Don’t send your customers to a competitor

By: Zari Kotwal

A common weakness I’ve come across when dealing with clients across a number of industries is the lack of Quality Assurance (QA) on their websites. The pain points I constantly hear are: I have no bandwidth, we’re lacking resources, we don’t need QA, content is thoroughly checked before flowing to production teams; I usually get blank faces when I mention “QA”. We can’t hide from poor customer experiences on the web. It slaps us in the face when our executives log onto our sites over the weekend and cannot place an order or they get directed to an error page. PANIC! Sound familiar? Read on.

There is an acute lack of analytics reporting on 404 pages which appear when there's no file or page that corresponds to the visitor's request. For example, a visitor types in a URL with the assumption it is valid when in fact it is an obsolete link routing to a deleted or non-existent file/directory. They then get directed to a 404 or “Not Found” error page. Not only is it a poor customer experience affecting your Customer Satisfaction scores, it is a sure way to scare your once happy and “potential” customer to a competitor.

As web ‘owners’ it’s essential we have the visibility of such requests. You can easily track error 404 pages using Google Analytics (GA) or any other web analytic tool. For this paper we will look at adding additional GA code onto pages so you can learn what those visitors were looking for and consider if you need to add new content or fix the broken link when they encounter “Not Found” pages.

Configuring and reporting on missing or error pages requires a few steps:

1. Add the GA tracking code to a custom 404 error page.
2. Modify the tracking code on the 404 page as follows (see the urchinTracker modification in orange below):

<script type="text/javascript"

src="http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js">

</script>

<script type="text/javascript">

_uacct = "xxxxx-x";

urchinTracker("/404.html?page=" + _udl.pathname + _udl.search);

</script>

This code sends a virtual pageview of "/404.html?page=[pagename.html?queryparameter]" to your account, where [pagename.html?queryparameters] is the missing page name.

In GA, navigate to your Top Content report or go to the Content Drilldown report.

Filter the reports to find your custom /404.html page and expand the list to drill down to the associated referring pages.

Export into excel. Categorise the referring pages in order of adding new content or fixing broken links.

Send the list to your production team to make the appropriate change.

Continually check the state of health of your site on a daily/weekly basis.

Looking at the number of error free sessions, broken links and visitors exiting on broken links will give you valuable information about the QA issues of your site. You can take action to fix referring pages, investigate server errors and generally keep all technical issues to a bare minimum. Even if your site appears to be relatively error free, external problems can occur such as server overload or credit card authentication not performing quick enough that affects the quality of the visitor experience. GA reports can provide insights into the seriousness of the problem so that you can take steps to rectify the issue and not send your customers to your hungry competitors.

Contact Panalysis on 1300 368 553 if you need assistance in setting this up; we can talk to your developers.