Web Analytics Goals, Metrics, KPIs, Dimensions, Targets

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Report Metrics

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Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage. Web analytics is not just a tool for measuring web traffic but can be used as a tool for business and market research, and to assess and improve the effectiveness of a web site. Web analytics applications can also help companies measure the results of traditional print or broadcast advertising campaigns. It helps one to estimate how traffic to a website changes after the launch of a new advertising campaign. Web analytics provides information about the number of visitors to a website and the number of page views. It helps gauge traffic and popularity trends which is useful for market research.

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KEY CONCEPTS

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5. KEY CONCEPTS • METRICS: "The columns" "The units". The actual count for a selected KPI • KPIs: Key Performance Indicators - the important business measures for your

site e.g. Test Drives, Leads, BP

CORE METRICS • VISITORS: person (IP Address) coming to the website • VISITS: How many times has that visitor visited your website • PAGE VIEWS/INSTANCES: counts the number of times an action occurred

Visitor

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Web Analytics: Goals, Metrics, KPIs, Dimensions, Targets

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Web Analytics: Goals, Metrics, KPIs, Dimensions, Targets

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"What is the difference between a metric and a key performance indicator (KPI)?" "What is a dimension in analytics?" "What is segmentation?" "Are goals metrics?" And many more. There seems to be genuine confusion about the simplest, most foundational, parts of web metrics / analytics.

Source: Web Analytics 101

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Web Analytics 101: Definitions: Goals, Metrics, KPIs, Dimensions, Targets

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Business Objectives: This is the answer to the question: "Why does your website exist?" Or: "What are you hoping to accomplish for your business by being on the web?" Or: "What are the three most important priorities for your site?" Or other questions like that. Without a clearly defined list of business objectives you are doomed, because if you don't know where you are going then any road will take you there. The objectives must be DUMB: Doable. Understandable. Manageable. Beneficial. progress objectives directions90% of the failures in web analytics, the reasons companies are data rich and information poor, is because they don't have DUMB objectives.

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Web Analytics 101: Definitions: Goals, Metrics, KPIs, Dimensions, Targets

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Goals: Goals are specific strategies you'll leverage to accomplish your business objectives. Business objectives can be quite strategic and high level. Sell more stuff. Create happy customers. Improve marketing effectiveness. Sell more stuff really means we have to: 1. do x 2. improve y 3. reduce z Improve marketing effectiveness might translate into these goals because currently they are our priorities: 1. identify broken things in m 2. figure out how to do n 3. experiment with p type of campaigns

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Web Analytics 101: Definitions: Goals, Metrics, KPIs, Dimensions, Targets

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Metric: A metric is a number. That is the simplest way to think about it. Technically a metric can be a Count (a total) or a Ratio (a division of one number by another). Examples of metrics that are a Count is Visits or Pageviews.

Metrics form the life blood of all the measurement we do. They are the reason we call the web the most accountable channel on the planet.

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Web Analytics 101: Definitions: Goals, Metrics, KPIs, Dimensions, Targets

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Key Performance Indicator: Key performance indicators (KPI's) are metrics. But not normal metrics. They are our BFF's. A key performance indicator (KPI) is a metric that helps you understand how you are doing against your objectives. That last word – objectives – is critical to something being called a KPI, which is also why KPI's tend to be unique to each company. For example, I run www.buyproducts.com. My business objective is to sell lots of stuff. My web analytics KPI is: Average Order Size. Business objective: Sell Stuff. KPI: Average Order Size. I might use other metrics in my reports, say Visits or # of Videos Watched or whatever. But they won't be my KPI's. Business Objectives -> Goals -> KPI's -> Metrics -> Magic.

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Web Analytics 101: Definitions: Goals, Metrics, KPIs, Dimensions, Targets

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Targets: Targets are numerical values you have pre-determined as indicators success or failure. It is rare, even with the best intentions, that you'll create targets for all the metrics you'll report on. Yet it is critical that you create targets for each web analytics key performance indicator.

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Web Analytics 101: Definitions: Goals, Metrics, KPIs, Dimensions, Targets

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Dimension: A dimension is, typically, an attribute of the Visitor to your website. Here's a simplistic pictorial representation. . .

