All About: Web Analytics
Average Time Spent
Exit Pages
Entrance Pages
Bounce Rate
Repeat Visits
Feed Subscribers
Top Internal Search Keywords
Conversion Rate
When looking at the success of your site, metrics can determine what needs to be changed or what needs to be completely overhauled. Popular web analytics tools like WebTrends and CoreMetrics can help you analyze important data and how to use it going forward.
According to makeuseof.com, key metrics you should measure include:
Average Time Spent
This Average Time Spent (ATS) metric indicates the amount of time a visitor spends on your website and pages. Its usually a good indicator of the quality of your website (depending on the type of website). The longer the ATS, usually, the better. However, a long ATS can be an indicator of a bad website experience and that people cant find what they are looking for. Its best to combine it with the bounce rate and exit pages (see below) to get a more accurate picture of the quality of your website content. Also, the average time spent doesnt take into account the last page saw (it has no way of knowing when the visitor closed their browser or walked away), so blog home pages suffer from this.
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Exit Pages
This metric indicates the amount of exits from pages on your website. Therefore, it reveals the pages on your website that drive people away. But remember, some exit pages are more natural exit pages, like purchase confirmation or newsletter signup confirmation pages. Look for the highest exited pages that seem to be an important path of your websites flow, like products pages or info pages, and improve these.
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Entrance Pages
All too often people just analyse and improve the homepage, because they think thats where the majority of their traffic arrives from. However, all too often the reality is that many people will arrive deep into your website through search engines. Looking at this metric reveals which of your pages are most often used as entrance pages. Look to improve these pages and make sure its easy for visitors to navigate from these pages - otherwise these entrance pages will become exit pages.
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Bounce Rate
This is one of the most under-used, but most revealing metrics. To put it simply, it indicates the amount of people that, upon arriving at your website, immediately leave. Therefore, its a great indicator of the quality of your website. Bounce Rate is the percentage of single-page visits from entrance page visits for individual pages. In particular, its very revealing to check out the bounce rate for your paid search keywords - spend more on the keywords with low bounce rates, and cut out keywords with high bounce rates. A bounce rate below 40% for pages is considered good.
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Repeat Visits
This is another great metric to use, and is a great indicator of the quality of your website. Simply put, the more your visitors return, the better your website is likely to be - so therefore, you should try and get your repeat visits as high as possible. The higher the percent of repeat visits versus first time visits is another great indicator to use for site quality.
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Feed Subscribers
This is a great metric, but only related to blogs - in fact its only usually found in RSS feed tools like Feedburner.com. If you have a blog, its essential you sign up to a service like this so you can monitor the amount of subscribers to your blog content. The more subscribers you have, the more popular your blog is likely to be.
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Top Internal Search Keywords
Dont confuse this with search engine traffic metrics - this is for searches actually performed on your site (like the search box in the top right hand corner of this website). This is one of the most revealing metrics you can use - but why? By looking at the keywords people use to search your website, it tells you exactly what people are wanting/expecting to see on your website. So, if you have a website about guitars, but people are searching for keyboards, then you should check to see if your website is confusing for visitors, or consider offering content about keyboards.
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Conversion Rate
Lastly, but certainly not leastly, knowing the conversion rate on your website is one of the most powerful things to know and act on. And not just conversion for the site as a whole but you should be looking at conversion rate by page or set of pages. Ideally you should set up a funnel for each conversion so you know exactly where people are leaving before they convert - a prime candidate to analyze conversion rate and funnel is pages within a shopping cart. Also looking at conversion rates by referrers gives a good indicator of the sources of traffic to your website.
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