Week 6 - Important Web Metrics

This blog post is going to be on "The 6 most Important Web Metrics to Track for Your Business Website" by Noah Parsons. You can find the full article at articles.bplans.com/the-6-most-important-web-metrics-to-track-for-your-business-website/. Overall I found this article to be useful and a quick insight on visitors, referrals, bounce rate, exit pages, conversion rate, and top ten pages.

Visitors: 
Visitors are important as they represent the audience size of a given website or blog. One should know their visitors as they can be "unique" as he describes. If you have two visitors, one that visits 5 times and one that visits once; you have some interesting data on your hands. You now have a total of six visits, with one visitor visiting the site multiple times - this is a unique set of data. The overall effectiveness of a website can be measured by the amount of visits, more visits the more popular and effective the website or blog may be.

Referrals:
Once understanding how visitors work, you can get a better understanding of referrals. A referral is when a visitor clicks a link that directs them to your site. Think of it as a site or ad referring your website to a visitor. It is important to know where your visitors are coming from as it can help for marketing purposes when setting up ads or really anything for your site.

Bounce Rate:
Bounce rate is when someone clicks a link that redirects them to your site and they immediately click the back button. We have all been here and do this a lot probably. Think of it as walking into a store, doing a quick look and walking out, its the same thing as a bounce rate in analytical terms. With good visuals one can decrease the bounce rate with an inviting site.

Exit Pages:
Bounce rate and exit pages are often mixed up but they are not the same. An "exit" is when a visitor views multiple pages and then leaves your website. Sometimes a high exit rate can mean the visitor found what they were looking for. On the other hand it can also mean that their are problems within your page(s) as the visitor is leaving.

Conversion Rate:
Conversion rate is one of the most important metrics to track according to Parsons. "Conversion rate is the percentage of people who achieved a goal on your site. Goals are things like completing a purchase, filling out a contact form, or viewing a certain page on your site". Understanding and using conversion rate can be an advantageous tool. If the rate is low then that means the site is not effective or it is attracting the wrong type of visitors. It can be useful in the sense that lets say there is a sudden drop in the conversion rate, this can be used as an indicator that there is an error in the site as the visitors can not achieve their goal - like making a transaction.

Top Ten Pages:
Knowing your top ten pages of your site will allow you to get to understand your audience better or see where changes need to be made on other pages.

Overall, analytics can be overwhelming yet so intriguing at the same time. Start small Parsons says, stick to one metric tool that you think is the most important and go from there !

Hope everyone find this somewhat helpful, even understanding the lingo can help.
-STURCO