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Web Analytics 101: Definitions: Goals, Metrics, KPIs, Dimensions, Targets

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The source that someone came from (referring urls, campaigns, countries etc) is a dimension in your web analytics data. So is technical information like browsers or mobile phones or (god save you if you are still doing daily reports on) screen resolution or ISP used. The activity a person performed such as the landing page name, the subsequent pages they saw, videos they played, searches they did on your website and the products they purchased are all dimensions. Finally the day they visited, the days since their last visit (if returning visitor) the number of visits they made, the number of pages they saw are all dimensions as well. I know, they sound like metrics. But they are, as the definition says up top, attributes of the visitor and their activity on your website. This is a crude way to think about it but… Dimensions almost always appear in rows in a report / excel spreadsheet.

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Web Analytics 101: Definitions: Goals, Metrics, KPIs, Dimensions, Targets

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Dimensions allow you to group your data into different buckets and they are most frequently used to slice and dice the web analytics data.

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Web Analytics 101: Definitions: Goals, Metrics, KPIs, Dimensions, Targets

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Segments: A segment contains a group of rows from one or more dimensions. In aggregate almost all data is useless (like # of Visits). The best way to find insights is to segment the data using one or more dimensions (like # of Visits from: USA, UK, India as a % of All Visits). You segment by dimensions and report by metrics.

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REPORT METRICS

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Report Metrics

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Building Block Terms: Page, Page Views, Visits, Unique Visitors, New Visitor, Repeat Visitor, &Repeat Visitor.

Visit Characterization: Entry Page, Landing Page, Exit Page, Visit Duration, Referrer, Internal Referrer, External Referrer, Search Referrer, Visit Referrer, Original Referrer, Click-through, Click-through Rate/Ratio, Page Views per Visit

Content Characterization: Page Exit Ratio, Single-Page Visits, Bounce Rate Conversion Metrics: Event, Conversion

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Building Block Terms Page

Type: Dimension Calculation: An analyst definable unit of content.

Page View

Type: Count Calculation: The number of times a page was viewed.

Visits (Sessions) Type: Count Calculation : A sequence of page views in a sitting. The visits metric is commonly used in reports that display the number of user sessions within the selected time period. The Visits Report measures traffic to your site by counting the number of sessions in a given time period. You can use this report to observe traffic patterns, or to identify impact of site modifications made on your site.

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Unique Visitors Type: Count Calculation: The number of inferred individual people (filtered for spiders and robots), within a designated reporting timeframe, with activity consisting of one or more visits to a site. Each individual is counted only once in the unique visitor measure for the reporting period.

New Visitor

Type: Count Calculation: The number of Unique Visitors with activity including a first-ever Visit to a site during a reporting period. Note that "first-ever" is with respect to when data began being properly collected on your site by your current tool.

Return(ing) Visitor

Type: Count Calculation: The number of Unique Visitors with activity consisting of a Visit to a site during a reporting period and where the Unique Visitor also Visited the site prior to the reporting period. Shipra Malik

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Repeat Visitor Type: Count Calculation: The number of Unique Visitors with activity consisting of two or more Visits to a site during a reporting period.

Visit Characterization Entry Page

Type: Dimension Calculation: The Entry Pages report shows you which pages on your site were the first page of a visit. You can use this report to identify which of your web pages are the most frequent points of entry or to optimize the primary entry points on your site.

Landing Page

Type: Dimension Calculation: A page view intended to identify the beginning of the user experience resulting from a defined marketing effort.

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Exit Page Type: Dimension Calculation: The last page on a site accessed during a visit, signifying the end of a visit/session.

Visit Duration

Type: Count Calculation: The length of time in a session. Calculation is typically the timestamp of the last activity in the session minus the timestamp of the first activity of the session.

Traffic Sources: The Referrer Type report takes all referring traffic to your site and categorizes them based on domain. This report can be helpful in determining which general methods users are accessing your site. Using Marketing Channels may be better in obtaining this information, however the Referrer Type report takes much less configuration in order to work properly. Referrer Type: Dimension Calculation: Referrer is a generic term that describes the source of traffic to a page or visit.

