How Web Metrics Can Help Reach Site Goals

Monte: Now, what are some basics that people have to know, to be able to interpret the data that they receive? Okay, so now you have all this data--

Brett: Right.

Monte: --now, I guess the saying goes that data is knowledge, then you turn knowledge into action, you know, you process the knowledge, put in the action. You’re speaking at this conference, and you know, I don’t know if it was about the tips on how to turn that information into knowledge that can power more revenue, more information about how to do a better job on the web, but I’m sure you have some tips for people.

Brett: Right, yeah. It’s not exactly what I spoke on, but you know, absolutely. I think it’s an extremely important piece, and I’ll say the first thing that you want to do is be familiar with your own site. You know, you should know what the goals of your site are and establish those goals up front. Even if you--when you built your site you didn’t think you really had any goals in mind, like if I’m telling you, you should have a conversion goal and you’re thinking what the heck is a conversion goal, it’s just whatever you’re trying to get people to accomplish, whether it’s a lead capture, a form fill, e-commerce sale, whatever it is--

Monte: Right.

Brett: --that is your goal. And you can have multiple goals per site. So the first thing is to make sure you have some basic business objectives. Once you’ve established those, be able to track those, and with Urchin it’s fairly simple, you basically tell us the URL of the page, like your thanks for buying page, for example, your receipt page, or your thanks for filling out the form, or whatever those are, those are your conversion goal pages, you just tell Urchin what those are, and then, you know, it’ll do your analysis to tell you if that happens. You can also tell us what the funnel process looks like to get to those. You know, someone comes in my landing page, then they go click on my catalog, in my catalog they select a product, and then they go into my shopping cart and buy something. So that’s what a funnel is. Anyhow, once you know those things about your site, that’s where you need to start and look at the data and see if those things happen. And it can also be helpful to start looking at your--you know, they call them key performance indicators in the industry, and you have those KPIs established, then you can start to see if they’re positive or negative. And if they’re positive, you look at why they’re positive, what’ve you done to make, you know, achieve your goals, make things happen, if they’re negative you say, okay well before something was positive and now it’s not working, so what can we change to make it work.

Monte: Right. And of course, if people are bailing out of the process, you’re able to see that, you know, in the web analytics, and you can definitely get to a point where you need to make a change, you need to make a change to help that process so you can get to either a close, a sale, a form fill out and all that, so.

Brett: Absolutely. If people are leaving the funnel process, you can see that in the reports, and it’s very useful to understand that. If you have a high abandonment in certain areas, go to those pages and see what you’re doing wrong on those pages.

Monte: Right, right.

Brett: And one of the other things is we try to do is show people not just the quantity of what’s happening on their site, but also a little bit of the quality metrics about what’s happening. Give you one quick example, is our site, Overlay Report, and a lot of the other vendors do a site overlay. The way we do it is you can actually see your own website, you’re looking at your site, we put the metrics right on top of the links where when people are looking at this page what do they click on.

Monte: Oh, that’s nice.

Brett: And what we do, is there’s a blue bar that says--it’s basically, you know, out of 100% of the clicks from this page to other pages, how many were on this link, right, so 20% or whatever, and then we have below that a green bar that says the quality of those clicks, and the quality is how many of those clicks converted into one of your goals that you’ve established, so the idea is to very easily and visually understand if, you know, this little link over here not driving much traffic to it, but it’s converting very highly, you might want to increase the exposure to that link.

Monte: That’s great.

Brett: Yeah.