Analytics & KPIs
Analytics and Key Metrics You will never succeed if you don’t set goals. Without a goal, it’s hard to know what success is. Fine – it’s agreed. You’ll set some goals. Great. Now, how do you measure your progress? Analytics – that’s how. Before we get too far ahead of ourselves here, let’s begin by discussing some key performance indicators (KPIs) that you should be watching. 1 – Unique Visitors 2 – Visits 3 – Page Views 4 – Click Through Rates 5 - Referrers Unique Visitors (Uniques) A unique is basically the very first visit ever by an individual to your website. It’s that simple. Since most tracking will rely on a cookie being set on the user’s computer, though, the same person might slip into the stats as a unique multiple times if they have their cookies turned off. No biggie – most folks have them on, so this metric is key to determining how many new users you are getting during a given period of time. Visits Visits represents all the visits you’ve received for a given period of time. It includes Unique Visitors in its count and will always be equal to, or higher (numerically) than, your Unique Visitor count. Visits are basically the total amount of traffic you’ve seen during the period in question. If a user comes back 5 times in one day, that’s 5 visits. Unlike Unique Visitors which only tracks the user once – on their first visit – Visits gives you a sense of returning traffic numbers. This will tell you if users are loyal over time. Simple subtract the number of Unique Visitors from the number of Visits during the period in question and you’ll have an idea of how many people fell into the “multiple visit” category. Page Views Page Views tracks the number of actual pages which were fully loaded by users of your site. This is a useful to know as it’ll give you an idea of how much of your website users are interacting with. Page Views will grow over time and with more Unique Visitors and Visits in general, will come more Page Views. By dividing your number of Page Views by your number of Visits, you’ll know how many pages per visit you’re averaging. The higher this number is the better. If the number is low, get cracking on better internal linking. If the number is already high – like 5 – 7 pages per visit – you’re gold on this stat. Click Through Rates This applies to ads you are showing on your website. If you have ads such as those from Google’s Adsense program in place, this stat is clearly shown in your reports. I consider rates of 3% - 5% or more to be good. Less than that and you’ll want to investigate the ad’s placement in relation to the content, it’s colors, it’s size, etc. Testing multiple ad variations will lead you to the best performer. This metric is critical to comparing types of ad opportunities. Google Adsense might have a much higher click through rate (CTR) when compared to image ads from the Fastclick network, for example. This tells you your users are more likely to take action on the text-based ads Google shows and allows you to easily make the decision on which type of ad to use, or which network to use for placing ads on your site. Referrers This metric shows you where the visits came from. You’ll be able to see how many visits Google sent your way, how many came from other websites where you have links and in general, will pain the picture of traffic trends for you over time. Since you’re optimizing a site to rank well, you should be seeing increasing numbers of visits referred from Google, Yahoo, MSN and other search engines. This data also provides a clue to the viral growth of your site. As users find the content, and link to it in posting forums, or send links to friends via e-mail, you’ll start seeing new referrers cropping up each week in your stats. It’s still more reliable to track your external links through a dedicated tool as mentioned in the “SEO Tools” section of the book, but it’s still useful data. Analytics Options I’ll be up front with this in a couple of regards: 1 – You get what you pay for – free is often useless 2 – There is precious little available for Webmasters looking for free or low-cost options that give you useful data. Given we’re talking about building a content/topic focused site here and showing ads on it to generate revenue, we’ll assume you’re not approaching this with a lot of money to invest up front. So, options such as WebTrends (http://www.webtrends.com/ ), which would give you absolutely every metric you can think of, are off the table. Analytics solutions like this can cost tens of thousands of dollars a year. Currently, one of the most popular options is that offered form Google – Google Analytics (http://www.google.com/analytics/ ). It’s simple to set up (just drop the code onto the pages you want tracked) and gives you all the information outlined above, and then some. It’s designed to integrate with Google’s Adwords program, and in order to get it, you must have an active Adwords account. Don’t sweat this – set up the account, run one ad, even at very low bid rates, and you’ll qualify. Once the Adwords account is live and the ad running, you can apply to the Analytics program. There might be a wait period before they respond, but they’ll get to you. Google Analytics will allow you to track a user from the click on that Adwords ad, right through until they leave your site. It will also show you a “Site Overlay” of how many users clicked on every link on the page shown. This allows you to see what the users find popular and useful and refine your navigation to increase page views. There is no cost for Google Analytics, except that you are spending on Google Adwords to get the Analytics and keep it live. I’m averaging about $20 when looked at this way, so this is a useful, cost effective solution. Clicktracks (http://www.clicktracks.com/ ) is another useful analytics tool, though it’s not free. There’s a free trial, but entry to this level of details starts at about $300. Clicktracks will cover all the bases mentioned above and more. They’ve won some award for their analytics packages and have a solid reputation. They’ve also recently released their Appetizer package, which is free at the moment (http://www.clicktracks.com/products/appetizer/ ). This looks to be a worthwhile option to Google’s Analytics, but only time will tell. There is a boatload of options available for tracking your site’s statistics, but in the true nature of starting a small site and growing it on a shoestring, here are a couple of thoughts on freebies. Since your site is going to be hosted somewhere, there’s a very good chance your hosting provider will include a basic stats package as part of your monthly cost. Have them walk you through how to find it and get it live and working. Some come this way out of the gate and require nothing more than going to a specific URL to see the data. Others require a file be put into a live directory and you’re gold. Your hosting provider will be able to best help you get that moving. Many of the stats packages offered in even entry level hosted solutions will cover those metrics mentioned here and more. Take the time to familiarize yourself with your stats package and layout. Check it every day. Don’t sweat the day-to-day ups and downs – that’s normal. Your goal is steady increases month-on-month. It’ll take a little while to get moving, but you’ll clearly see when things kick into gear. The Stuff To Avoid Notice how we haven’t even mentioned the word “Hits” until now? That’s because it’s a pretty useless metric and has no business being counted as a real KPI. A hit results any time anything from your website is called into being. So, let’s say a user clicks on a “Gallery” page on your site. They see the page and it has 20 thumbnail pictures shown on it. Each of those thumbnails, when they loaded into their spots on the page, was counted as a hit. So, here we have one user and 20 hits. Now ad in the request to create the page itself (another hit), the text on the page, other images, links and more – suddenly that one page represents hundreds of hits – all from one user simply looking at it. Every one of your pages will represent a different number of hits, as the unique content on each page varies. In the end, it’s not a metric used by online businesses to track success. That’s a black and white statement, and I know there will be plenty of exceptions to it, but for the average Webmaster it’s a true statement. Thus I can safely tell you to avoid hit-counters for your website. Those neat little counters that you see on a website low down on the page that click ever higher as users come to the site. OK, neat to look at maybe, but you’ll need more information than “32,008 people have visited this site since January 2001” to make real decisions that will affect your revenue. As mentioned above, you get what you pay for. In most cases, though, you’re already paying for these stats you need if you have a hosted solution or Virtual Dedicated Server. Sure, the pay-for options give you lots more data, but ask yourself if it’s data you actually need getting started. The truth is you might be fine with just the basics you’re already able to access. If you start searching around for other free options, you’ll likely be disappointed in the lack of quality packages available at no cost. There’s a reason quality analytics packages aren’t free – they show you the most important data about your website. And companies like Google and Clicktracks know you need the data.