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Exit Page Type: Dimension Calculation: The last page on a site accessed during a visit, signifying the end of a visit/session.

Visit Duration

Type: Count Calculation: The length of time in a session. Calculation is typically the timestamp of the last activity in the session minus the timestamp of the first activity of the session.

Traffic Sources: The Referrer Type report takes all referring traffic to your site and categorizes them based on domain. This report can be helpful in determining which general methods users are accessing your site. Using Marketing Channels may be better in obtaining this information, however the Referrer Type report takes much less configuration in order to work properly. Referrer Type: Dimension Calculation: Referrer is a generic term that describes the source of traffic to a page or visit.

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• Internal Referrer - The internal referrer is a page URL that is internal to the web site or a web-property within the web site as defined by the user. Not all tools report internal referrers as a group.

• External Referrer - The external referrer is a page URL where the traffic is external or

outside of the web site or a web-property defined by the user. • Search Referrer - The search referrer is an internal or external referrer for which the URL

has been generated by a search function. Many tools segment and report on search referrers as a group; however the exact definitions vary from tool to tool. Most will include the "big" search engines, such as Yahoo, Google, and MSN/Live. However, they vary in whether or not they exclude mail servers from these sources, or whether they use wildcards to capture any URL containing the word "search.“

Click-through Type: Count Calculation: Number of times a link was clicked by a visitor.

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Click-through Rate/Ratio Type: Ratio Calculation: The number of click-throughs for a specific link divided by the number of times that link was viewed.

Page Views per Visit Type: Ratio Universe: Aggregate, Segmented, Individual Calculation: The number of page views in a reporting period divided by number of visits in the same reporting period.

Content Characterization Page Exit Ratio

Type: Ratio Calculation: Number of exits from a page divided by total number of page views of that page. Shipra Malik

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Single Page Visits (Bounces) Type: Dimension or Count Calculation: A visit that consists of one page view.

Bounce Rate Type: Ratio Calculation: Single page visits divided by entry pages.

Conversion Metrics Conversion terms record special activities on a site, such as purchases, that have particular business value for the analyst. They often represent the bottom-line “success” for a visit. Event

Type: Dimension and/or Count Calculation: Any logged or recorded action that has a specific date and time assigned to it by either the browser or server.

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Conversion Type: Dimension or Count Calculation: The number of times a desired outcome was accomplished.

Because a Conversion can be both a metric and a count, a web analytics report may show “number of conversions,” “number of purchases,” “number of sign-ups,” etc. (conversion as a count), or it may show specific conversions and how many events, page views, visits, or unique visitors were associated with the conversion (conversion as a dimension). Conversion Rate Type: Ratio Calculation: The ratio of conversions over a relevant denominator.

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Report Metrics (SiteCatalyst)

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• Keywords: The Search Keywords reports show the search keywords (or search phrases) that customers used to arrive at your site, and how those customers affected your site’s Success Metrics. This can help you determine how to better tailor your site code, such as META tags, or which keywords to register with search engines. You can see if certain keywords resulted in more orders or if other keywords caused higher instances of cart additions

• Top Pages: The Pages report ranks the pages on your site based on those that receive the most traffic. By default, pages are ranked by the number of times they were viewed, with the pages receiving the most page views listed first. You can use this report to view which pages associated with products users are most interested in, measure pages in their effectiveness to conversion events, or to simply view all page traffic in a single easy-to-read report.

• Top Banner ID’s: There are several common ways to track internal campaigns (such as banner ads that lead to other portions of your site) in SiteCatalyst. Each method uses an eVar, which by nature can associate conversion beyond the page it was defined on.

• File Downloads: The SiteCatalyst File Downloads Report helps you understand how often your visitors download files from your site. Examples of file downloads may be word processor documents, spreadsheets, audio files, movie files, user manuals, etc. This includes both files being saved and opened directly from the browser, as well as files saved to the user's computer. The report shows the name of the file being downloaded, including the complete URL required to access the file.

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Q&A

• What Questions do you have?

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