Website analytics - What metrics to measure?

The website analytics association defines website analytics as “the objective, tracking, collection, measurement, reporting, and analysis of quantitative data of internet to optimize websites”.

“The e-tailing group 2007” report says online merchants convert only 2-3% of their website traffic to buyers. It also emphasis that website analytics is the better way to resolve the issue. (For more details on this see “Few Convert at E-tail sites”).

You might have some sort of website analytics software to measure the effectiveness of your website. But…

How often do you use it?

Have you ever taken any decisions after completing the analysis?

Have you ever measured to check the impact on the bottom-line?

What are the metrics that you measure?

Most of the ecommerce websites fail to use even the basics of analytics. Here is the process you need to follow for website analytics measurement. Before jumping into the process see what are the most important factors to measure?

Any ecommerce website would have the following parameters

Increase in online sales and decrease in marketing expenditure, Cost per visitor, Sales per visitor, Conversion rate, RFM analysis (Recency, Frequency, Monetary), Trend reporting, predictive analytics etc.

The following are the Metrics to measure...

• Measure reach
• Retention
  
• Conversion

Measuring reach:

Overall site traffic, no. of visits, no. of new visitors, top entry pages, top exit pages, top bounce rate pages, top contents, percentage of new visitor over returning visitors, impression served, top slip pages, visitor geographic data etc.

Measuring retention:

Measure number of recurring visitors, Frequency of visit, Recency of visit, Overall retention rate,

Measuring conversion:

Overall conversion rate, New visitor’s conversion rate, Recurring visitor’ conversion rate, cost per sale, cost per visitor, cost per new visitor, specific campaign conversion rate, etc.