Recherche avancée

Sur d’autres sites (10509)

• How (and Why) to Run a Web Accessibility Audit in 2024

  7 mai 2024, par Erin

  When most businesses design their websites, they primarily think about aesthetics, not accessibility. However, not everyone who visits your website has the same abilities or access needs. Eight percent of the US population has visual impairments.

  The last thing you want is to alienate website visitors with a bad experience because your site isn’t up to accessibility standards. (And with growing international regulation, risk fines or lawsuits as a result.)

  A web accessibility audit can help you identify and fix any issues for users with impaired vision, hearing or other physical disabilities. In this article, we’ll cover how to conduct such an audit efficiently for your website in 2024.

  What is a web accessibility audit ?

  A web accessibility audit is a way to evaluate the usability of your website for users with visual, auditory or physical impairments, as well as cognitive disabilities or neurological issues. The goal is to figure out how accessible your website is to each of these affected groups and solve any issues that come up.

  To complete an audit, you use digital tools and various manual accessibility testing processes to ensure your site meets modern web accessibility standards.

  Why is a web accessibility audit a must in 2024 ?

  For far too long, many businesses have not considered the experiences of those with disabilities. The growing frustrations of affected internet users have led to a new focus on web accessibility laws and enforcement.

  Lawsuits related to the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) reached all-time highs in 2023 — over 4,500 digital-related lawsuits were filed. The EU has also drawn up the European Accessibility Act (EAC), which goes into effect in June 2025.

  But at the end of the day, it’s not about accessibility legislation. It’s about doing right by people.

  

  This video by voice actor, YouTuber, and surfer Pete Gustin demonstrates why accessibility measures are so important. If buttons, navigation and content sections aren’t properly labelled, sight-impaired people who rely on speech-to-text to browse the web can’t comfortably interact with your site.

  And you’re worse off for it. You can lose some of your best customers and advocates this way. 

  With stronger enforcement of accessibility regulations in the US and new regulations coming into effect in the EU in 2025, the time to act is now. It’s not enough to “keep accessibility in mind” — you must take concrete steps to improve it.

  Who should lead a web accessibility audit ?

  Ideally, you want to hire a third-party web accessibility expert to lead the audit. They can guide you through multiple stages of manual accessibility testing to ensure your site meets regulations and user needs. 

  Experienced accessibility auditors are familiar with common pitfalls and can help you avoid them. They ensure you meet the legal requirements with proper solutions, not quick fixes.

  If this isn’t an option, find someone with relevant experience within your company. And involve someone with “skin in the game” in the process. Hire someone with visual impairments to usability test your site. Don’t just do automated tests or “put yourself in their shoes.” Make sure the affected users can use your site without issues.

  Automated vs. manual audits and the danger of shortcuts

  While there are automated audits, they only check for the bare minimum :

  • Do your images have alt tags ? (They don’t check if the alt tag is descriptive or just SEO junk text.)
  • Are clickable buttons identified with text for visually impaired users ?
  • Is your text size adjustable ?
  • Are your background and foreground colours accessible for colour-blind users ? Is there a sufficient contrast ratio ?

  

  They don’t dive into the user journey (and typically can’t access login-locked parts of your site). They can be a good starting point, but it’s a bad idea to rely completely on automated audits.

  They’ll miss more complex issues like :

  • Dynamic content and animated elements or videos that could put people with epilepsy at risk of seizures
  • A navigational flow that is unnecessarily challenging for users with impairments
  • Video elements without proper captions

  So, don’t rely too much on automated tests and audits. Many lawsuits for ADA infractions are against companies that think they’ve already solved the problem. For example, 30% of 2023 lawsuits were against sites that used accessibility overlays.

  Key elements of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)

  The international standard for web accessibility is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). In the most recent version, WCAG 2.2, there are new requirements for visual elements and focus and other updates.

  Here’s a quick overview of the key priorities of WCAG :

  

  Perceivable : Any user can read or listen to your site’s content

  The first priority is for any user to be able to perceive the actual content on your site. To be compliant, you need to make these adjustments and more :

  • Use text that scales with browser settings.
  • Avoid relying on colour contrasts to communicate something.
  • Ensure visual elements are explained in text.
  • Offer audio alternatives for things like CAPTCHA.
  • Form fields and interactive elements are properly named.

