Web Analytics -Metrics

Metrics
• a metric is a quantitative measurement of
statistics describing events or trends on a website.

• A key performance indicator (KPI) is a metric that

helps you understand how you are doing against
your objectives. That last word—objectives—is
critical to something being called a KPI, which is
also why KPIs tend to be unique to each company
 Visits
• Visits report the fact that someone came to
your website and spent some time browsing
before leaving. Technically this visitor
experience is called a session.
• When you run a report for any given period in
your web analytics tools, Total Visits is the
count of all the sessions during a given time
period.
 Unique Visitors
• When you run a report for any given time period in your web
analytics tool, the Unique Visitors metric is the count of all the
persistent unique cookie IDs during a given time period.
• If you run your reports at the end of day 2, you will see these
details:
• Daily Unique Visitors: 5
• Weekly Unique Visitors: 3
• Monthly Unique Visitors: 3
• Absolute Unique Visitors: 3
• Daily Unique Visitors is a useless number if you are looking at a
period of more than one day!
 Time on site
• Tp (home page) = one minute Tp (page 2) = four minutes Tp
(page 3) = zero minutes Ts = five minutes (Time on Site, also
known as Session Length)
• Bounce rate: the percentage of sessions on your website with
only one page view.
• Measure Bounce Rate for your website’s top referrers. Your
top referrers tell you who your true BFFs are. These are not
the referring sites that just send you traffic but rather sites
that send you traffic that does not bounce.
• Measure Bounce Rate for your search keywords (paid and
organic). Perhaps you are optimized for the wrong keywords,
or perhaps your landing pages stink; either way, you need to
fix them.
Time on site
 Bounce Rate
• You, don’t measure the Bounce Rate for a blog in
aggregate.
• Segment your data, and measure Bounce Rate for your
New Visitors.
• You don’t want them to just come and leave after reading
the post. You want them to subscribe to your RSS feed.
(That’s one click! No bounce!) You want them to read your
About page (and be impressed with your magnificence
and come to the site again). You want them to click ads
(heavens!), and so on. All these actions are of business
value to you.
Bounce Rate
• don’t measure the Bounce Rate for a blog in
aggregate. Segment your data, and measure
Bounce Rate for your New Visitors. You don’t want
them to just come and leave after reading the post.
You want them to subscribe to your RSS feed.
(That’s one click! No bounce!) You want them to
read your About page (and be impressed with your
magnificence and come to the site again). You want
them to click ads (heavens!), and so on. All these
actions are of business value to you.
 Exit Rate

• Exit Rate measures is simple: how many people left your

website from a certain page
• On paper, this metric is supposed to show the leakage from
your website. In other words, where do people exit after they
start their session? It should illustrate pages that you should fix
to prevent leakage and get customers to buy more or sign up
more
• Can you separate good exits from bad exits without overlaying
your own opinions on the data
• Use Bounce Rate measures: of the people who enter your site
on a given page, how many leave from that page without
clicking anywhere on the site and without looking at any other
pages? Those are “bad” exits.
Exit Rate
 Conversion Rate
• Conversion Rate, expressed as a percentage, is defined as
Outcomes divided by Unique Visitors (or Visits). Outcomes are
customarily the submission of an order on your ecommerce
website.
• If you choose Visits as the denominator, you assume that every
visit to your website is a chance to get someone to place an
order and get someone converted. If you choose Unique Visitors
as the denominator, you grant that it is OK for a person to visit
your website multiple times before making a purchase.
• Check which denominator your web analytics tool uses. For
example, Google Analytics and Omniture (and many others) use
Visits by default
 ENGAGEMENT
• defines engaging as “tending to draw favorable attention or interest.
• The number of times someone visits your site, frequency of Visits,
helps you understand the degree of Engagement
• Degree The degree of positive or negative Engagement lies on a
continuum that ranges from low involvement, namely, the
psychological state of apathy, to high. An engaged person is
someone with an above-average involvement with his or her object
of relatedness.

• Kind Customers can be positively or negatively engaged with a

company or product. A more in-depth examination of kind would
reveal its content, usually a mixture of emotional states and rational
beliefs, such as in the case of positive engagement, sympathy, trust,
pride, and so on.
