Have you taken a peak at your traffic today? Is it up? Yes? Good.
Or is it?
What did you look at to determine if your traffic was up? Hits? Assuming even a mild sense of internet sophistication, hopefully not. (If you did, quickly acclimate yourself to How Idiots Track Success, and then grab a cup of coffee with good old Ted).
Maybe you looked at visitors? Unique page views possibly? Time on site? Bounce Rate? Pages per visit? These metrics are getting warmer, but still not quite there…
Evaluating whats working and not working in your little corner of the internet requires a deeper, more thoughtful look beyond raw numbers increasing or decreasing. Avinash Kaushik offers some great insight:
Click-stream has become a lot more sophisticated. What you should measure is quality.
Who’s coming to your site? Is everyone in purchase mode? Lets say you’re running a small business that relies heavily on staffing, and you are constantly recruiting employees. Are your metrics improving because customers are finding your site easier to use, or because your visitor demographics are changing? Did you bump up your search marketing only to be more easily found by job seekers? If attracting talent isn’t a goal for your site, job seeking-visitors are muddying up your numbers.
Conversely, your metrics could be in decline not because things have taken a turn for the worse, but rather that you’ve improved the quality of your clickers. If you run a commerce site, your pages per visit and time on site declining could certainly signal lower customer engagement and interest, but could it also signal that those changes to your check out process you made are working? Or that your new product organization is making it so much faster and quicker for customers to find what they’re looking for?
Scenarios similar to this one highlight the need for a clear understanding of the following questions:
- What are you trying to accomplish with your website?
- What are the relevant metrics to track progress against those goals?
- Should you be segmenting your visitors before tracking these metrics?
Without answers to these, that low bounce rate really can’t be entirely trusted.
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