As mentioned in the first blog in this series, LIVESTRONG partnered with Springbox to redesign their LIVESTRONG.org site — a content-heavy domain that provides information and resources to persons affected by cancer. In the two previous blogs we looked at site-level and segmented data in an effort to gauge how the new site is performing in comparison to the old. But in addition to just improving user engagement, with their new site LIVESTRONG hoped to more effectively feature events and opportunities and to gain better insight into what resources the community finds most helpful.

As a first step towards those goals, we implemented a Flash-based, rotating homepage banner that LIVESTRONG could easily update with current events, promotions, and opportunities via their new CMS. This helped expedite updates, while permitting up to three different display options at a time. 

 

To measure engagement with their new tool, we leveraged event tagging in Google Analytics, and created naming conventions to help ensure that data populated neatly within their Google Analytics interface — even as the number of different banners used increased.

 

Shortly following launch, LIVESTRONG ran five banner ads:

• Who Do You Ride For?
• See Lance in France
• Join Team LIVESTRONG
• It’s Your Journey
• Do You Need Support?

With the event tagging in place, we were able to help them optimize content according to specific business goals, which included: 

• Increasing engagement — especially among new visitors.
• Increasing engagement within the community as a whole.
• Making information about cancer journeys more assessable.

We pulled data on the banners for May 5, 2010 - June 5, 2010, and found that most clicks on the banners were from new visitors. We believe this is contributing to the notable decrease in the bounce rate of new visitors accessing the site via search (62.94% to 30.74%), which we’ve seen since the new site launched back in April. 

 

In addition to that, we discovered:

• The “Who Do You Ride For?” campaign was most popular as measured by raw clicks (3,530) as well as unique visitor clicks (2,303.) This content spoke to the community as a whole.
• The “Join Team LIVESTRONG” campaign was most popular among new visitors — with 81.58% of the clicks originating from first-time visitors to the site. This content worked well for procuring the attention of first-time visitors, and keeping them on the site.
• The “It’s your Journey” campaign was associated with those visits with the highest engagement metrics — pages per visit averaged 6.23 and time on site averaged around 11 minutes for persons who clicked that banner. 

The robust naming conventions and organizational strategy we developed to tag the flash banner easily expanded to permit tagging of many important, but common on-site interactions, including media plays and downloads — even as the number of tracked files and activities continued to grow. LIVESTRONG’s “At School” program is good example.

LIVESTRONG runs a program called “At School,” which helps educators teach K through 12-graders about cancer, cancer treatment, and support. At launch, there were over 40 PDFs to track — some listed in multiple locations — and we knew the list would continue to grow.  But in order to gauge how helpful the community found their program and in what ways they could improve, LIVESTRONG needed to understand what content was being accessed, from what sections of the site, and for what age groups. We put in place the tags to capture the data, and we also developed a methodology for aggregating and storing the data. Now that there’s three months worth of information, we checked on the program’s performance.

 

From May 1, 2010-August 7, 2010, we discovered that “Questions and Answer about Cancer,” a PDF for all grade levels, was the most commonly downloaded file, and that it was most often accessed (47.79% of the time) through the K- through 2nd grade portion of the Web site. The K-2nd grade pages also accounted for all downloads of the next most commonly requested file.

 

 

This followed the trend we saw for the program’s use as a whole:

• Request for K through 2 grade-appropriate materials accounted for 46.97% of the program’s total downloads.
• Accounting for only 3.37% of the program downloads, 7th through 9th-grade appropriate content constituted the least downloaded content.

As the start of the school year approaches, this information will help LIVESTRONG plan for timely program promotions. Right now we know that elementary school educators use their content the most and that middle schools represent the greatest opportunity for program expansion.