Define Your Metrics

You must pick measures to gauge your success over time and figure out whether moves you’re taking are leading to success. These are often called your “key performance indicators” or KPIs. Choose from among the available tools (see sidebar “Know the Basic Tools” for an explanation of some) and then configure your mix:

Know the Basic Tools

Before you start using Web measurement tools, make sure you and your team are on the same page when measuring your site. Use the right terms consistently. Here are some key catch phrases to get you started:

 • Unique Visitors (also called “uniques"): The number of different computers that come to a Web site. To be meaningful, the measure must be coupled with a period of time - daily, weekly, monthly. Monthly unique visitors is one of the most common measurements in the Web world, that is, the number of individuals who access a site in a month. For example, if one individual using the same computer visits the site 100 times in a month, he or she will count as one monthly unique.

 • New and Repeat Visitors: The number of people who come to the site for the first time in a given time frame, say 60 days, and those who come back for multiple visits in that time.

 • Visit (or Session): When someone goes to a site, that’s considered a visit or a session. Each time the person comes to the site anew, it’s a new visit (or session).

 • Page Views: This refers to the number of times a page with a specific Web address or URL is accessed. Generally, Web analytics software requires a certain proportion of the page (such as 50 percent) to load before the page view is counted. This prevents the counting of accidental or meaningless clicks to a page.

 • Page views per Visit: The number of pages viewed during a visit. This helps tell you how deeply or broadly people are navigating through your site once they arrive. Do they come and see one page then leave? Or do they trawl through the site to consume many pages? If you have a blog that people visit and scroll down, or a page of user photos that has the same URL every day, you may be happy with a lower PV/visit ratio.

 • Time on Page (Time on Site): A measure of how long people are spending on the entire site, or on a particular page, such as a popular community photo or video page. One cautionary note: many experts throw away the visits at the top of the scale. For example, if someone opens your page and then goes to lunch for 45 minutes, you’ll want to try to factor that out when evaluating this number (see “Outliers” in the Understand the Limitations section).

 • Entrance, Exit: These tell you the first and last pages people visited on your site when they came. You may be surprised to find out what pages people enter on; it’s often not the home page. That may prompt you to make those landing pages more inviting or use them to entice people to visit other pages on your site with links or graphics.

 • Referrer (Referring Sites): This let’s you see which other sites are sending traffic your way. For instance, if you trade links with a local publication, you can see how much traffic they’re actually sending you and decide whether or how to cultivate that relationship.

You’ll often hear the word “hits,” but that’s a term that should not be used. Hits are, literally, everything that a server sends to a user from a Web site. Every photo, link, image, block of text, ad or piece of video registers as a “hit.” An individual page can have dozens, even hundreds, of hits.

 • Define your measures of success. A community-oriented site targeting specific groups in that community might want to see growth in new and repeat visitors and in time spent on certain areas of the site, such as a discussion board or photo area. A site with lots of breaking news might expect traffic fluctuations as news ebbs and flows. A site reaching out to local blogs might measure success in terms of the increase in visitors being referred from those blogs. A site that draws traffic from e-mail it sends to the community might see a lot of “direct" visits that don’t come from search engines or referrals from another site, but rather indicate that people have visited the site without clicking on another site’s or search engine’s link.

 • Understand your community and how you’re serving them. If you aim for lots of discussion or user submissions, see if those content areas are among your most popular. Are you targeting a specific geographic community? Web analytics software uses IP address information from Internet Service Providers to figure out where people are coming from, usually down to a city level. Experts say the information is generally above 90 percent accurate.

City-level report from Google Analytics

A “city-level” geographic report from tracking software Google Analytics.

If your audience is not coming from your defined community, that’s a strong indication you’re not reaching who you want to reach. At one blog targeted to the New York media community, for instance, a post on an ad about supermodel Kate Moss appearing nude in a billboard brought a tremendous amount of traffic to the site. But the site’s analytics package showed that most of the traffic to the post was via a site that writes about pornography. Furthermore, the majority of people who viewed the post left immediately and did not visit other parts of the site. In gauging success for the month, the blog then excluded most of the traffic to that post, because the people who came in to view it were not in its target audience.
 
 • Watch referrals, especially from search engines. Nearly all your traffic will come from three sources: direct links (someone types your URL in a browser or clicks their own bookmark or an e-mail link), a referring site (a link from another site), or a search engine. Often, the largest slice is from search, especially Google. Your analytics software will tell you what keywords and terms people typed in search engines that led them to your site.

Once you have your measures, you’ll see typical patterns for your site. Then you can set goals for growth or percentage increases you’d like to achieve. You can see if, for example, adding one more story or blog post per day increases traffic, and by how much, then set a target number of unique visitors and page views over six months or a year. You can add more headlines to a page, or change wording or move items around on a page. If you see a certain kind of story gets a spike in page views, you can do more of that kind of story, or drill down into the analytics package for data on that story to see what more you can learn.

Here, with some images, is one example of a metrics report for a locally focused site that uses Google Analytics for its tracking (more on using this software below). We’ve removed identifying markers to protect the site’s confidentiality. 

For this site, Google Analytics showed a spike in page views on July 2:

Google Analytics page views graph

We clicked on the “Top Content” area under “Content” in the navigation ...

Top Content menu in Google Analytics

... and limited the time span to July 2. We saw the URL of the story that accounted for the spike, and saw that page had more views than the home page that day (the home page is number two in the list below):

Google Analytics Top Content graph

By clicking on that URL in Google Analytics, and also by calling up the actual page on the Web site, we were able to see that the story was our coverage of a local event, a type of story we hadn’t done in surrounding day. We also saw that most of the traffic to that story was “direct” ...

Direct traffic numbers on Google Analytics

... meaning people had probably sent it around via e-mails or perhaps via instant messaging, neither of which were tracked by the analytics software. A lot of the other traffic was from e-mail software that was tracked, as you can see.

Bottom line: We ramped up event coverage and planned to e-mail people who were at the events to tell them we’d written a story, so they’d look and send it around. 

PREV: Making the Most of Metrics

NEXT: How to Get Going: Installing Google Analytics

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Comments

Speaking of geographical targeting, there’s an option in Google’s Webmaster tools that’s not known by a lot of webmasters. Click on Tools, then click “Set geographic target”. From there you can pick the country you want. I don’t know how much it affects rankings, but the option is there, so why not use it?

Comment from Tony at 11:15 am on 12/04/08