Measuring the Customer – An Introduction to Metrics
Friday, October 19th, 2007What are your customers really doing?
Reviewing website metrics is the easiest and most efficient way to see how your customers use your website. In examining this information, website owners can gain a sense of how many people are visiting their website, where the visitors are coming from, where they are entering and exiting, the average number of pages viewed per visit, and other facts that will educate the website owner. These statistics will allow you to better analyze how your customers are using your website including the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.
The goal of website traffic analysis is to assess how well or how poorly your website is working for your visitors. From these statistics you can gain valuable insight around how your customers are using your web applications, and if necessary, make enhancements to improve the overall customer experience.
The following terms are commonly found in most analytic tools:
Hits: There seems to be some confusion regarding the terms used to describe website visitor traffic. We usually hear website owners speak in terms of “hits” to their website. Hits don’t accurately describe the number of visitors viewing the website – they are actually just any sort of HTTP request made to your server. Not only are requests made for website pages, but also for all the images and other files associated with viewing a single page. Therefore, one page view could actually result in dozens of hits. If a single user visits many pages on your website, this visit could generate hundreds or even thousands of hits. This can excite some website owners, but this number is not a reliable indicator of how many people have actually visited the website.
Number of Unique Visitors: The term that website owners want to focus on is the amount of unique impressions that are generated by their website. A unique impression will measure the number of actual people visiting the website based on their IP address, browser, and operating system. No matter how many “hits” a visitor registers on your website, the server will record the session as one unique visit. Thus, the number of unique visits gives us a much better idea of the amount of traffic the website generates. What we want to look for is a trend in the average number of unique visitors. On a day to day basis, there may be a good amount of volatility in the number of unique visitors, but we want to pay attention to the trend of the average number of visitors per month. Optimally, we’d like to have the number increase on a monthly basis.
Entry Page Statistics: From these statistics we can learn which page people are using to enter your website. Most visitors will enter from your home page, but you may notice that up to 50% of your website traffic originates from a page other than your home page. It’s important that your website has an easy-to-use navigation structure to ensure that visitors can find the information they are looking for, even if they don’t enter through your website’s main page.
Bounce Rate: The bounce rate can be defined as the percentage of people who visit your website and immediately leave. Don’t get worried if your bounce rate is high – most websites have a bounce rate of about 50% or so. If the bounce rate is unusually high, you can experiment with your website to try and retain more visitors. Maybe you need more enticing graphics, less text, faster loading pages, or a more engaging design.
Exit Page Statistics: These statistics will show you where people are leaving your website. When you know which page is losing the bulk of your website’s visitors you can experiment with some changes in an attempt to retain more visitors.
Average Time & Page Views Per Visit: Website visitors are very goal-oriented and task-driven. Upon visiting your website, most visitors will merely scan the page to quickly determine whether or not it contains the information they are searching for. By analyzing the average amount of time spent on your website and the average number of page views per visit, you can determine how engaging your website’s content is. The key to retaining visitors and increasing the number of page views is to have relevant and interesting information on your website. Remember – content is key!
Top Referring URLs: This statistic lets you know where the bulk of your website’s traffic is coming from. This is important if you’re pursuing a website marketing campaign or search engine optimization campaign because you can easily judge the campaign’s effectiveness by looking to see how many visitors each marketing method is generating.
Top Search Words & Phrases: This information will let you know which keywords and phrases visitors are searching for in Google and the other search engines in order to find your website. With this information you can gauge the effectiveness of a search engine optimization campaign, or get an idea of how your website’s keyword density should be altered to position it for the keywords and phrases that you’re targeting.
Country of Origin: If your product or service has global appeal then knowing where your customer comes from globally is important to you. For instance, if you own a retail store that caters to the European Union and you notice that 90% of your website traffic is coming from the U.S., then it can easily be determined that you need to rethink your online marketing strategy.
Companies who do not measure the customer experience of their website or applications are at a disadvantage because there are so many businesses out there that do and those companies are capitalizing on what they have learned. There are several free and easy-to-use applications such as Google Analytics, which allows businesses to measure their success in metrics. For more advanced applications or richer measurements Gomez is a better choice.
Paying attention to user needs and analyzing how your customers are using your website will ensure that your web applications are easy to use and will increase the chances that your customers will want to come back again and again.
By Haley January Eckels
