After researching web metrics, I have a better understanding
of what is important to measure. Some measurements of a website provide less information
than other web metric tools.
One tool that is increasingly important is the conversion
rate. Rich Page from makeuseof.com
rates conversion rates with an A. Conversion rates are an important tool to measures
the quality of the visitor of the site. If the website has a low conversion rate,
it means the website is attracting the wrong type of visitors or the website is
an ineffective persuader. Through the measurement of conversion rates, we can
find the amount of people who performed a desired action from the website.
If a
website is trying to sell something, conversion rates would measure how many
people purchased from the website. If the goal of a site was to gain
subscribers, conversion rates would measure how many people opted-in to receive
information from the creator of that site. Rich suggests you should funnel for
each conversion in order to see which lead is coming from which landing page.
This will give a more accurate picture of how people on getting to the site.
Another aspect to measure is the amount of unique visitors.
Measuring specifically which visitors are going on your site is important. Noah
Parsons writes in The
6 Most Important Web Metrics to Track for Your Business Website, that
unique visitors are people who visit the site regardless of the amount of times
they visited. This gives an accurate depiction of how many physical people are
visiting a site versus relying on just a number count of visits per time
period. It can also show how many times that unique individual visited a site in
a specific amount of time. This especially helpful in seeing how effective a
website is by looking at how many times a unique individual visits a website.
If they keep coming back, there is obviously a reason they do. You can also
compare repeat individuals versus first time visitors to show overall website
effectiveness.
Lastly, it is important to measure the bounce rate of a
website. The bounce rate measures how many people visit a page a then immediately
leave the page. Hartley
Brody suggests to look at landing pages with high bounce rates because
these pages are turning people away. You should look into why visitors might be
immediately leaving and change it to be a more effective page. Bounce rate will never be zero because we all
mistakenly click on sites we didn’t mean to click on, but reducing the bounce
rate to as low as possible is important for online success.
These are the top 3 web metrics that are the most important
in measuring success of a site. Keeping these aspects of website analytics is
crucial to making improvements to websites.
