Question

Topic: E-Marketing

Analyzing Website Analytics: Interpretation?

Posted by Anonymous on 7/27/2009 at 7:04 PM ET 125 Points
Our website traffic has been up over 2000% since our redesign and social media strategy launch. Great, right? But wait - our average page views have been slowly going down as traffic rises. The most popular pages on our website are our blog pages. It seems many are arriving via Google, Twitter, and other social media avenues. I suspect that people are arriving, bookmarking or subscribing to our RSS feed. Our B2B conversion is what is expected. What do you think could be affecting the inverse relation between traffic and page views? Do you have any sources of info on this topic to share?
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  • Posted by wnelson on 7/27/2009 at 7:54 PM Accepted
    Kimberly,

    You have LOTS more traffic - you did a good job with SEO, PPC, links management, etc. Great! They aren't looking at many pages - simply put, means once they arrive, they aren't seeing what they care about.

    But, you know what? average page views is a web analytic, not a business measure. What you want to measure is your conversions. What has happened with conversions since you changed the website? OK, you're going to tell me, "We don't sell anything on the site - conversions happen after the site is visited when a prospect contacts the sales or customer service person. OK. Again, how's your conversions going? Have the sales guys asked, "Where did you find out about us?" If you have 2000% visits and an average of 2 page views per visitor versus 4 before, but you have had an increase in prospects of 200% - who cares about page views? Of course, you may have a lag here, depending on the length of your sales process.

    I'm not very surprised that you have a large increase in visits but everything else is down - including sales conversions. If your traffic is from "social media," remember that social media is mostly about "free" stuff, not sales! Social media users don't buy from their social sites, for the most part. The best use of social sites is brand promotion, not sales. Having social media people sign up for RSS feeds and reading your blog - that's a good "conversion rate" for that.

    I hope this helps.

    Wayde
  • Posted by mgoodman on 7/27/2009 at 9:28 PM Accepted
    What's the call to action in your promotion plan? It's obviously working, but maybe you are not segmenting your audience properly or fulfilling their expectations when they get to the landing page.

    Get someone to go through the landing process and give you a professional assessment of what's working and what isn't. You may even want to design some simple A/B tests to see if you can identify what's affecting page views.

    And Wayde is right about not being able to take page views to the bank. What counts ultimately is conversions.

    Need some help with this? Contact me offline and I'll give you a couple of recommendations. It would be worth paying an expert to help you figure this out. It'll cost less than losing the opportunity to convert all these new prospects/visitors.
  • Posted by melissa.paulik on 7/28/2009 at 3:01 PM Member
    You should also look at your blog metrics. If the blog is the first page they go to, are they actually remaining on the blog for at least a couple of minutes - long enough to read the post that caught their eye. Or, are they bouncing immediately?

    If they are bouncing then you're not catching their interest with the blog so you have very little chance of driving them to your main site.

    If you find that your blog is maintaining their interest, but not enough to drive them to your site, consider adding some calls to action on your blog page. e.g. you can add your white paper downloads, webinar registrations etc.

    I would recommend steering as clear as possible from company-centric calls to action on the blog page. Chances are good that your blog visitors are not looking for product info yet, but this is a good opportunity to get them into your nurturing program.

    All the best!

    Melissa
  • Posted on 7/29/2009 at 11:55 AM Author
    Thank you for the answers. Originally, I wanted to just throw the situation out on the table and see how it was interpreted...

    However, what I really want to know - is if YOU (not a speculation) have had a similar experience on pages with RSS feeds. Personally, when I find a new blog page I tend to subscribe in Google Reader and then follow the reader for updates. I don't stay on the website and keep reading. So have you seen a negative inverse relationship with volume going to your blog and page views?
  • Posted by matthewmnex on 7/30/2009 at 8:59 PM Member
    I have not specifically measured the relationship between page veiws pe visitor and traffic coming from Social Media and rss feeds but I can tell you that in general, we do see a direct trend / correlation between volumes of traffic and pages views per visitor.

    Whenever we run a large campaign, we boost traffic but inversely, page views per visitor decline.

    When we don't run campaigns, then the traffic arriving is highly qualified because they took the time to search us out so therefore, the interest level and PV per Visitor rises.

    It is all about relevancy and 'qualified traffic'.

    I looked at your site and I have to say IT IS BEAUTIFUL.
    Congratulations on a fabulous design.

    In terms of bringing traffic, what you need is 'qualified traffic' not just any old traffic :))

    Social media sounds great but where are you focusing your attention? Business sites like 'linked in' or 'Viadeo' or other 'commercially relevant communities' may be yielding better results than facebook or twitter for sure :)

    Make sure that you tag all your traffic from the source so that you can analyse PV per visit and conversions from 'the specific source' of that traffic.

    We run a very complex network of:

    SEO,
    paid google / yahoo ads
    affiliate banners - email campaigns
    directories
    social network and rss feeds

    Just about everywhere and anywhere that we can access potential traffic (all in all hundreds of different potential sources). We use specific tracking for every different source so that we can track the performance right through. In this way we can better understand where to find the most profitable traffic and where to assign our budgets and resources.

    I hope that some of this is of help,

    Good luck,

    Matthew

    PS: as mentioned above, Page views is a web metric. We don;t really measure it seriously because we are not in the display business. It is therefore not really relevant to our business model.

    If we were generating income from ad display, then we would make it a key metric.

    Good luck.
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