People have a very narrow view of web analytics. “That’s where they measure the clickthroughs and pageviews, right?”
But that definition is about reporting. Reporting is all about setting up specific KPIs (key performance indicators) and then glancing at the results every now and then.
Analytics is about curiosity. (Great article about this by Neil Mason over at ClickZ.) It’s about optimization. At the moment, it’s about website optimization. But that’s changing.
Some companies see the Internet as their main way to communicate with their customers. They are looking at these numbers as a means to optimize all of their marketing. And then all of their customer communications. And then their business as a whole.
What do our customers want? What interests them? What shall we build for them? Where do they want it? These are the sort of questions that web analytics can deliver.
If you stop thinking about it in terms of pages and clicks, and start thinking about it in terms of revealing human behavior, then web analytics is an interesting and vital datastream into all of your customer analytics and business intelligence.
Jim
Thanks for the insights.
There are tons of web data. What are the critical few that we should focus/look into, so that we could reveal human behavior effectively?
Sampson Lee
gurublog: The Effective Experience
As proof that I am a consultant, the answer is “It Depends”.
Retailers:
Order/Buyer Conversion Rates
Average Order Value
Percent New Visitors
Ratio of New to Returning Visitors
Page Stickiness
Lead Generation Sites:
Lead Generation Conversion Rate
Percent New Visitors
Ratio of New to Returning Visitors
Page Stickiness
Percentage of Visits by Entry Page
Content Sites:
Percent Returning Visitors
Ratio of New to Returning Visitors
Average Pages Viewed per Visitor
Heavy User Share
Key Conversion Rates
Support Sites:
“Information Find” Conversion Rate
Percent of Visits Under 90 Seconds
Percent Returning Visitors
Top Internal Search Phrases
Percentage of Visits by Entry Page
But even those are just generic suggestions. Determining a specific company’s or specific project’s critical few KPI’s is the cornerstone of success.