Right now, I want to talk about 3 pieces of gold that will help you know what is bringing in the traffic, where and who your greatest supporters are, and what your visitors think about your website overall.

These 3 pieces of gold actually come from 3 sets of metrics, which are:

1. The overall site usage statistics
2. The list and data for your most visited pages
3. The list and data for your traffic sources

Site Usage Statistics

The site usage statistics is actually a grouping of multiple data points that when combined, give you a clear understanding of what website visitors think about your website.  When analyzed, you can quickly determine what visitors think about your website (could be a combination of performance, aesthetics, or content,) how long you have captured the attention of your visitors, and if your traffic building programs are working.

This grouping consists of the following:

1. Visitors/Unique Visitors (otherwise known as hits and visits)
   The visitors/hits data point tells you the number of times your website was viewed during a specific time period and includes multiple visits from the same individual. The unique visitors/visits data point tells you how many actual people came to your website.What’s the gold?
   Watch the ratio of unique visitors to visitors (or number of visits to hits depending on the terms used.)  If you see that the number of visitors/hits keeps growing proportionally to the number of unique visitors/visits then you know that something on your website is causing a lot of individuals to keep coming back to your website over and over again.  This is awesome because each visit is another opportunity to convert the visitor to a customer.  So if these two numbers are very close to being equal, then apparently there is not much of value or nothing that is causing visitors to return to your website after their initial visit.  So they came… they left… and they never returned during that time period.
2. Pages per visit
   This data point shows you on average how many pages a visitor looks at before leaving your website.  To understand the importance and value of this data, you need to know how many active pages are currently in operation on your website. With this, you will know how powerful your content is.What’s the gold?
   If this number is low, then your visitors are not looking at much of your content before they are deciding to leave. This means they’re either not finding what they are looking for, they did find the information they were looking for but it didn’t cause them to engage you, or maybe they were just glancing around your website.  You want this number to be proportionally high to the full number of pages on your site. If it is, it would tell you that your content has enough appeal and value that your visitors click through quite a bit of it before they leave.  So out of a 10 page web site, you would love for them to read 6 or more pages.  If this isn’t happening… it’s time to review your content!
3. Bounce rate
   This data point shows you the number of times people came to your website and left from the same page they arrived on.  This essentially means that they did not look any further than the page they landed on. This can easily be a metric that is looked at negatively since for the majority of websites, it is a high percentage.  For us, it tells us if our inbound marketing strategy is working!What’s the gold?
   If this number is extremely high when compaired to the number of visitors (the percentage is 80% or higher,) you know immediately something is wrong with the website and you need to make some emergency changes. People are telling you that either they can’t figure out how to access the rest of your pages, whatever they’re reading is not what they’re looking for, or something is completely turning them off about your website (potentially offensive material.)

   If this number is slightly high, then it may mean that visitors are not finding what they are looking for on the page they arrived on.  This could mean that your inbound marketing strategy has some flaws in it.  For example, the links that show up in the search engine results or on your online marketing ads are pointing to a page that is not converting visitors. So does it have the right content? If you are paying to send traffic here… you’re wasting money!  Cut off the spending and fix the page first!

   If this number is low (say below 40%) then it means that on average, your visitors are at least looking around your website a bit before leaving. This is a pretty good metric and is about the average.

What’s the overall gold?
The combined gold of the site usage statistics is that you can immediately determine the overall performance of your website, knowing how many visitors come, how long they stay, and what they think about your website overall. Consider this a quick snapshot of the overall health and growth of your website.

Your Most Visited Pages

The statistics that make up the most visited pages listings focus on the content of your website and can include data points such as how many of your site visitors viewed that page, how long they stayed on that page, what page did they come from and what page did they go to next.

What’s the gold?
This list shows you what content on your website attracts the most eyes to it.  So if you see certain pages attract the most visitors, you would want to build on that content to include more like it or change other pages to mimic its layout, its wording, and its structure to help increase the page views of all your pages.  This may also identify the content that is the most important to your visitors, so you would want to be sure to make this content even easier to find, access, and read.

Your Traffic Sources

This statistic helps determine the reach of your website. It helps you understand where the majority of your visitors are coming from. It is typically broken down into three categories: direct traffic, referring sites, and search engines.  Direct traffic means that they entered your web address directly into their web browser address bar, referring sites are all sites that have a link to your website somewhere on their pages, and search engines obviously lists traffic that came from the different search engines.

