At the SIC 2007
I gave a presentation together with Dave Collins on "Tracking
Web Activity ". Dave Collins started his presentation
with questions related to the usage of analytics tools, and
I was surprised to see that the majority in the room did not
measure their online actions and results, some of the main
reasons being: lack of time, too complicated, lack of tools.
Lack of time
I consider measuring a website and the web marketing efforts
performance as a critical step in any online business. Investing
the time to define your business website goals and performance
metrics it's a must-have process. Not reporting, not watching
every day if the traffic (page views, or visits or worse hits)
has increased is essential, but measuring what is important
for your business and transforming data into actionable information
is worth all the effort in order to obtain increased revenues,
reduce costs and improve visitor experience.
Allow yourself one hour a week to measure you website online
marketing efforts, to analyze and optimize. Once you notice
the results, hopefully you will have time for an hour a day.
Too complicated and lack of tools
The key is not to dive into the amount of data the analytics
tools provides you, but to measure what is important for your
business. Try to understand the bigger patterns and not to
stick to the micro-level of analytics.
In the presentation (you can download it here),
I outlined some of the key metrics you might use to evaluate
your website success: Cost per Unique Visitor, Cost per prospect,
Cost per Customer, Conversion Rate and Bounce rates.
For instance, you can calculate the cost per visitor and the
conversion rate for a certain period and segment by using
the same metric for every marketing channel. Once you know
how much it costs and how much a visitor coming from a search
engine is worth compared to the one coming from a specific
AdWords campaign , you will be able to make intelligent business
decisions and strategize your next moves.
These are just examples of metrics; every business has its
own goals and thus its own set of performance indicators.
Here's an article on how
to get started with Web Analytics, by Google Analytics
Evangelist: Avinash Kaushik.
A simple scenario on how to get started with Analytics: you
clearly define your website goals and key performance indicators,
set a free analytics tool: Google Analytics or Clicktracks
Appetizer to understand how to use the data on your side.
You watch your top referrals and keywords used by your visitors
to land on your website. You already have an insight on whether
the visitors are qualified traffic coming from related websites
or your website shows for the wrong keywords. If you also
calculate on the top referrals the cost per visitor and the
conversion rate of each one of them, you already have an idea
on how efficient your current marketing spending is.
You can use the Site Overlay feature from Google Analytics
if you have chosen to use the javascript tagging tool to visualize
how your visitors surf your website and how each page is attaining
the goals. An alternative is CrazyEgg.
To have more visual insights I suggest comparing the views
from these two services. Do you notice your download button
is not clicked? Or that some of your landing pages are not
converting? Now you can have an image of user behaviour on
your web pages.
Another great metric is the Bounce
rate, which is an indicator of the quality of your traffic.
If it's the right traffic and you have a high (more than 50%)
bounce rate then you know that the page is not engaging your
visitors and you need to improve it. Set as a goal to decrease
the bounce rate for the most important pages of your website
(say: product description, download page, shopping cart, contact).
These are just a few ideas on how to use the valuable
information and insights that measuring the online performance
will bring you. Just remember that the process is continuous.
Test, measure, optimize and start over.
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