Web-Metrics Express: What You Need to Know to Avoid Mistakes

by Pete Gaioni

Published on March 23, 2010

Tags: Collaboration, Marketing Tips, Measurement, Web Analytics, Websites

Looking for ways to use your website metrics but don't know where to begin? Let's start by putting Web analytics into some context.

What they can't do is offer a magic formula for success on the Web; taken out of context or misunderstood, they can even result in poor business decisions.

What they can do is help you build a picture of your website and its users' behavior. Though the picture is a snapshot of a given moment, and from only one perspective, it's an important one.

Approaching your website's analytics as a three-step process will allow you to not only understand the tools available and what they have to offer but also create a gauge by which you can determine how well key business objectives are being met.

1. Understand the basics

It's a crowded landscape—and it's not obvious which numbers need your vigilance. Below are the most basic, essential Web analytics data that you need to understand and monitor.

Unique visitors: This metric tells you the number of potential, new clients.
Total visitors: This metric tells you how often your site is visited.
Pageviews, unique pageviews, and click-through rates: These metrics, sometimes referred to as "impressions," tell you where users are going on your site and can help you understand what site content is the most relevant to visitors (so you can create more of it).
Keywords: This metric shows you the keywords through which people found you and how each keyword converts for you. For example, people who search for "car dealership in Seattle" convert a lot better than people who search for "car reviews."
Entrance pages: This metric shows the content through which people found your site. Identify that content, and create more of it.
Traffic sources: This metric tells you where your traffic is coming from. This is a great metric if you are trying (and you should be) to measure how much traffic each campaign is driving and how each campaign is converting.

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Pete Gaioni is strategist at iFactory, a provider of innovative, inspiring, and intelligent interactive solutions to the world's leading institutions. He can be reached via pete@ifactory.com.

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