Hack92.Know If the News Is Good

Hack 92. Know If the News Is Good

One of the most common issues in web site meaurement is having the data but not being sure what it means. Knowing whether the news is "good" is central to your company's success with web measurement.

When reviewing metrics, how do you know if "more" is better or worse? It depends on the metric you are looking at and the intent of your site. There are really two aspects of knowing if the news is good. One is understanding the performance of specific metrics: are more page views better or worse? The second is understanding how those metrics compare to those of competitors or other sites driving similar behaviors.

A few metrics are obvious: more sales or leads and a higher average sales price are generally positive (assuming product returns don't increase at the same rate as sales). Other metrics are more challenging. Examples are:

• Page views per visit

• Average visit length

• Visits per visitors during a given timeframe

It's natural to assume that it is a good sign if all three of these metrics increase. But this isn't always the case. It all depends on the goals of the site. If you are running a content site supported by advertising, then yes, you would want to increase all three of those metrics. But if you are managing a lead-generation or online retail site, running these numbers up may not be a positive. For example, optimizing a lead-generation site may increase the number and quality of leads by 50 percent, yet reduce other important KPIs:

The page views per visit dropped.

People were able to find the information they needed in fewer clicks, and the optimized site was able to convert visitors to leads at a faster rateagain, in fewer clicks. In this case, it was a positive that the page views dropped since leads increased significantly. And, from a visitor satisfaction standpoint, it was an improvement.

The average visit length dropped.

In addition to a drop in page views, reflected in less clicks, visitors were spending less time on the site. Again, without focusing on lead conversion, it could be easy to say that the site wasn't as "sticky" as it used to be. In reality, that didn't matter since the conversions were up significantly.

Visits per visitor changed little.

In this example, it didn't change much post-optimization. People normally think that we want site visitors to come back more than once per month, but as you can see, there are cases when that isn't important.

The most important thing is to focus on the key conversions based on your business goals [Hack #38] and ensure that those are moving in the right direction.

7.3.1. Comparing Your Site to Industry Standards and Competitors

"How do we compare to your other clients or the industry in general?" A week does not go by when I don't hear that question. Unfortunately, it can be very tough to answer. There are a few things that can make comparison difficult:

• Different business plans

• Different industries

• Different role of the Web for similar companies in the same industry

• Different site configurations

• Different positions of competitors in the marketplace

• Different mix of clients

• Campaigns and other traffic drivers

You can see how complex it is to get two sites that you can really compare to one another. And then how do you find out about the performance of other sites? There are two primary ways: through research reports and studies or through competitive analysis tools like ComScore (www.comscore.com)or Hitwise (www.hitwise.com).

Most people have seen the research reports from large research firms or smaller niche analysts that can provide incredible insight into specific industries. ComScore and Hitwise have live panels of millions of web users; they track these visitors as they access sites on the Internet and are then able to combine all of the information. This can help tell the story of your site as well as that of your competitors. Since they are basing this on sampling, we would not want to compare what ComScore says about ZAAZ.com traffic to what our analytics tool says about ZAAZ.com. However, it could make sense to compare the data from ComScore for ZAAZ.com against their data on our competitors. By doing so, we could compare our key metrics against the same key metrics on our competitors' sites.

This competitive information can be used for a lot more than just seeing where you stand against competitors. You can learn more about visitor paths, demographics, the percentage of the overall industry visitors who view your site, and more. In addition, you can evaluate the effectiveness of different portions of your competitors' sites and learn from them to improve your site performance.

When trying to determine whether the news is good, remember that you can always improve your site and business. Focus more on making the small, incremental changes [Hack #2] to the key metrics that drive your business. A plan of ongoing optimization focusing on the right things will always benefit you, no matter what others are doing.

Jason Burby and Eric T. Peterson