Ian
Analytics is fun. It’s interesting,
useful and it gives you scope to use several tools that help you
measure important website metrics.
Tracking these metrics gives you an
idea about how your site is received by its users. Diligent tracking
can help identify room for improvements and spot any abnormal results
(such as those caused by a site outage).
The most basic tracking tool is Google
Analytics. Let’s look at the most basic metrics that matter.
1. Website traffic
The most important metric that serves
as the base for all other metrics is the number of people who visit
your site. Obviously, all metric analysis tools start with
information on web site traffic. Traffic comparison between sites
gives information on how your website fares in comparison with other
sites. Similarly, the growth of a particular site can be measured by
comparing the site traffic statistics periodically.
If a certain trigger causes a surge in
traffic, it’s an indicator that you should be doing it often. A
blog post, a sale, a new product or a new ad; if there is anything
that makes the traffic swell, you should be doing it again. And
again.
2. Source of traffic
Knowing the source of site traffic is
just as important as knowing the traffic volumes. Google Analytics
categorizes site traffic into:
Organic Search traffic coming via
the search engines
Referral traffic from another
website
Direct traffic typing your domain
into the browser
Social traffic from social media
So, this helps focus marketing efforts
accordingly.
3. Bounce rate
Great site traffic is meaningless if
the bounce rate metric is bad. Bounce rate, displayed as a
percentage, tells you how many visitors leave your website
immediately after arriving. A low bounce rate indicates that most of
your visitors like what they see and stick around to know more about
your site. If bounce rate is high, it means that you have to rework
the site to be attractive enough for the visitors and hope to convert
enough visitors.
4. Top Pages
If your site has certain pages that
attract several visitors, analyze the pages to see what makes them
click. Mirror that in other pages so that the other pages also have
good traffic. More importantly, the pages that attract more visitors
must contain the information that makes people spend on your site.
It’s not just number of visitors that help you come up with top
pages. The time spent on pages, number of shares, likes and social
media mentions are also important when deciding what the top pages
are. Top pages help you come to a conclusion on what kind of content
people like. When you know which content your audience likes best,
the next step is to produce more of it!
5.
Conversion rate
This is the most significant metric
once the first level of metric (total traffic etc) is analyzed.
Tracking this metric gives you information that helps profitability.
If you can increase your conversion rate, your profits also go up.
6.
Conversion by traffic source
Don’t have all your eggs in one
basket. Have different sources from which you have inbound traffic.
But not all sources are equal. Your Facebook page might bring in more
people while Twitter lags behind. That happens! It tells you how you
can mirror successful content from sources throughout.
7.
Customer’s lifetime value
A customer’s lifetime value is a
little difficult to calculate, but is very important when making
forecasts and setting marketing budgets. Every customer has his
value. It goes up with every purchase, every referral and review.
This metric helps forecasting future purchases, membership viability
etc.
