The What, Whys, & Hows of Measuring Website Performance
How well is your website performing? If you aren't asking yourself that question, you should be. And when you do, you should be answering it based on quantitative metrics and thoughtful analysis.
Web metrics software is now widely available and allows marketers to track so many different items it can become overwhelming, and consequently, unusable. To help clear the clutter and focus your web performance analysis, here are our guidelines to managing web metrics...the what, whys and hows:
WHAT: You can only manage what you can measure, so measuring key traffic and conversion stats is the first step to website success. And, the data is useless unless is it used. Also, the stats become more meaningful over time, as you evaluate how the metrics evolve from month-to-month and year-over-year.
1. Traffic Stats. Web traffic software can provide oodles of information, but there are really only a small number that are very meaningful to how you measure site success and determine maintenance tasks:
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Visitors. This is the overall traffic number for your site. Different from “hits” which is defined as each server request (a page with 5 images would count as 6 hits…1 for the page and 5 for the image files). With this stat you want to measure both the total number of unique visitors and the number of repeat visitors.
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Page Views. This is the number of overall pages requested from your site, sometimes referred to as Page Loads.
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Length of Time on Site. This stat determines the length of each user’s visit.
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Busiest and Slowest Times. This metric refers to the timeslots and days that yield the highest and slowest amounts of traffic.
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Popular Page Requests. This is a count of the number of times each page is requested, ranked by the highest to lowest requested pages.
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Search Engine Rankings, Referrals and Keywords. These stats show how you rank with the top search engines, the level of traffic coming from the top search engines to your site, and what keywords visitors are using to find your site.
2. Conversion Stats. Conversion stats are generally tracked by offline systems, such as your sales system and should include:
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Email/Phone Inquiries. This is the number of prospects who make an inquiry, either by email or phone, after visiting the website. While email contacts can be easily attributed to a website visit by using a specific email address (i.e. info@xyz.com), you will need to add a process to your phone response that asks, and records, “how did you hear about us.”
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Downloads. If your site offers downloads (audio, whitepapers, etc.), track the number as these count as “leads” in your cost-to-lead metric.
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Orders. This stat is the number of orders generated or influenced by your site. In addition to online orders you should have all offline orders ask the question “did you visit our website.”
WHY:
1. Performance Metrics
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Stickiness. This metric determines just how interesting your site is to its visitors. It’s calculated by the ratio of unique visitors to page views. For example, if you have 10 visitors and 100 pages views, you have an average of 10 pages per visitor. The higher ratio of unique visitors to page views, the more “sticky” your site is.
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Relevance. This metric is based on length of time your visitors spend on your site. The longer your visitor remains on the site, the more relevant the content is to them. The metric looks at the percentage of total visitors that remain on your site for more than five minutes.
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Cost per visitor, lead, and customer. These metrics help you determine your website return on investment (ROI).
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The cost per visitor metric is derived by dividing your total website cost by the total number of visitors to the site.
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The cost per lead metric is derived by dividing your total website cost by the number of leads generated (by phone, email, download, etc.)
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The cost per customer metric is derived by dividing the total cost website cost by the total number of customers gained through the site.
2. Maintenance Metrics
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Best Update Time. This metric is derived from slowest time stats. You will want to be updating your site during your slowest times.
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Best Promotion Time. This metric is derived from the busiest time stat. You will want to coordinate promotions around when your site receives its highest amount of traffic.
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Pages To Update. This is more of an indicator than a metric. By looking at your most popular and least popular page requests, you can determine what’s working and what isn’t, and then make updates base on that information. The updates may be navigational (perhaps the page can’t be easily found), page content updates (to make it more interesting), or keyword (to make it more search engine friendly) in nature.
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SEO. Search engine rankings (what pages are indexed, what their ranking positions are, and how that compares to your competitors) will help you understand how you need to evolve/update your site over time. (If your rankings aren't strong, be sure to download our free SEO Checklist.)
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Also, monitoring the traffic stats on your site by search engine referrals will give you an idea of where your visitors are coming from and what keywords they are using to get there. You can use this information to then make content updates for better search engine optimization.
HOW: First you must gather your data, using web traffic analysis and search engine ranking software. Here are our favorites:
1. Web Traffic Analysis Software
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Google Analytics: The richest set of features in a free analytics tool. Of course it's very Google-centric, but hey...it's free.
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Alexa. Go to this site and enter your URL in the box at the top, hit go, and see your site ranking stats. You can enter competitor sites as well to determine how you compare! And, it's free.
- Visistat: This is the tool we use..and we love it. There is a small monthly fee (starting at $9.95/mo.), but the features are fantastic if you really want to track and measure website metrics in real-time. Along with the traditional stats, Visistat includes Heat "Touch" Mapping (where you see exactly where people are clicking on ANY of your pages), StatCasting® Live Visitor Reporting (where you see how many and who is on your site at any given time...and what page they are viewing), and Website Activity Alerts (where you get email alerts when specified activities occur on your site). Another bonus is that it has a search engine optimization section that will let you know if you have duplicate Meta Tags or other SEO violations. Also, Visistat has two great add-ons: AdCaM® & PageAlarm®. One allows you to track traffic and conversions from a unique URL you use in emails, ads, and other promotional vehicles. The other lets your know when any page on your site is unavailable or your site is down. They have a free trial, so you just must try it now!
2. Search Engine Ranking Software
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GoogleRankings: While the name makes it seem like it is only tracking your Google rankings, this free tool actually allows you to determine your rankings on several other key engines.
- Search Engine Ranking Check: This is a fast (and free) way to determine your page ranking for any keyword or phrase on the top three (Google, Yahoo, MSN).
Once you’ve captured the data, you need to report and analyze it each month. Compare the information month-over-month, year-over-year to understand how you’re doing and if your numbers are increasing, decreasing, or remaining stable.
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