Optimise Link Placement

Using Quadrant Analysis

Analysing link placement and banner creative can give you a great insight into how to optimise your marketing campaigns, web pages, landing pages and banner creatives to achieve the maximum return on investment. Once you know which link locations or banner creatives work better, you can then serve up the best performing web pages to all your visitors.

Performance may be measured and determined by the amount of visitors it delivers to a specific page, but a more useful and meaningful metric to analyse would be the conversions a certain link placement or banner creative produces. Just doing something as simple as moving a call to action link on a web page or landing page nearer the top of the page or making it more prominent, can bring significant gains in relation to the number of conversions.

This page will look in more detail at some of the investigations you can do using web analytics, to determine the most effective link placement.

Business goals

To determine the most effective location for a hyperlink or banner ad on a web site page to maximize clickthroughs.

Background information and common terminology

A hyperlink can be in the form of a textual link embedded in the copy of the web page, can be part of the web page’s menu, or can be in the form of a banner ad placed on the site. Often, web pages contain more than one hyperlink leading to the same destination page, for example when one link is located within the menu and another in the copy. Hyperlinks can take the visitor to pages within the web site, or can refer them away to other web sites. Placement analysis is sometimes also called quadrant analysis, even if the area of a web page is not necessarily easily divided into exactly four quadrants.

Most common challenges

• When there are multiple hyperlinks from a page, each of which lead a visitor to the same destination page, raw clickstream analysis cannot reveal which of these hyperlinks a visitor has clicked.

• When a hyperlink refers a visitor away from a web site, the following page view cannot be tracked and therefore there is no raw data to reveal which hyperlink was clicked.

Required information sources

Additional information to reveal that a specific link was clicked:

• One method is to redirect hyperlinks through a redirection utility, such as the one available with Affinium NetInsight. For example, instead of linking a banner ad directly to /Promotion.html, the hyperlink can be configured via Affinium NetInsight’sredirection program, “ntadtrack”, as follows: ”/cgi_bin/ntadtrack.cgi?/Promotion,html?placement=lower+right+corner”

• Another method is to add a Affinium NetInsight JavaScript event tag to each hyperlink, which will create a specific log record when the link is clicked.

Solutions for measuring link and banner clickthroughs

Affinium NetInsight provides multiple mechanisms for marking hyperlinks in order to measure the clickthroughs for each. One method is to make use of the redirection programs supplied with Affinium NetInsight, i.e. “ntadtrack” (for banner ads) and “ntlinktrack” (for links). For example, ntadtrack is simply passed the destination page in the query string, as shown in the example on the front side of this card. When called in this manner, the program redirects the web browser to the specified destination page. This call to “ntadtrack” is recorded in the web server log files, similar to any other page request, and can thus be traced in Affinium NetInsight. Affinium NetInsight will exclude the call to the redirection program itself from its count of page views in order to keep the number of page views that it reports accurate. Once hyperlinks have been redirected in this manner, they can be configured in Affinium NetInsight as Links or Banner Ads. The Banner Ad Summary will display the number of impressions for the banner graphic as well as the clickthroughs to calculate a clickthrough rate, as in the example below:

Investigating link and banner placement

The majority of investigative analysis for link placement occurs by experimenting with various link locations and banner ad creatives. In addition, however, you can cross-filter Affinium NetInsight’s Banner Ad and Link Summaries with various criteria, in an ad hoc fashion, to investigate link effectiveness for various visitor segments. The example on the right shows the Banner Ad Summary, filtered for visitors who:

• Visited during the morning hours

• Were referred from Yahoo

• Searched for a specific keyword on Yahoo’s search engine

Action items

• Experiment with link placement, measure continuously and place links in the most effective quadrants.

• Cross-filter reports for specific visitor segments, to fine tune links further.

Further reading

• Refer to the sections, Analyzing Content: Analyzing Links, and Analyzing Banners Ads, in the Affinium NetInsight User’s Guide.