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Website Critique   URGENT - Need Help Fast!  
 
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Help With Website Metrics
Posted By: MissyV on 6/8/2005 1:00 PM (CST) 500 Points
We are in the middle of redesigning our corporate website. Currently there is nothing in place to monitor traffic on the site, no search engine registrations, etc. It is on my plate to help change that. My question is two-fold:

First: What is the best way to measure traffic driven to our site? I want to be able to see and track more than just clicks on our homepage - but is it that I want to see people who have spent 'x' number of minutes somewhere in the site - and if that is the answer, what is the number of minutes? Or is it that the user has clicked on 'x' number of pages - and what would the right number of pages be?

Second part of question: Does the number of clicks to a site affect that site's search engine ranking?

Thanks in advance!

Posted by: skoobie99 Member Response
6/8/2005 1:23 PM (CST)
My web hosting service uses WebTrends and provides me access to their data. They provide a slew of information that you can analyze for hours if you feel like it - I think you can also set up customized reports.

As far as what is the "right" number of clicks, or minutes (seconds?) for a website, it really depends on your content - obviously the more (and high quality) content, the higher your numbers ought to be.

I am pretty sure the different web search engines measure the number of people who click through to various websites and this affects rankings - I also get search engine referral info from WebTrends by the way.

Hope this helps,
John
 
Posted by: Pepper Blue Member Response
6/8/2005 2:19 PM (CST)
Hi MissyV,

You need web analytic solutions which are available either by software providers or as a service supplied by an ASP.

Quite often your ISP already has this in place for you, although limited in functionality, check with them first to see what they have.

Both software and ASP offerings run anywhere from free to $1.95 a month to $1000's of dollars.

The important metrics depend on your situation and there are entire books wrote on this subject. A Google search will also provide you with a wealth of information and links to blogs and forums.

However, one way to look at it is the most important analytics are those that lead to conversion to a customer, all the way through the shopping cart if you have one, newsletter signup, white paper download etc.

It is important to know what search engines people are coming from especially if you are running a pay-per-click program with them.

Here are a couple of solutions:

Traffic Facts from Go Daddy, $1.95 a month and you get a lot for this $1.95 but you need to be hosted on Go Daddy also, which is a good thing:

https://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/hosting/stats_Landing.asp?se=%2B&ci=261

Urchin, now owned by Google:

http://www.urchin.com/

If you don't know how to work with them, you can look at web analytics all day and try to make sense of them. I know of a couple of great books that will help you out here, but I can't think of them right now, email me offline and I can get that info if you want.

I hope that helps.
 
Posted by: miker Member Response
6/8/2005 3:06 PM (CST)
We run WebTrends 7 small business. Essentially, it allows for 1,000,000 page views per year. Depending on your business you may need to get a beefier version. I believe they also have a Pro and Enterprise. Obvioulsy, with the extended page views (probably unlimited in the higher versions), you also get a lot more features....which you may or may not find useful.

WebTrends has both a shrinkwrapped and "on demand" versions. The on demand essentially runs the application remotely and you are to upload your log files to that server, where they will crunch the numbers on their end, and you will use your browser to access the reports. We chose to go with the software/shrink wrapped version.

WebTrends looks great on paper. It says it can do some really amazing stuff. Which it can...the problem is setting it up. I encountered MONTHS of time back and forth with the tech support at WebTrends, and finally was resolved with an entirely new product version (7.1)....

WT will do everything that you want and more...it's setting up and tech support that have the issues...

Search engne ranking greatly depends on links from other sites that have large amounts of links to them...and so on. So your popularity, and the popularity of the sites that are linkiing to you affect your ranking...among a ton of other metrics...

M
 
Posted by: MissyV Author Response
6/8/2005 3:19 PM (CST)
Thanks to all the responses so far and I will check out the ideas suggested. We will be hosting our website inhouse and we're trying to figure out the 'plan' for tracking what is going on out there in cyberspace.

I'll leave this open for a bit and see if anyone has more specific answers for whether we should be looking at the number of pages or the amount of time that people spend - which is more standard?

From what I read here, the number of clicks to a site doesn't make a huge amount of difference in ranking with search engines - it's more about the links to/from the site and the ability of the spyders to index, yes?
 
Posted by: Pepper Blue Member Response
6/8/2005 6:08 PM (CST)
Hi MissyV,

Here is a link to some great articles that should help you out:

http://www.iboost.com/promote/marketing/analyzing_traffic_statistics/

There is a whole lot of things that happen to determine your search engine ranking. Read these articles on linking:

http://www.marketingprofs.com/5/mcgovern36.asp

http://www.marketingprofs.com/5/mcgovern35.asp
 
Posted by: dennish* Accepted Answer
6/8/2005 6:33 PM (CST)
There are four types of software to monitor and report on visitor activity on your website.

