Why are we talking about metrics and not insights?

The common theme that runs through any discussion of web analytics is that the industry needs to move beyond a focus on metrics and simply providing reports to instead focusing on the provision of insights and recommendations. I totally agree, in order to add value to a business and justify our salaries, that this is what we need to be doing. But the other point that is often raised is that web analytics is really hard – it is the identification of these insights and recommendations that is the really hard part. I believe that everyone needs a starting point, some simple metrics that may not provide any real insights but give the reader a quick overview of performance. While simple and possibly not insightful in themselves, these metrics do indicate if some aspect of performance has changed and they can also give some hints about the areas that should be examined in more detail in order to do that adding of value.

Traffic Metrics

The starting point for any review of the performance of a website must be the level of traffic that it has. That is the number of visits to the site, the number of people making these visits and the level of interaction they had with the site. These really are simple metrics but they instantly tell you if something has happened to your site performance. An unexpected change to any of these metrics would usually be the first indicator that something has broken or that the new marketing campaign is having an impact.

Visits

Even I find it weird that I am starting with Visits ahead of Visitors but my gut instinct feel that this is an under rated metric is constantly growing stronger. I am starting to think that the visit, that is a sequence of one or more interactions with a website ending with a period of 30 min of inactivity, is actually the foundation metric for web analytics. From a user point of view, it covers all interactions they have with a website during the period they have engaged with it. Understanding user behaviour during this period is a key element of developing websites and/or marketing that meet customer requirements and expectations.

Traditional offline marketing has a big focus on the importance and value from segmenting customers. The online world can take this a step further by segmenting at visit level. For me, the best type of segmentation is based on customer needs/thoughts/actions. Now a person may have many reasons for visiting a website and to assign them to a single bucket reduced the understanding that can be taken from segementation and an investigation into user behaviour. This is improved by segmenting at visit level, placing into different buckets based on method used to get to the site and actions taken once there.

Visitors

Quite simply the number of people who accessed the website during the period specified. I do not agree with the concept of there being two metrics, visitors and unique visitors, where visitors is the number of people accessing the website per day totalled for the period specified while unique visitors is the actual number of people for that period. Adding visitors up over a number of days and calling it a total is not mathematically or logically sound nor does it provide useful information. Instead, for me, it is unique visitors at daily, weekly, monthly or campaign level all the way.

This number is useful in understanding if more or less people are accessing the site and how many people it actually is who are looking at all these pages, placing these orders, clicking out to other sites. There are issues with the accuracy of this metric due to cookie blocking, cookie deletion and multiple computers but the solution is to accept this fact and move on.

Interactions

Traditionally this metric was the number of page views and it indicated how much visitors were navigating through the site. This concept is changing due to the introduction of so many new ways of presenting information on a website, many interactive and not requiring a page to be viewed. Hence my use of the term ‘interactions’, suggesting this could measure the level to which visitors have clicked on or viewed multiple elements of a website, whether this is a page or something else.

For simplicity, I think many sites can still start with using page views as a measure here. In my previous role at Ask.com, we used the number of queries made as our measure of interaction as that was more relevant than the number of pages viewed. Another alternative could be clicks or screen views viewed – the key point is that it should always be an action that every visitor with even minimal engagement with the website performs at least once. More detailed (and insightful) metrics will cover areas that only a proportion of visitors perform, such as placing an order or viewing a certain type of page but the number of interactions gives the brief overview that is a good starting point.

In my next post, I will go on to describe the other simple metrics that I believe are a good starting point for examing the performance of a website.