 Engagement
• The more pages a visitor sees, the deeper their
journey and the higher the degree of
Engagement. But this metric again does not
distinguish the kind of Engagement.
• some other metrics and tasks that can capture
degree of Engagement: Time on Site,
registering on the site, subscribing to RSS feed
or newsletter, submitting a comment, or
downloading content.
 Kind of Engagement
• Use inline or on-exit surveys and ask your customers. You could
ask them directly, “Hey, buddy, are you engaged with our site?”
OK, maybe reword that a smidgen. The point is, get qualitative
data. • Go for an indirect approach with your survey’s by
measuring the likelihood to recommend as a metric. Likelihood
to recommend is a strong proxy for Engagement because it
measures the greatest gift you can get from your customers:
that they will recommend your business to others
• Use the other awesome proxy: customer retention over time.
Do long-term analysis of people who come back again and how
often (non-ecommerce) or make repeat purchases
(ecommerce). We’re talking months of data, segmented for
online and offline (then compare) and for various micro-
segments of your online population.
 Great Metrics
• Uncomplex
• Relevant : to business model and strategy
• Timely:
• Instantly useful
 Root Cause Diagnosis
• diagnosing root cause, is a technique to help
you unravel insights from your critical few
metrics. The second element, leveraging
custom reports, argues that creating custom
reports can accelerate understanding of the
site’ performance.
• Starting with a solid understanding of the
macro view of your site’s performance rather
than wandering around in the weeds.
 Example
• Increase Conversion rate by 10%
• Conversion Rate depends on your acquisition
strategy (where you spend money to acquire
traffic), your organic search keyword ranks, the
ease of your checkout process, the distribution
of why people come to your site (primary
purpose), the website “scent” (ability of your
campaigns to deliver traffic to the most
relevant pages), and so forth.
Example
 Macro
• Q1: “How many Visitors are coming to my
website?”
• Measure Visits to your website (sum of sessions)
and measure Unique Visitors (sum of unique
persistent cookie ID s).
• For both of these metrics, focus on the long-term
trends.
• Go as far back as you can to look for seasonal
trends and look for other patterns in the data
• Q2: “Where are Visitors coming from?”
• Look at two reports: Referring URL s and Search Keywords.
• Referring URL s help you understand which websites are
sending you traffic and which are not.
• It is a great way to begin to understand both what you are
doing that is causing traffic to come (relationships, direct
marketing, other campaigns, affiliates, and so on) and what you
have not done that might be causing traffic.
• look for how much traffic you get for search engines (in your
referring URL ’s report), and then dive deeper into what
keywords and key phrases send traffic from each search engine
• Look for non branded keywords. They will indicate that you are
getting prospects— people early in the consideration cycle—
and that you are getting traffic at the right level for your
branded keywords.
 Intent
• Q3: “What do I want Visitors to do on the
website?”
• Why does your website exist?
• What are your top three web strategies (paid
campaigns, affiliates, trying to get Digg’ed)?
• What do you think should be happening on
your website?
 Metrics
• Q4: “What are Visitors actually doing?”
• Look at these four details in your reports:
• Top entry pages Home pages are dead.
Thanks to search and marketing campaigns,
people come directly deep into your website.
Identify the top 20 “home pages” of your
website.
• Mark these as important,
 Metrics
• Top viewed pages This is a great way to know what content
is being consumed, and it will probably be different from
what you think should be consumed. The top viewed pages
can also help you, in conjunction with top entry pages, see
why people end up looking at what they do.
• Abandonment analysis You have surely created your first
couple of funnels right now (for your order-taking process
or for the steps it takes to submit a lead or take a donation).
• Check out the funnel steps where the highest abandonment
is happening.
• Visitor behavior there will identify big opportunities that will
improve outcomes for you, fast
Conversion Funnel
Foundational Metrics
Traffic Sources
 Acquisition Strategy
• Visitor acquisition methods: what are they? Direct Traffic
represents all those people who show up at your website after
typing in the URL of your website or using a bookmark.
• Referring Sites represents other websites that link to you,
including blogs, industry association sites, forums, competitors,
your mom’s site that proudly links to you, and so on.