1. Desktop Software. You run this on your desktop computer. It reads the log files on your webserver and creates reports.

2. Server Software. The software will run on a server and access the log files and provide reports.

3. Upload Logfiles to Vendor. You upload your logfiles to the vendor and they produce a report for yo.

4. Realtime Monitor. You insert some html code in every page you want monitored and a remote server gets the hits in realtime and you view dynamic reports online.

I don't believe time on a page can really be measured accurately. Many people multitask, so even if a page in in the visitor's browser is open, who knows if they are even reading it.

The important stuff - what unique visitor, goes to what pages, on using what search terms, using what link. Then did the visitor take action - buy something, register, download, etc.

I always recommend you do not go after a homerun with a website. You hit singles. You may do some Pay per Click, but always try to get ranked on first page of organic searches. Great content, purposefully written around key words/phrases that helps a visitor to fullfill their need and yours always works. Do a little sprinkling of tags, links - you will win big. It takes 6 to 12 months to get there and continuous babysitting to stay there.

For example we took a client with a website selling items online. They went from $6,000 per month income to hitting $17,000 in one day last week in just over 6 months time.

Good Luck!
 
Posted by: MRowland Accepted Answer
6/8/2005 7:26 PM (CST)
Missy,

I'll leave the software packages to others. In our business, we measure the impact of the site on our client's business goals. I would recommend the same for you.

What specifically is your goal? Base metrics like page views, session times, etc. really are not useful in and of themselves. Let me give you an example....

Looking at your site, one of your offerings is designer collections for image work. So, how would you measure the business goal of driving sales from this area?

First of all you ask for registration data to see the offerings. Good start because you can now calculate the conversion ratios you need to see how successful your site is at attracting visitors to register with you. First metric to use is unique visitors to your home page. Second is unique visitors to your design page, with the third being the number of unique visitors that visit your registration page. The last metric is how many registrations did you gain. Use each as a percentage of the last (2/1, 3/2, 4/3, and 4/1). These tell you in turn:
1) What percentage of unique site visitors are interested in design offerings 2) What percentage of those unique visitors are interested enough to register 3) What percentage of interested unique visitors acually register and 4) Of the total unique visitors to your home page, what percentage actually registered with you.

One thing I noticed after registering and seeing your design area is that you have no way to quickly inquire about a design online. Nor can you order. Lastly, there is no real call to action. All of these would allow further analysis to be done which would help your business team better understand what role the web site plays in overall business goals.

Please feel free to contact me via the email address in my profile (or your registration database) if you want more ideas and information about measurements and success metrics for your company.

Good Luck!

Mike
Impact Interactions
Building Successful Interactions for Business Online
 
Posted by: KSA Accepted Answer
6/8/2005 8:04 PM (CST)
MissyV,

It's good to hear that you are updating the site. I'd suggest starting that project by sketching out the structure of the site based on your objectives.

Right now, the home page doesn't really say what the site is all about. And, its not obvious how a visitor would move through the site. As Mike said, start out with what you want the site to do for you. That should drive the structure, as well as how you measure success.

I agree with Mike in terms of giving visitors opportunities to interact with you or place an order. That is how you will really tell whether the site is working for you or not.

However, I'd also suggest that you think about the registration for the Designer Collection Patterns. In my experience, visitors are often hesitant to give out their information until they are really sure they want what the site has to offer.

If whatever is in the Patterns section is one of your key selling points, I'd suggest considering leaving that section open to everyone. Then, design some other tools to get contact info. Maybe an analysis of the visitor's needs, or if there are products they could purchase online, add a shopping cart or Buy button function. Or, even a contact form to ask a question about a product or service.

You'll need to integrate the stats you get about visitor traffic with the number of responses (e-mails, orders, registrations) to really complete your measurement, as Mike said.

Also, right now, the home page on the site has no keywords or descriptions. It also doesn't appear that there are any links to your site. And, at least for the home page, the lack of relevant copy would make it difficult for a search engine to figure out what your site is about.

I didn't have time to read McGovern's articles, but I am sure they are very insightful. A very oversimplified way to look at search engine ranking, however, is this:

The Engines want relevancy. The meta tags and copy should be targeted to researched keywords. Engines also love backlinks. They figure that if a number of other sites link to yours, your site must be pretty important. So, make sure these types of issues are addressed in the redesign.

Hope this helps, and good luck!

Kathleen
 


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