Aussie Web Analyst

The engagement merics that I discussed a few weeks previously are a useful method of understanding user behaviour on site. However it must be remembered that they are averages and that there is no such thing as an average user. So while these are useful as a single number representing these metrics, there is an alternative way of looking at these or similar metrics that can be even more illuminating.

Using the example of page views per visit, while the average for a site might be 3.50, in actual fact some visits would have involved a single page view while others would have involved 7, 8, 9 page views or even more. A frequency table can be developed showing the number of visits that contained each number of page views. While useful, this doesn’t give an easy overview of user behaviour that can be trended over time, which is the stage we are trying to get to. So we need to simplify the frequency table.

The way to do this is to create three or more groups within the frequency table with the simpliest option being of course just three. These three groups are commonly described as light, medium and heavy. The groupings can be defined any which way appears best. This is not a situation where one rule fits all, the definition needs to be customised to the situation.

A nice way of doing it is to split the groups fairly evenly. Alternatively, just use what appears to be the most logical manner of splitting the groups based on desired user behaviour. For page views per visit, you could define light as visits containing 1 page view, medium as 2 to 4 page views and heavy as 5 + page views.

This gets you the number of light visits, medium visits and heavy visits – an easy overview of user behaviour that can be trended over time. However, it can be taken to another level of usefulness simply by converting the absolute numbers into proportions. This means you can see very easily an increasing trend in the proportion of heavy visits over time – a metric that could be used as a KPI and suddenly we are in a very useful place.

Metrics that I have referred to previously that can easily be treated in this manner are frequency (visits per unique visitor), page views per visit and duration per visit. However the principles can be applied to any situation where each case of one metric can be linked to a variable number of instances of another metric e.g. each unique visitor can have a variable number of visits during each time period.

Tags: Engagement Metrics, Web Analysis