One of my favorite quotes is often attributed to Tom Peters: “What gets measured, gets done.” In web analytics, often what gets measured is associated with money — what brings in revenue, and what costs the client cash.
Last fall I had the opportunity to hear Avinash Kaushik speak at Time Warner in NYC, and one of the things he said that really made sense to me was (I’m paraphrasing here), there’s no point in measuring anything that isn’t actionable. There are lots of KPIs that look pretty on paper, but either they don’t have tangible meaning or you can’t do anything to make them go up or down, so they just clutter things up. As a search marketer, I think it is essential to focus on the numbers that matter.
Essential metrics vary from site to site — they will be different for an e-commerce site than they will for a financial services site, and even more different for a forum or social media site. For me, these are the Big Three important metrics — the things that matter when measuring success towards my goals:
- Conversion rate. My primary goal is to bring in more leads for the sales staff to follow up on. Statistics tell us that on average, only 2% of site visitors ever convert, so it’s tempting to try to increase overall traffic to increase conversions. Sure, it’s great to see site traffic go up (even better if it’s qualified traffic), but if those visitors don’t take the action(s) we want them to take on the site, it’s essential to find out why. Does the site content suck? Is the navigation klugey? Are we targeting the wrong people? Conversion rate is the red flag signaling whether we need to answer these questions. Whether I’m providing conversion numbers from AdWords, our analytics program, or follow the cycle all the way through Salesforce, these are the ones that count the most.
- New vs. Returning visitors. Since we don’t do e-commerce on our site (yet), one of the things that interests me is whether we’re getting a lot of new visitors, or repeat traffic from loyal “old” visitors. Repeat visits can show stickiness and engagement, while newbies can show that we’re getting the word out in ever-larger rippling circles.
- Competitive share of search. This is a little harder to measure, since our competitors aren’t likely to give up their analytics numbers publicly. Google Trends for Websites and Google Insights for Search are interesting (and free) tools, and a good place to begin. Coming from a stint in digital media research, I refuse to use Alexa, and I have serious concerns about the methodology behind services like Compete and Hitwise. However, they do provide a starting place and some numbers to compare ourselves against, even thought the numbers are valuable only in relation to each other.
This is not to say that no other metrics are important. I still measure unique visitors, pages/visit, time on site, search terms, and most popular pages, but these are mostly in a nice-to-know capacity and not really crucial. My VP’s goals include increasing UVs, for example, so she has to provide these numbers on a regular basis. But I think it’s safe to say that what her higher-ups really want to see are higher conversion rates (=>$), loyal visitors balanced with plenty of new visitors, and that we’re stacking up well against the competition in the market.
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That’s a great point – how fortunate to get to see Avinash speak too!
I agree with you about conversion rate – another thing that is crucial to emphasize, especially for clients and sometimes bosses, is that if we don’t have conversions set up correctly there are a host of other metrics that become barely relevant just because we can’t consider them with regard to conversion rate.