  Operable : Any user can navigate the site and complete tasks without issue

  The second priority is for users to navigate your website and complete tasks. Here are some of the main considerations for this section :

  • Navigation is possible through keyboard and text-to-speech interfaces.
  • You offer navigation tools to bypass repeated blocks of content.
  • Buttons are properly titled and named.
  • You give impaired users enough time to finish processes without timing out.
  • You allow users to turn off unnecessary animations (and ensure none include three flashes or more within one second).
  • Links have a clear purpose from their alt text (and context).

  Understandable : Any user can read and understand the content

  The third priority is making the content understandable. You need to communicate as simply and as clearly as possible. Here are a few key points :

  • Software can determine the default language of each page.
  • You use a consistent method to explain jargon or difficult terms.
  • You introduce the meaning of unfamiliar abbreviations and acronyms.
  • You offer tools to help users double-check and correct input.
  • The reading grade is not higher than grade 9. If it is, you must offer an alternative text with a lower grade.
  • Use consistent and predictable formatting and navigation.

  This intro to accessibility guidelines should help you see the wide range of potential accessibility issues. Accessibility is not just about screen readers — it’s about ensuring a good user experience for users with a wide range of disabilities.

  Note : If you’re not hiring a third-party expert for the manual accessibility audit, this introduction isn’t enough. You need to familiarise yourself with all 50 success criteria in WCAG 2.2.

  How to do your first web accessibility audit

  Ready to find and fix the accessibility issues across your website ? Follow the steps outlined below to do a successful accessibility audit.

  Start with an automated accessibility test

  To point you in the right direction, start with a digital accessibility checker. There are many free alternatives, including :

  • Accessibility Checker
  • Silktide accessibility checker
  • AAArdvark

  When choosing a tool, check it’s up-to-date with the newest accessibility guidelines. Many accessibility evaluation tools are still based on the WCAG 2.1 version rather than WCAG 2.2.

  The tool will give you a basic evaluation of the accessibility level of your site. A free report can quickly identify common issues with navigation, labelling, colour choices and more. 

  But this is only good as a starting point. Remember that even paid versions of these testing tools are limited and cannot replace a manual audit.

  Look for common issues

  The next step is to manually look for common issues that impact your site’s level of accessibility :

  • Undescriptive alt text
  • Colour combinations (and lack of ability to change background and foreground colours)
  • Unscalable text
  • Different site content sections that are not properly labelled

  The software you use to create your site can lead to many of these issues. Is your content management system (CMS) compliant with ADA or WCAG ? If not, you may want to move to a CMS before continuing the audit.

  Pinpoint customer journeys and test them for accessibility 

  After you’ve fixed common issues, it’s essential to put the actual customer journey to the test. Explore your most important journeys with behavioural analytics tools like session recordings and funnel analysis.

  Analysing funnel reports lets you quickly identify each page that usually contributes to a sale. You will also have an overview of the most popular funnels to evaluate for accessibility.

  If your current web analytics platform doesn’t offer behavioural reports like these, Matomo can help. Our privacy-friendly web analytics solution includes funnel reports, session recordings, A/B testing, form analytics, heatmaps and more.

  Try Matomo for Free

  Get the web insights you need, without compromising data accuracy.

  Start for free

  No credit card required

  If you don’t have the budget to test every page individually, this is the perfect place to start. You want to ensure that users with disabilities have no issues completing the main tasks on your site. 

  Don’t focus solely on your web pages 

  Accessibility barriers can also exist outside of your standard web pages. So ensure that other file formats like PDFs and videos are also accessible. 

  Remember that downloadable materials are also part of your digital experience. Always consider the needs of individuals with disabilities when accessing things like case studies or video tutorials. 

  Highlight high-priority issues in a detailed report

  To complete the audit, you need to summarise and highlight high-priority issues. In a larger company, this will be in the form of a report. W3’s Web Accessibility Initiative offers a free accessibility report template and an online tool to generate a report.

  For smaller teams, it may make sense to input issues directly into the product backlog or a task list. Then, you can tackle the issues, starting with high-priority pages identified earlier in this process.

  Avoid quick fixes and focus on sustainable improvement

  As mentioned, AI-powered overlay solutions aren’t compliant and put you at risk for lawsuits. It’s not enough to install a quick accessibility tool and pat yourself on the back.

  And it’s not just about accessibility compliance. These solutions provide a disjointed experience that alienates potential users. 

  The point of a digital accessibility audit is to identify issues and provide a better experience to all your users. So don’t try to cut corners. Do the work required to implement solutions that work seamlessly for everyone. Invest in a long-term accessibility remediation process.

