Blog
By Roger G. Best
One of the biggest questions I’m presented with is dealing with making an on-line presence more than just a brochure that is viewed on-line every once in a while (my words, not necessarily theirs). They will ask me questions about how do drive traffic to their site, or a similar question. And, let’s face it, we don’t spend all that time and money to develop/maintain the site just because we want the bragging rights of saying we have one. We do it in hopes that “if you build it, they will come”. I’ve heard that somewhere before. But, it’s important to look beyond “hits” or “visits” when we evaluate the effectiveness of a web site. Let’s look at a few things that can help us focus on what’s really important.
How long were they on the site: It’s not uncommon for people to look at the amount of time someone spends on a our site, or on a given page, and think that we’re doing good if they stayed there for a while. There are a lot of problems with using that particular metric as a measure. First, I can’t begin to count the number of times I’ve went to a site and had someone walk into my office (or had to answer a phone) just as the page opened. That page might be open for an extended period of time before I ever got back to it, and when I did, I found the site to be just short of useless and immediately closed the site. Sorry, I didn’t mean to really burst any bubbles, it just happens sometimes.
Instead, how about if we look at the number of pages visited. The more pages a site visitor views, the more they are engaged in the site. When they visit a page, hang out there for a few minutes and leave, the site has not done anything to draw them deeper and grab their attention.
Site Referrals may also be a bad metric: Site referrals only tell you where the visitor originally found your site. Although that’s not a bad thing to know, it may not always be a particularly useful tidbit of information. What you’ll frequently see is that they were referred from a search engine (like Google, Bing or Yahoo) but it won’t tell you why they found you.
But if you look at Entry and Exit pages, you’ll begin to have a better idea as to the “why”. Different pages typically have a specific topic covered and that will give you a better clue as to what originally brought the visitor to your site. This information will help you better understand what is drawing the most visitors to your site, which will allow you to better plan your site in the future.
How about Conversions: Now that sounds like a good metric. I mean, if I sell something on my site, I want to convert those site visitors into clients/customers. But that info alone doesn’t give us a great picture. It’s quite possible that someone came to the site with the specific intent to buy something. That’s not a conversion that can be attributed to great content, it was their intent to begin with.
A better metric might be to look at Abandonment. Where, exactly did we lose the visitor? If we look at the people who abandon a shopping cart part way through the process, we may find that we’ve made something a bit difficult, or asked for unnecessary information that scared them off. Or what about that free download of the PDF that we do to get their email address? If that’s the purpose of the free download, you may not want to abandon the requirement of entering the email address to get the download, but this will be a clue that we might need to give them more reason to give us that info prior to asking for it.
There are lots of things to look at, but my goal here is to bounce around some ideas that my help to reshape the way we measure success and in doing so, found more of it.
Do you have more ideas that you’d like to add? I’d love to hear them. Add your thoughts and/or comments below.
Roger