There is a wealth of information readily available for marketers online. Google Analytics offers real time data, along with social media sites like Facebook that can track every detail of the visitor’s online experience. With so much information available across so many different platforms it can be easy to get lost in the metrics. Page views, unique visitors, new visitors, returning visitors, conversation rate, page referrer, and the list goes on and on. There are metrics measuring metrics, so where does one begin?
First decide what is important. Don’t get lost in all the numbers and percentages, instead start planning with the end in mind. Decide what is important and what the goal is for your consumers to gain from their experience on your site and then choose the metrics that best measure the success, or failures, based on those goals. Case in point, if you are a blogger, looking at the bounce rate for your blog might not be useful to you if your blog scrolls through multiple posts with little need for the visitor to click around. A more useful metric to consider might be visit duration, or returning visitors to learn how long readers stay on the website and whether they choose to come back.
Author of Web Analytics 2.0, Avinash Kaushik suggest asking yourself four simple questions to gain a macro view of the data (70). First, “How many visitors are coming to my website?” (Kaushik, 71). Consider unique visitors, versus total visitors, or how many people actually visited the website one time, and how many came back and visited the page multiple times. Look at trends and patterns over periods of time and also specific to marketing campaigns like a newsletter or direct mailer. If people aren’t visiting your website there is not much to measure beyond that. Step one is crucial!
The second questions is “Where are Visitors coming from?” (Kaushik, 71). This the equivalent to asking your customers “how did you hear about us?” Referring URLs can share where your visitors are coming from. Is it from search engines or direct traffic such as an email campaign? If they are coming from search engines Google Analytics can provide the search keywords a visitor used to find your website. By using this information to optimize your website you can improve your search engine result pages rankings, and increase the likely hood that others consumers will find your website.
The third question, goes back to the idea of – planning with the end in mind – “what do I want Visitors to do on the website?” (Kaushik, 72). Establish what goals you have for your consumers, whether it is to buy a product or subscribe to an e-newsletter, write down your goals. The last and probably most important question is, “What are Visitors actually doing?” (Kaushik, 72 - 73). This may seem obvious but at times we, as marketers, can get so caught up in what we want our visitors to do on our website that we miss out on what they are actually doing which can lead to opportunities for growth and improvement in new or unexpected areas. Look at where visitors are entering your website. Often we believe (or hope) it is our homepage, and we invest a great deal of time and energy into “prettying” it up, when in reality they may be entering directly form a search engine link and never even see your homepage. Look at the most view pages and assess patterns and trends. What is it that is making these pages more successful than others? Find commonalities and repeat them across your website, particularly on underperforming pages.
Revisit these questions often, as consumers needs and wants change and so to will your website. Keep a few baseline metrics in mind and comparing those metrics over time to measure results. Test new ideas and use those same few metrics to determine the effectiveness. But most importantly, do not drown in the details. It is easy to do so but keep your end goals in mind and use the metrics that matter most to you and your business.
References
Kaushik, A. (2010). Web analytics 2.0: the art of online accountability & science of customer centricity. Indianapolis, IN: Wiley.
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