  Deliver a frictionless experience while gaining insight into your users

  An accessibility audit is crucial to ensure an inclusive experience — that a wide variety of users can read and interact with your site.

  But what about the basic usability of your website ? Are you sure the experience is without friction ? Matomo’s behavioural analytics tools can show how users interact with your website.

  For example, heatmaps can show you where users are clicking — which can help you identify a pattern, like many users mistaking a visual element for a button.

  Plus, our privacy-friendly web analytics are compliant with GDPR, CCPA and other data privacy regulations. That helps protect you against privacy-related lawsuits, just as an accessibility audit protects you against ADA lawsuits.

  And it never hurts that your users know you respect their privacy. Try Matomo free for 21-days. No credit card required.

  Try Matomo for Free

  21 day free trial. No credit card required.

  
  

  Your email address
  

  Your website address
  

  Your Analytics subdomain will be .matomo.cloud (change)

  Choose your analytics subdomain
  

  .matomo.cloud

  I accept the terms and conditions and data processing agreement (DPA)

  
  Your information will be used to create an account on our cloud service. For more information please consult our privacy policy.
  
  
  

  Start improving your websites now

  

• How to Conduct a Customer Journey Analysis (Step-by-Step)

  9 mai 2024, par Erin

  Your customers are everything.

  Treat them right, and you can generate recurring revenue for years. Treat them wrong ; you’ll be spinning your wheels and dealing with churn.

  How do you give your customers the best experience possible so they want to stick around ?

  Improve their customer experience.

  How ?

  By conducting a customer journey analysis.

  When you know how your customers experience your business, you can improve it to meet and exceed customer expectations.

  In this guide, we’ll break down how the customer journey works and give you a step-by-step guide to conduct a thorough customer journey analysis so you can grow your brand.

  What is a customer journey analysis ?

  Every customer you’ve ever served went on a journey to find you.

  From the moment they first heard of you, to the point that they became a customer. 

  Everything in between is the customer journey.

  A customer journey analysis is how you track and analyse how your customers use different channels to interact with your brand.

  

  Analysing your customer journey involves identifying the customer’s different touchpoints with your business so you can understand how it impacts their experience. 

  This means looking at every moment they interacted with your brand before, during and after a sale to help you gain actionable insights into their experience and improve it to reach your business objectives.

  Your customers go through specific customer touchpoints you can track. By analysing this customer journey from a bird’s eye view, you can get a clear picture of the entire customer experience.

  4 benefits of customer journey analysis

  Before we dive into the different steps involved in a customer journey analysis, let’s talk about why it’s vital to analyse the customer journey.

  By regularly analysing your customer journey, you’ll be able to improve the entire customer experience with practical insights, allowing you to :

  Understand your customers better

  What’s one key trait all successful businesses have ?

  They understand their customers.

  By analysing your customer journey regularly, you’ll gain new insights into their wants, needs, desires and behaviours, allowing you to serve them better. These insights will show you what led them to buy a product (or not).

  For example, through conducting a customer journey analysis, a company might find out that customers who come from LinkedIn are more likely to buy than those coming from Facebook.

  Find flaws in your customer journey

  Nobody wants to hear they have flaws. But the reality is your customer journey likely has a few flaws you could improve.

  By conducting customer journey analysis consistently, you’ll be able to pinpoint precisely where you’re losing prospects along the way. 

  For example, you may discover you’re losing customers through Facebook Ads. Or you may find your email strategy isn’t as good as it used to be.

  But it’s not just about the channel. It could be a transition between two channels. For example, you may have great engagement on Instagram but are not converting them into email subscribers. The issue may be that your transition between the two channels has a leak.

  Or you may find that prospects using certain devices (i.e., mobile, tablet, desktop) have lower conversions. This might be due to design and formatting issues across different devices.

  By looking closely at your customer journey and the different customer touchpoints, you’ll see issues preventing prospects from turning into leads or customers from returning to buy again as loyal customers.

  Gain insights into how you can improve your brand

  Your customer journey analysis won’t leave you with a list of problems. Instead, you’ll have a list of opportunities.

  Since you’ll be able to better understand your customers and where they’re falling off the sales funnel, you’ll have new insights into how you can improve the experience and grow your brand.

  For example, maybe you notice that your visitors are getting stuck at one stage of the customer journey and you’re trying to find out why.

