As I plowed through an extensive analysis of our SEM-in-a-Box product Web site yesterday and today, it got me to thinking about other meaningful metrics to consider in analyzing your Web site stats aside from a conversion event. Sure, total conversions are a hugely important metric for any online marketer to measure ROI, but there are others to consider. You can slice and dice data in different ways to gain additional insights into your site visitors’ behavior, and react accordingly to improve.

• Overall site traffic (unique visitors) - map this metric over a trendline and correlate it to significant promotions or marketing events whose impact you want to measure. Maybe that press release you sent a week ago made way less of a dent than when your chief engineer’s guest column appeared on that industry-specific blog. This metric can potentially be mapped to a branding value for your company - how much is each site visitor “worth” to you, in terms of the site’s overall average conversion rate & order value (if you’re an ecomm site.)
• Day-of-week or even hour-of-day trends - check out the conversion rate on your Web site at specific times. Consumer product e-comm sites may see a spike on Saturday/Sunday, when people are shopping from home in their leisure time, or even during the week at lunch time. Use your site’s specific data to drive more sales volume at the time when conversion rates are higher. For example, you can bid higher on PPC ads and even consider raising your daily budget for those times, to try to get a higher position and hopefully send more customers to your site.
• Pageviews per visitor and average time spent on site - If you have a content-driven site and not an ecomm site, then it’s important to you to know over time how well your site is engaging your visitors. To grow user interaction with pages on your site, you can incorporate links on your content pages that send people to similar content. Hey, if it’s a blog, encourage commenting. What about reader polls or letting people rate your content?
• Top exited pages - where are people leaving your site from the most? What can you do to keep them there? For ecomm sites, the metric would be shopping cart abandons. Did you hide shipping costs till the “checkout” page? (a big no-no!) Or not disclose you don’t take Amex? The better informed your customers are from the outset of a transaction, the more likely they are to stick with you through completing the purchase. And don’t forget about your confirmation page - remind customers on your Thank You page to visit other areas of your site (blog?), or check out related products to what they just bought.
• Top referring keywords - most analytics programs offer a report on what “organic” (e.g. non-paid search) terms are sending visitors & conversions to your site. Take a look at these, compare them to your paid search keywords and determine if it makes sense to expand your PPC campaign’s reach by adding them. If the per-click costs are low, and the conversion rate is good, it probably is smart to add them.

With today’s analytics programs, most of this data is pretty easy to grab. Now it’s just a matter of finding the time to dig into all the numbers!



Posted in: Default | Web Site Analytics