• Search Engines, well, that’s you know who: Google, Yahoo!, Bing,
Ask, and others. This bucket will include both your organic as well
as your paid (PPC/SEM ) traffic, so be aware of that.
• Finally, there is Other. This bucket contains your display banner
ads, email campaigns, social media campaigns, affiliates, and so
on.
• Typically you are spending money with these places to acquire
traffic (except for search
 Analysis
• Low Direct Traffic number could indicate issues with
retention or truly connecting with customers.
• Next, look at Referring Sites to identify sources that don’t
know you but are sending you traffic. You might visit the
referring pages and see why.
• For some solid sites, you might want to establish a
marketing relationship. Usually, referring sites link to you for
free, and you want this number to be as high as possible,
although it will never be 80 percent! Though, if this number
is 2 percent, you may not be spreading your marketing
message or value enough to get people to link to you.
Segmenting paid and Search keywords
 Analysis
• drilling down to specific websites that send
you traffic and, of course, drilling down to
keywords and key phrases that are sending
you traffic.
• Both of those help you understand that critical
customer intent.
Percentage Short Visits
• Top entry pages, keywords, and bounce: what are
they?
• H ere’s a metaphor: you have many doors into your
department store.
• With Top Entry Pages and Bounce Rate, you identify
doors that are not letting people come into your store.
• The Top Entry Pages report shows you the top home
pages that let your Visitors.
• The keyword report helps you identify keywords
where something is amiss. It’s even better if you look
at just your paid search keywords.
• Bounce Rate measures stinkiness from a customer’s
perspective: “I came, I left.” Pages with a high Bounce
Rate are not delivering on the promise that drives
customers to your site. The ones in the top ten entry
pages report need your attention. You fix ’em, and you
increase the likelihood that people will go deeper into
your site and maybe convert.
• The keywords report is even more interesting. Here you
have intent. The customer is telling you why they might
be visiting, and keywords with high Bounce Rates are
where you are not meeting that intent. You may be
ranked for the wrong keywords, or the pages these folks
land on may not have the right calls to action. Fix it.
• What do you do next? I
• Experimentation and Testing. Start with simple A/B tests.
Start with a free tool like Google Website Optimizer; it can
do 95 percent of what any paid tool can do. If you already
have a paid tool like Optimost, Offermatica, or SiteSpect,
then go for it with one of those.
• Pick pages you want to fix, create a couple versions of the
pages, and put them into a test. Change copy, content,
images, and calls to action—everything is fair game.
• With testing, you improve the pages based on customer
feedback.
 Site overlay report
• The site overlay report shows the number of clicks on each link on a
page
• The site overlay report shows % Page Views, Time on Page, Time to
the Page, % Exits, and Keywords that brought people to the page. In a
nutshell, it’s everything you would ever want to know to judge the
performance of a page.
• What is it telling you? W hen you look at the site overlay report, you
are looking for clusters of heavy clicks. Look for the top two or three
most clicked links, and try to reconcile that against links that you want
Visitors to click.
• See what people are clicking “below the fold,” and look for any
surprises there. Also, look at links that ultimately drive high
conversions (you can have conversions on an ecommerce website.
• Look for things that connect with people. For example, do more
people convert on the site when they click Product Comparison on
the home page or when they go directly to a product page?
Naviga
tion
report
with
page
level
effecti
veness
 Actionable Insights
• What do you do next? I dentify improvements to your
pages.
• Consider merchandizing and cross-sell and up-sell
opportunities now that you know what people like. For
example, no one is clicking your blinking promotion in
the middle of the page because it looks like an ad!
• If your tool allows, segment the clicks. Where do people
who convert click vs. everyone else or vs. everyone
from a search engine or an email campaign?
 Visits to Purchase report
• Visits to Purchase: what is it? Your web analytics
tool starts anonymously tracking a visitor from
their first visit. When they purchase something
from your website, that event is noted.
• The Visits to Purchase report shows the
distribution of the number of visits it took for
someone to purchase from your website. A
“purchase” can also be a submission or a lead or
another such outcome.
