Jilianne Scamperle

PR Research - Cypress Falls Event Center

Executive Summary

Diving Deeper Into Your Website

My group was happy to work with your company, Cypress Falls Event Center,

throughout this semester and to experience how important web analytics are to research. The

website for Cypress Falls is focused heavily on pictures of the venue and décor, with little

written descriptions, which allows customers to really visualize themselves at the location. When

we first contacted you, were informed that the Cypress Falls website was recently updated, but

that the company was still struggling with customers being confused on whether it was an indoor

or outdoor venue. You also told us of your goal of reaching new people who had never heard of

Cypress Falls in potentially being new clients. We used analytics, or data gained from website

tracking, in order to look at where we could possibly help strengthen the Cypress Falls website

and reach some of your goals.

Web analytics is the process of collecting and analyzing data that results from

how people interact with a particular website. In order to reach the goals of Cypress Falls, we

chose to measure three different concepts. The first was clarity, which was defined as the quality

of being clear and precise about a subject. We hoped that by determining the clarity, we would

reduce the problem Cypress was having with customers being confused as to what kind of venue

Cypress Falls is. We planned to measure this by looking at the bounce rate, or how many people

left the website after entering on the home page. If people leave immediately we can infer that

they aren’t finding what they need on the initial page. Our second concept we wanted to measure

was reach, which is defined as the breadth and depth of how you impact those around you. We
hoped that we would be able to see how many people Cypress Falls was reaching through their

website, and if these customers were returning or new potential clients. We planned to measure

this by looking at the percentage of new clients vs the percentage of the old. The final concept

we wanted to look at was impact, which is the long-lasting impression. We planned on

measuring this by looking at the number of promotions used and if reservations increased when

promotions were offered, but with only 20 days of data we ended up measuring this by looking at

new and old visitors as well as the time spent on the website by each individual.

After looking at the analytics of a 20-day period, we concluded two important findings.

The first is that the Cypress Falls website has a bounce rate of 47.96% . This means that almost

half of the people who entered the website, left after only viewing the first/home page. The

second thing we learned was that of the 447 users, or people who visited the site, 20.6% were

returning visitors while 79.4% were new.

From the information that we gathered, we want to offer a couple of suggestions for

Cypress Falls to take into consideration. With such a high bounce rate, we can assume that

people aren’t finding what they need on the first page, which shows a lack of clarity. We suggest

adding some words to go along to the photographs in order to get more information across to the

potential clients. As for impact and reach, we can see that most of the visitors were new people,

which confirms Cypress Fall’s goal of getting “fresh eyes” to their site! We know that Cypress

falls has good reach, and the word is getting out to potential clients. However, only about 20% of

people who view their website come back to visit again, and people on average only visit two

pages on the site before leaving. With this we can assume that impact of the website can be

improved. In order to do this, we suggest adding promotions to keep people coming back and to

help them remember your website over other venues.

 We want to thank Cypress Falls Event Center for allowing us to work with you as we

learned about web analytics! We hope that we brought some insight as to how to potentially

better your website, and what areas may be the most beneficial.