Web Metrics: It’s How We Measure and Learn

One of the most important tools to any marketer is knowledge. The more we know, the better our ideas will be and the greater success we will have. So it’s no surprise that with web metrics, the more we know the better our chances will be in improving our efforts across the digital landscape. The primary goal of web analytics is to “analyze and statistically process user and customer behavior."

Defining Web Analytics

Techtarget.com utilizes the widely accepted definition of web metrics:

Web analytics is the process of analyzing the behavior of visitors to a Web site. The use of Web analytics is said to enable a business to attract more visitors, retain or attract new customers for goods or services, or to increase the dollar volume each customer spends. This analysis can also include determining the likelihood that a given customer will repurchase a product after having purchased it in the past, personalizing the site to customers who visit it repeatedly, monitoring the dollar volume of purchases made by individual customers or by specific groups of customers, observing the geographic regions from which the most and the least customers visit the site and purchase specific products, and predicting which products customers are most and least likely to buy in the future. 

Avanish Kaushi said it best in his book, Web Analytics 2.0,  …”to change how the world makes decisions when it comes to online.”

Google was quick to create the right platform where someone with basic knowledge of websites can simply apply one line of javascript code and within minutes, have access to a plethora of data we use to define everything we need to know about how their website is performing.

A key learning from anyone looking to dive into Web Metrics is to have a deep understanding of the fundamental metrics. These foundational metrics are the building blocks to understanding how a website is performing, which can then be used to improve on the results of these metrics. 

Identifying Foundational Metrics

In my research, various users list different “foundational” metrics. Matthew Wells, of Web Metrics and SEO at West Virginia University, mentions five metrics: Page; Page view; Visits (sessions); Unique Visitors; and Event. 

My Internet Marketing Partner, mentions eight that include some of the aforementioned:

• Visitors / Visits: It may help if you think of visitors as being a count of people and visits as being a count of the number of times those people visited your website. 
• Time on Page / Time on Site: Time on page is simply the average amount of time that people visiting your site spent on your page. 
• Bounce Rate: The bounce rate is a measure of the percentage of people who came and landed on a page of your website and then turned around and left immediately without visiting any other pages on your website. 
• Conversion Rate: Your website’s conversion rate is the percentage of people who come to your website and then go on to make a purchase, fill out a form, or whatever the desired action is for your website. 
• Exit Rate: The exit rate is a page level statistic that shows you the percentage of people who leave your website from any given page outside of the bounce rate.
• Engagement: Website engagement is a way of seeing how well your website is engaging and interacting with your audience. 

With these foundational metrics in mind, goal can be set to measure the successes and failures of a website. The results help in determining what the areas of improvement for continued success are.