Visits to Purchase rates
 Days to Purchase
• What do you do next? The sister report of Visits to Purchase is
Days to Purchase. The intersection of these two reports helps
you understand how many days pass between visits.
• For example, most people may make a purchase after three visits
to your site. But those three visits could be more than fifteen
days. Or it could be that those three visits were on the same day.
• This analysis helps you understand customer behavior in a very
actionable way.
• Now you can go back and optimize how you sell each item and
how you advertise and market it, and you can even optimize your
inventory system!
Outcomes by all Traffic Sources reports
 Customer acquisition analysis
• Sources of Traffic: What kind of people are
coming to our website
• Whether the sources are quality sources?
• Which sources are leading to our
Goals(outcomes)?
Monthly Revenue Trend
Segmented Monthly revenue Trend
 Home
Page
effectiv
eness in
driving
engage
ment
Aggregate metrics
Distribution of pages read during each visit
Internal site search Analysis: Site Search
Overview
Internal site search keywords
usage
Comprehensive site search data by specific
site search terms
Measuring site search quality:
Site Search Usage
• When you look at how your internal site search is
used, you need to answer the basic questions first:
how much is the search function used, and what
keywords are used most?
• Remember Bounce Rate? Some web analytics tools
provide a Bounce Rate for site search. It is called %
Search Exits. It measures the same phenomenon as
Bounce Rate: the number of people who leave your
website immediately after seeing the results
provided by your internal site search engine.
Bounce Rate for site search
Measuring search quality with Results Page
Views/Search
% Search Query Refinements for site
searches
Search refinement for keyword
“segmentation”
Segmentation options for site search data
 Analysis
• Do New Visitors to your site search more than
Returning Visitors? For example, for my real estate
website, Visitors from which city search more, and for
what?
• Is there a difference in internal site searches done by
Visitors from yahoo.com vs. those from google.com?
Visitors who enter the site from my campaigns on
custom landing pages should not be doing internal site
search because I have created the most glorious and
relevant landing pages, so are they still searching?
Goal Conversion Rate for Visits with and
without site search
SEO ANALYSIS: Optimizing organic search
traffic
SEO ANALYSIS:Organic and Paid traffic trend
 Analysis
• Why did the paid search strategy get increasingly
successful while the organic search strategy went
nowhere? What is unique about our website and
content? Is our business (content, products, services)
so dynamic that organic search won’t work for us?
Why the “overreliance” on paid search?
• An effective search strategy is a portfolio strategy.
You must optimize for all major search engines, and
you must effectively use paid and organic search.
Doing only paid or only organic is suboptimal.
 Content Coverage
• You can measure the impact of your SEO efforts in terms
of content coverage in two ways:
• • You can measure the amount of content being indexed
over time (this should go up if you publish new content).
• • You can measure the number of pages on your site
that get traffic from search engines.
• If your website is being indexed correctly and
• your SEO efforts are working, then over time the
number of pages that get direct traffic from search
engines will increase.
Google webmaster tools Crawl stats report
Content
coverage
report:
organic
search
landing
pages
Keyword Performance: Top Search Queries report, Impressions vs.
Traffic
OUTCOMES, GOALS REVENUE
AND ROI
Segmented conversions: All Visits vs. organic
search traffic (Non-paid Traffic)
Ecommerce metrics for organic traffic
Correlating organic search traffic with Goal
Conversion Rates
DIRECT TRAFFIC REPORTS ANALYSIS
E COMMERCE REPORT OF DIRECT TRAFFIC
• Content analysis Note what pages/content directories
these (UNIQUE VISITORS) people visit most often. Look
at their click pattern in the site overlay (click density)
report—what does it indicate in terms of their
preferences? Note whether the internal site search data
indicates particular needs in terms of products, services,
or other needs.
• For example, analyzing Visitor Loyalty and Depth of Visit
could reveal that most Direct Traffic visits frequently and
tends to read only about sports and entertainment,
while all other traffic sources seem to gravitate toward
politics and culture. Actionable insights
• Purchase behavior Visitors who come through
Direct Traffic are often, but not always, existing
customers, and understanding what they buy is an
insightful exercise.
