interactions are more subtle and content driven. However, an analytical approach can still clearly align site performance with the business, help focus marketing and communications strategy and highlight the best opportunities for development.
Multiple Stakeholders
Corporate sites address distinct audiences (employees, shareholders, press/media, job seekers) and have different messages to communicate to these different stakeholders. Web analytics traditionally segments traffic at a page level (e.g. “most popular pages”) set against an overall unique user total, which masks who is visiting the site and why.
An alternative approach is to profile visitors by the high-level sections they look at during their visit, and break down unique users (not page impressions) by their implied interest. This can transform reporting from “we had 5000 unique users to the site this month and the top 3 pages were the homepage, management team and environment pages” to “this month the site attracted 1000 job seekers, 500 shareholders, 2000 press and 1500 internal users”.
Lynchpin help companies benchmark their corporate site on a regular basis in terms of their identified stakeholders, and present results in this form for month-on-month comparison.
Content Engagement
“Content is King” for a lot of corporate sites, but equally content requires investment in time and resources to publish, and understanding how stakeholders engage with it is vital to focus these efforts.
Fortunately, segmenting users of the site by their high level stakeholder profiles allows us to choose suitable outcomes that signify engagement with relevant content and thus benchmark this effectively. For example, posting on a graduate blog is a strong indicator of engagement for internal users just in the same way as downloading an interim report for a shareholder.
Lynchpin turn soft content measures into active measures of audience engagement, and present these in a format that shows the real value driven by a corporate site for its stakeholders.
The Bigger Picture
Corporate sites clearly do not operate in a vacuum. Shareholder interactions are driven by the events of the financial year, media and press by other communications channels, and career interest by other communications undertaken both offline and online.
Lynchpin look to incorporate these influences in reporting and analysis to show the cause and effect of these activities, and demonstrate the effectiveness in different styles of communications for driving online engagement.