What’s the gold?
This statistic tells you who knows about your website, how they are getting there, and where you need to improve in order to get more traffic.  If the bulk of your traffic is coming from search engines, then you are potentially missing out on additional traffic that could come from other websites that link to you.  It also means that your offline activities (marketing, advertising, networking, etc.) is not causing anyone to come directly to your website.  Ideally, you would like all three to be equal, but it’s not likely.  Most traffic comes from search engines, but there is great benefit in having other websites link to you (as they could be a source of your greatest fans) and having a large amount of direct traffic is a clear indication that your offline marketing activities are doing well at bringing traffic to your website.  So work on these two sources just as much as you would want to have the #1 spot on Google!

Where do you find gold?

What about you? Where do you find gold nuggets of information in your web statistics?  Share with us below in the comments!

“Clients are saying they want accountability for every dollar they spend, and they want cause and effect. Clients will continue to rally behind ideas that build business, and we as an industry have to accept that things will never revert back to the pre-recession mind-set that wasn’t totally focused on accountability.”

Wow! Now that’s a wake-up call if I ever heard one! Time for us to wake up to the fact that the world in which we once operated and conducted business has made some permanent changes! Interestingly, professional marketers and agencies are not the only ones who need a change in our thinking. Business owners and organizations also need to wake-up to the fact that if they want accountability from their marketing, they themselves now have to become accountable to the decisions they make and the support they provide!

In other words, the time of playful ad spending on low result producing activities is over. In comes the sternness and structure of performance-based spending.

What is Performance-based Spending?

The idea behind performance-based spending (or performance-based marketing) is that for every activity you engage in, you are tracking multiple metrics used to determine the overall effectiveness of the implementation.  In other words, for every medium, technique, and message you engage in, there should be built-in metrics that are fed by captured data that will be analyzed to determine the cause and effect of the activity.  Without the metrics, you’re just scattering money into the wind.

Those metrics, when analyzed against the established goals, will give you the activity’s performance.  From that, you can determine if the activity simply needs to be tweaked to increase the already positive results, OR you have clear indication that the activity is not producing results and therefore should be stopped. The focus is on the cause and effect… the return on the investment… the performance of the implementation.

Performance-based Spending Leads to Accountability

For our marketing strategies to truly be valuable, we HAVE to implement, track, analyze, and report results. The results do not simply include subscriber or viewership numbers, total impressions, the click-through rates, or the amount of traffic driven to our web sites, but the actions and transactions made by individuals directly with our organizations.  This processes of “implement, track, analyze, report” brings accountability into the structure of how we develop and implement our marketing strategies.

Wikipedia talks about accountability as “responsibility, answerability, enforcement, liability with the expectation of account-giving.”

Put into my own terms, here’s what I believe marketers AND businesses should be accountable for regarding how we market to our audiences:

1. Responsibility
   You are responsible for the research, planning, development, and decisions you make to engage in certain marketing activities. No pointing fingers. No “he said/she said.”  You all agreed and you all made the decision. Getting past this point helps you take quicker action to prevent any continued losses.
2. Answerability
   Both the marketer and the business are answerable to each other and themselves as to why an activity did or did not produce the desired result. If it did, hey… it’s time for a celebration.  If it didn’t, try to identify the potential reasons a failed result was produced.  This could bring to light major issues that need to be immediately dealt with!  Could be something operational with the business, or it could be a major deficiency on the part of the marketer! Figure it out by communicating with one another!
3. Enforcement
   A central step in the development of your marketing strategy should be a “Strategic Marketing Action Plan.”  This document is not just an outline of the specific activities you are engaging in, but is also a guide with planned action steps that should be followed should an activity or even a whole strategy fail.  This gives you quick, decisive actions that will be taken to begin the process of rectifying the situation.  Don’t focus on the failure, start enforcing planned actions to prevent future failures.
4. Liability
   Our decisions, our actions and our reactions are things that may prevent us from reaching success in our marketing.  They become a liability; something that restrains us from probing deeper and pushing farther with our strategies. We have to accept that these liabilities exist, but work to ensure they do not hinder us from always moving forward.  You can be accountable for past decisions, actions, and reactions… just don’t live in the past.

Plugging accountability into your marketing is step in the right direction to put a cap on wasteful ad spending.  And in tough times such as these, we need to be sure that every dollar we spend marketing ourselves is in some way producing a measurable result.  Show the result, save the dollars!

Questions for Thought

Do you have accountability as part of the structure of your marketing?

What are your thoughts or experiences with engaging in marketing activities that did not capture valuable metrics to prove its effectiveness?

Are there any horror stories of a time you spent large sums of ad dollars on a complete bomb?