• Or in case of non-ecommerce websites, you want to
understand the behavior around submitting leads or
contributing donations and other such Outcomes.
• This data can be especially useful for future
targeting possibilities; this is a delight if you have
analyzed the behavior to understand seasonal
impact
RICH EXPERIENCE ANALYSIS:EVENT
TRACKING
CAR CONFIGURATOR EVENT TRACKING
MODEL
VIDEO EVENT TRACKING MODEL
 Car
confi
gurat
or
event
tracki
ng
optio
ns
Goals,
Goal
Values,
and
Econo
mic
Value
From a strategic perspective, what is the most important thing that your
website is solving for?
• If one metric could identify that your business is going up in flames or
not,
• which one would it be?
• • Which metrics will tell you that the three business priorities you are
executing
• against are having an impact?
• • Have you separated the nice to know from the have to know?
• • If you had $100 to divide amongst all your web activities, how would
the distribution of money look? Who gets the most investment?
• • What is the biggest threat to your existence, and how do you know
whether it is already harming you?
 Actionable Outcome KPI’s
• Task Completion Rate is the percentage of Visitors to your website who rate if
they were able to complete the primary purpose for their visit.
• Share of Search is the percentage of traffic you get from search engines compared
to your key competitors. You are doing search engine optimization, and you have
invested in paid searches. You may be happy with your slow but steady
improvements with traffic from search engines or from specific keywords. But
what about your competitors? How are they doing, and how are you doing in
comparison?
• Visitor Loyalty measures the distribution of the number of Visits by each Visitor to
your site; that is, it answers this question: “How many times did Avinash come to
my website?”
• Recency measures the gap between two Visits by the same Visitor
• RSS /Feed Subscribers measures the raw number of people who have signed up
for your website or blog’s RSS feed. Measuring Feed Subscribers is key because the
content from your site is being consumed off-site, in feed readers that might be
web-based or software-based. This activity is usually invisible to your web
analytics tool.
• The % of Valuable Exits metric measures the percentage of people who leave your
website by clicking something of value to you.
• Cart and Checkout Abandonment:
• Cart Abandonment (percentage) This is 1 minus (the total Visitors
who start checkout divided by the total number of add to cart clicks).
• Checkout Abandonment (percentage) This is 1 minus (the total
Visitors who complete checkout divided by the total number of
people who start checkout).
• Days to Purchase shows the distribution of the number of days it
takes someone to make a purchase on your website. Visits to
Purchase shows the number of Visits until purchase. Each metric
helps you understand the stretch of time it takes someone to make a
purchase on your site. Based on what the data reveals, you would
change your marketing, messaging, and calls to action.
• Average Order Value is the total amount of revenue divided by the
total number of orders received
• Opportunity size: 2% conversion rate. What is
the opportunity. You can do this by analyzing
the content Visitors consume on your website.
For example, 20 percent of the Visitors went
only to Jobs, 20 percent downloaded your
press releases, and the last 60 percent went to
your product pages. There you go: a primitive
realization that your opportunity pie is not 98;
it’s 60
 Suggestions for micro conversions
• Call Avoidance: This is the amount of Visitors who see the phone
number page (hypothesis: if the site is good, this amount goes down
over time).
• • Content Consumption: This is the number of Visits over time to each
technical support core area (for example, different products or types
of problems).
• • Tickets Opened: This is the number of technical support tickets
opened on the website (and over time compared to those opened
over the phone).
• Sales: This is the Revenue from referrals from the tech support site to
the e-commerce site (sometimes the best solution to fix a problem is
to buy the latest version of the product or an upgrade).
• • Net Promoters (or Likelihood to Recommend): This is the percentage
of people (or an indexed representation) who will recommend the
company products after an experience on the tech support site.
• The term economic value is the imputed value of an
action taken by someone on your website. The
question you must answer is, “As a result of this action
by a Visitor, was any value created for my business?”
• The way I compute economic value is to figure out the
value of a highly qualified list of people. It turns out a
recent qualified mailing list cost $4 per email address.
• I can take that as a proxy for each of the 23,000 Feed
Subscribers I have. Last month I added 470 new
subscribers. Value? 470 × 4 = $1,880.