The Need for MORE Speed

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Last week we reported our triumph over the AWS server gods and expressed elation as to our 1.5 second load time gain over our switch from Go Daddy. In Go Daddy’s defense we started with a really bottom barrel shared hosting package, so even my grandpa’s hosting service would have been better (NOTE: Grandpa does not have a hosting service). Unfortunately the AWS server gods fought back hard and defeated us lowly marketers as we were unable to setup some pretty basic stuff because EVERYTHING falls on you when you are in AWS.

So the Bluefin Strategy team set out on a new search for a top-notch hosting partner. There, buried deep in the woods off CA-57 we found DreamHost! While we did some comparison shopping to the others that will certainly pop up when doing a search for “WordPress Hosting” we settled in on DreamHost mostly because they weren’t selling fancy bells and whistles, just solid service. Secondly, their homepage ranked higher when we did a Pingdom Speed test. Kind of like testing the SEO-ness of an SEO agency.

After a little user error, their helpful staff got us (me) back on track and the entire site was moved over in less than an hour. Although there was a slight learning curve of their admin panel, everything is pretty easy to find and their live chat staff was prompt and helpful. Oh, and remember that whole 1.5 second gain from Go Daddy to AWS? Well, we gained another 1.5 second from AWS to DreamHost. #NBD

The Need for Speed

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This week we’ve been slowly migrating our website over to Amazon Web Services to keep up with our growth. As a lowly marketer with near zero server knowledge I can assure you this was a laborious and frustrating endeavor. Additionally we are also converting our site to SSL, because – well you know – Google. During this change I figured I’d point out a few quick things that we discovered that may help other in the future. Enjoy.

Setting up WordPress on AWS

Amazon succeeded in confusing the, umm, ‘stuff’ out of us. Documentation is really complicated for those of us who think in the philosophical tenses. An amazing young gentleman by the name of Jesse over at WeDoInternet was instrumental in gettin us going. Suffice it to say there are basically two generally easy ways to get WordPress up A) EC2 and B) LightSail. We opted for the slightly more difficult option A, but it provides a bit more customization and flexibility. Where we got stuck, and Jesse helped to unstick us, was upon “Launching” a new EC2 instance you should select “AWS Marketplace” in the left rail and search for “WordPress Bitnami”. Using this is super easy and gets a WordPress instance setup in near minutes. We used the All-in-one WP Migration plugin to port our site over and then, BAM… site moved!

Easy SSL Setup

The last big hurdle we had was getting everything ported over to SSL. We used a combination of Really Simple SSL and Better Search and Replace to get the job done. Really Simple SSL made it easy for us to spot where issues might be and also made it easy to implement the HTTPS redirect. Many of those issues resulted from hardcoded HTTP links and files. And while Really Simple SSL pointed out all of those issues there were a lot of them. Better Search and Replace made it ridiculously simple to run through them all and fix the issues in seconds!

Hope that information is helpful and enjoy reading this post even faster. Why? Well simply switching over to AWS generated about a 1.5 second decrease in page load time… no big deal.

The Chicken vs. Egg Strategy Approach

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Not too long ago we were redesigning a website for a large hospital chain client. During the research phase of the project we reviewed the analytics to find that the ‘Locations’ page was nowhere to be found. We further dug into the numbers and saw that site searches for ‘locations’, ‘hours’, and ‘directions’ were quite high. In the qualitative research phase we talked with customer support specialists and determined that ‘locations’ type questions get asked a lot. Needless to say, when we created the user experience there was a ‘Locations’ link front and center!

Chicken Theory

“That’s just the way it’s always been done!”
This is often a tough one to overcome, especially in a large organization. Web analytics can help sway opinions, but you may have to do some digging. We would not have convinced the CEOs about putting such prominence of the ‘Locations’ link had we not dug deeper into the data. UX can, and should, drive user behavior. But bad UX can drive an undesired behavior and could lead you to make incorrect design decisions. Dig into your data and don’t just settle on the quantitative side. If something doesn’t make sense go deeper and collect more data sets. A developer once told me that he approaches things like a 5-year-old… just keep asking “Why?” until you reach a point where an answer emerges.

Egg Theory

“Hey, let’s bolt this feature on!”
Don’t do this! A strategy is a plan, and a failure to plan is a plan to fail. Bolting on feature sets without understanding how it fits within the larger digital strategy can be immensely harmful to user behavior. It can also wreck havoc on your analytics if it isn’t implemented properly nor tagged, as we discussed in our example. When new features are discussed they must be wireframed and discussed, determining how a real life user would actually use the feature. Oh, and obviously the big one… how will we track their behavior with this feature?

So which is it?

Well, it’s a combination of the two. It is important to think through new features and undertand how they fit into your site’s overall architecture and user experience (The Egg). However, it is just as important to learn from past behavior by asking the right questions and letting a mature site give you UX direction (The Chicken).

How to Create Custom Reports & Dashboards

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Google Analytics’ standard reports are really great and offer up a wealth of great information. However sometimes this can get overwhelming as you may have to go into multiple reports to get one answer. Both Custom Reports and Dashboards help you overcome this issue by allowing you to combine certain dimensions and metrics together in order to make reporting and analysis easier.

Google Analytics Custom Reports

Custom reporting is really useful for a multitude of reasons, but first and foremost it allows you to see reports for some dimensions that Google Analytics doesn’t report on out of the box. These could be hostname reports (eg: what domains is your GA code firing one), custom dimensions (eg: dimensions you have created in your admin), or to combine out of the box dimensions together (eg: Paid Search Keywords with Time of Day). The second way to look at Custom Reports is from the metrics side of the fence. Google Analytics has standard metrics tables and organize them in the way they want. But what if you want to see Bounce Rate first, then Transaction Revenue second, then Sessions? Custom Reports allow you to organize your columns any which way you want, as well as group your own metrics in any way.

Google Analytics Dashboards

Admittedly the Google Analytics Dashboards aren’t anything to write home about. We here at Bluefin Strategy actually use the Google Analytics API to create our own reports within Google Sheets and then display things the way we want. You may also have more flexibility using Google Data Studio, although that comes with its own limitations. Never the less, if you’re looking for quick and dirty dashboards Google Analytics has you covered. The benefits are that they are easy to create, are retroactive, and you can apply both time comparisons AND advanced segments to them. The latter is the only reason we still use them at all.

From a strategic standpoint use dashboards as the first line of defense. What are the four to five metrics that really matter. What metrics actually affect the conversion on your website and what are the dimensions that matter most. You want your dashboards to be actionable as if they are waving a flag saying “Hey, something is wrong over here”. Don’t clutter them up with useless data points that would not help you make a better conversion decision. If you have more than six dashboard widgets you really need to ask yourself if this is really a “dashboard” or just one big report.