I Got No Ecommerce. How Do I Measure Success? - Occam's Razor by Avinash Kaushik - 0 views
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My recommendation: Measure the four metrics that are under the "Visitor Loyalty" button in Google Analytics (or in your favorite web analytics application). Loyalty, Recency, Length of Visit, Depth of Visit.
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There is one singular reason I loved 'em: they showed distribution and not simply averages for each of the metric!
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Visitor Loyalty: During the reporting time period how often do "people" ("visitors") visit my website?
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The number you are used to seeing is "average visits per visitor". That is usually one point something. It hides the truth.
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For example you update your website ten times each month. If you have 100% loyal visitor base then they should be visiting your website ten times each month. Are they? What's your number? Is it going up over time?
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Action: 1) Identify a goal for your non-ecommerce website for the # of visits you expect from the traffic to your website in a given time period (say week, month etc). 2) Measure reality using above report. 3) Compare your performance over time to ensure you are making progress, or potentially not as in my case…
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Recency: How long has it been since a visitor last visited your website? Sounds confusing? Don't worry it is cool (it even has a psychedelic border! :)……
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As would be the case for a jobs site. Or craigslist. Or any website that wants lots lots of repeat visits. Using this simple report you can now see how you are doing when it comes to the distribution of visitors in terms of their propensity to visit your site.
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Length of Visit: During the reporting period what is the quality of visit as represented by length of a visitor session in seconds.
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But it has always been frustrating to me how hard it is to get away from the average and measure the distribution of the visits to check if the average time on site is 50 seconds because one person visited for one second and the other person for 100 seconds. The average hides so much. Here's a better alternative……
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Ain't that better? I think so. So many things jump out at me, but notice that either I lose 'em right away or if some how I can suck them in for one minute then they tend to stay for a long time. Hurray! I have a better idea of how to interact with my visitors.
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1) Identify what the distribution is for your website for length of visits. 2) Think of creative ways to engage traffic – what can I do to keep you for sixty seconds because after that you are mine! 3) Should I start charging more for ads on my site – if I have 'em – after 60 seconds? 4) If you are a support website then should you be embarrassed if 20% of your audience was on the site for more than ten minutes!
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Depth of Visit: During a given time period what is the distribution of number of pages in each visit to the website.
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You are used to seeing average page views per visitors, above is something that is a lot more helpful. I was also able to get this exact metric from my indextools implementation…..
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Action: There has been so much said about this already so I'll spare your the pain. You can easily imagine how wonderful and fantastic this data is as you go about analyzing experience of your customers (and so much more powerful, a million times more, than average page views per visitor!).
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Socialize them to your key stake holders and decision makers to make the realize what is really happening on your website.
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Absolutely positively work with your leadership to create goals and then measure against goals over time
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Segment the data! For Visitor Loyalty or Length of Visit what are the most important acquisition sources? What are the keywords that drive valuable segments of traffic to the website?