  So, you leverage Matomo’s heatmaps, sessions recordings and scroll depth to find out more.

  In the case below, we can see that Matomo’s scroll map is showing that only 65% of the visitors are reaching the main call to action (to write a review). 

  

  To try to push for higher conversions and get more reviews, we could consider moving that button higher up on the page, ideally above the fold.

  Rather than guessing what’s preventing conversions, you can use user behaviour analytics to “step in our user’s shoes” so you can optimise faster and with confidence.

  Try Matomo for Free

  Get the web insights you need, without compromising data accuracy.

  Start for free

  No credit card required

  Grow your revenue

  By taking charge of your customer journey, you can implement different strategies that will help you increase your reach, gain more prospects, convert more prospects into customers and turn regulars into loyal customers.

  Using customer journey analysis will help you optimise those different touchpoints to maximise the ROI of your channels and get the most out of each marketing activity you implement.

  7 steps to conduct a customer journey analysis

  Now that you know the importance of conducting a customer journey analysis regularly, let’s dive into how to implement an analysis.

  Here are the seven steps you can take to analyse the customer journey to improve your customer experience :

  

  1. Map out your customer journey

  Your first step to conducting an effective customer journey analysis is to map your entire customer journey.

  Customer journey mapping means looking at several factors :

  • Buying process
  • Customer actions
  • Buying emotions
  • Buying pain points
  • Solutions

  Once you have an overview of your customer journey maps, you’ll gain insights into your customers, their interests and how they interact with your brand. 

  After this, it’s time to dive into the touchpoints.

  2. Identify all the customer touchpoints 

  To improve your customer journey, you need to know every touchpoint a customer can (and does) make with your brand.

  This means taking note of every single channel and medium they use to communicate with your brand :

  • Website
  • Social media
  • Search engines (SEO)
  • Email marketing
  • Paid advertising
  • And more

  Essentially, anywhere you communicate and interact with your customers is fair game to analyse.

  If you want to analyse your entire sales funnel, you can try Matomo, a privacy-friendly web analytics tool. 

  You should make sure to split up your touchpoints into different customer journey stages :

  • Awareness
  • Consideration
  • Conversion
  • Advocacy

  Then, it’s time to move on to how customers interact on these channels.

  Try Matomo for Free

  Get the web insights you need, without compromising data accuracy.

  Start for free

  No credit card required

  3. Measure how customers interact on each channel

  To understand the customer journey, you can’t just know where your customers interact with you. You end up learning how they’re interacting.

  This is only possible by measuring customer interactions.

  How ?

  By using a web analytics tool like Matomo.

  With Matomo, you can track every customer action on your website.

  This means anytime they :

  • Visit your website
  • View a web page
  • Click a link
  • Fill out a form
  • Purchase a product
  • View different media
  • And more

  You should analyse your engagement on your website, apps and other channels, like email and social media.

  4. Implement marketing attribution

  Now that you know where your customers are and how they interact, it’s time to analyse the effectiveness of each channel based on your conversion rates.

  Implementing marketing attribution (or multi-touch attribution) is a great way to do this.

  Attribution is how you determine which channels led to a conversion.

  While single-touch attribution models credit one channel for a conversion, marketing attribution gives credit to a few channels.

  For example, let’s say Bob is looking for a new bank. He sees an Instagram post and finds himself on HSBC’s website. After looking at a few web pages, he attends a webinar hosted by HSBC on financial planning and investment strategies. One week later, he gets an email from HSBC following up on the webinar. Then, he decides to sign up for HSBC’s online banking.

  Single touch attribution would attribute 100% of the conversion to email, which doesn’t show the whole picture. Marketing attribution would credit all channels : social media, website content, webinars and email.

  Matomo offers multiple attribution models. These models leverage different weighting factors, like time decay or linear, so that you can allocate credit to each touchpoint based on its impact.

  Matomo’s multi-touch attribution reports give you in-depth insights into how revenue is distributed across different channels. These detailed reports help you analyse each channel’s contribution to revenue generation so you can optimise the customer journey and improve business outcomes.

  Try Matomo for Free

  Get the web insights you need, without compromising data accuracy.

  Start for free

  No credit card required

  5. Use a funnels report to find where visitors are leaving

  Once you set up your marketing attribution, it’s time to analyse where visitors are falling off.

  You can leverage Matomo funnels to find out the conversion rate at each step of the journey on your website. Funnel reports can help you see exactly where visitors are falling through the cracks so you can increase conversions.

