NCS is a quick way to see if your visitors are spending too much time trying to navigate to content. The fewer pages it takes a visitor to content, or the more direct path, the better. NCS complements the Content Engagement Score (CES) which lets you know whether visitors are using the most important content on your site.
Navigation-to-Content Score: Compares number of navigation page views to all site page views.
Calculation: Percentage of navigation-type pages viewed compared with all content page views. This is derived from dividing navigation page views by all site page views. A lower percentage indicates a more efficient visitor interaction with the site.
Calculation Note: As with the other metrics in this series, you need to identify navigation pages and measure them separately. Pages include:
o home pages
o portal pages
o search engines
o site maps
o pages provided for navigational purposes
Example: There are 40,000 page views of navigation pages out of 150,000 total page views for the month. This equals a navigation-to-content score of 27%. Here’s how a report might look:
You can make this a much more valuable report by running this for different segments of visitors based on geolocation, domain, first time vs. repeat, as well as adding visit segmentation attributes such as acquisition source. If you use this with the segmentation, you’ll be able to see which visitor groups are having an easier time finding site content.
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If you’re going to eMetrics Toronto, be sure to stop by Analytics in Real Life on Wed, 3/20. I’ll be moderating a panel with Anuschka Van Dijke from KPMG and Nancy Duley, from American Society of Clinical Oncologists. They’ll be sharing their stories on how to get resistant management to come around to the value of analytics. Hope to see you there…