  6. Analyse why visitors aren’t converting

  Once you can see where visitors are leaving, you can start to understand why.

  For example, let’s say you analyse your funnels report in Matomo and see your landing page is experiencing the highest level of drop-offs.

  

  You can also use form analytics to find out why users aren’t converting on your landing pages – a crucial part of the customer journey.

  7. A/B test to improve the customer journey

  The final step to improve your customer journey is to conduct A/B tests. These are tests where you test one version of a landing page to see which one converts better, drives more traffic, or generates more revenue.

  For example, you could create two versions of a header on your website and drive 50% of your traffic to each version. Then, once you’ve got your winner, you can keep that as your new landing page.

  

  Using the data from your A/B tests, you can optimise your customer journey to help convert more prospects into customers.

  Use Matomo to improve your customer journey analysis

  Now that you understand why it’s important to conduct customer journey analysis regularly and how it works, it’s time to put this into practice.

  To improve the customer journey, you need to understand what’s happening at each stage of your funnel. 

  Matomo gives you insights into your customer journey so you can improve website performance and convert more visitors into customers.

  Used by over 1 million websites, Matomo is the leading privacy-friendly web analytics solution in the world. 

  Matomo provides you with accurate, unsampled data so you understand exactly what’s going on with your website performance.

  The best part ?

  It’s easy to use and is compliant with the strictest privacy regulations.

  Try Matomo free for 21-days and start Improving your customer journey. No credit card required.

  Try Matomo for Free

  21 day free trial. No credit card required.

  
  

  Your email address
  

  Your website address
  

  Your Analytics subdomain will be .matomo.cloud (change)

  Choose your analytics subdomain
  

  .matomo.cloud

  I accept the terms and conditions and data processing agreement (DPA)

  
  Your information will be used to create an account on our cloud service. For more information please consult our privacy policy.
  
  
  

  Start improving your websites now

  

• Announcing Long Term Support in Piwik 2 – The analytics platform for your mission critical projects

  11 janvier 2016, par Matthieu Aubry — About, Development

  We are proud to announce our Long Term Support (LTS) for Piwik 2.X !

  Why Long Term Support (LTS) ?

  Part of our mission is to ready Piwik for the enterprise — and ready the enterprise for Piwik. Our fast release cycle and our ability to quickly innovate has served us well for the past seven years and has lead Piwik to being one of the most popular open source projects, used by over one million websites worldwide. But Piwik’s success today has also shown us that this fast release cycle is not suited for all users and customers. Like most large open source projects (such as Ubuntu, Firefox, Debian, Symfony, Node.js, etc.) at Piwik we now also offer a Long Term Support release which gives users the confidence that Piwik can be used for mission critical projects for months to come.

  What does LTS mean for Piwik ?

  For the duration of the LTS period, Piwik 2.X will continue to receive the following fixes :

  • Critical bugs causing data loss or data corruption.
  • Major and Critical security issues.

  Our goal is to offer you a Piwik LTS release that you can trust for all your mission critical projects.

  How long will Piwik 2.X be supported ?

  Piwik 2.X will be supported for at least 12 months after the initial release of Piwik 3.0.0.
  Piwik 3.0.0 is expected to be released in the second half of 2016.
  This means that Piwik 2.X will be supported at least until the second half of 2017.

  Which Piwik version is LTS ?

  The latest Piwik 2.16.X release is our Long Term Support version.

  How do I benefit from the LTS version ?

  To get the full benefits of Piwik LTS, please make sure you are using the latest LTS version. First, update to the latest Piwik 2.X version, then Configure Piwik to use the LTS release channel and then update to the latest LTS version.

  How do I configure Piwik to use the LTS version ?

  By default, Piwik will not use the LTS version. When you use the one-click update your Piwik instance will be updated to the very latest release : when Piwik 3.0.0 will be released, the one click update will update your instance to 3.0.0. It is however possible to configure your Piwik so that you will stay on Piwik 2.X and keep using the LTS Long Term Support version :

  • Login Piwik as the Super User,
  • Go to Settings > General > Update settings,
  • Under “Release channel” click “Latest stable 2.X Long Term Support version”, and click “Save”.
    

  How do I get professional Piwik Support ?

  If you need professional support for your Piwik service get in touch with the Piwik experts.

  ---

  For other questions, feedback or discussion, feel free to join our forums and comment on this LTS forum post.

  We wish you all a fantastic year 2016 !