One of the basic features of SiteCatalyst is its ability to track conversions. To do so, you need to use Success Events. The Success Event is generally a counter of something happening on your site. However, there’s a couple of things that should be considered though, when using success events, especially if you’re using it to count things like leads…

Improving internal search should be one of your primary goals. It’s probably used by an extraordinary amount of people, searching for all sorts of things. In this post, I show how to capture the number of times people search, a breakdown of keywords and search attempts, and also demonstrate how much search is costing your organisation.

So, still want to know certain things like what pages were viewed from visitors conducting a search, or which campaigns are driving most page views – and you don’t have Discover. Well, there’s two parts to this post and a bunch of answers…so read on.

One of the little-used nuggets in SiteCatalyst is “participation”.

It’s a given that you want to know how many sales you’ve made, or how much revenue you’ve generated, but what about which pages have helped to contribute to that conversion. Not every visitor follows the same path through the content, and it’s therefore beneficial to be able to see which pages are more likely to drive a conversion than others, thereby exposing your most valuable pages.

I got asked today to provide a benchmark value for time on site for a competitor of ours. They asked me if I thought that 3 minutes and 41 seconds was a good time for someone to be on their site. Not an easy one to answer.

Users are here for a good time, not a long time. Get them to where you want them. Quickly. Then cross-promote them. Engage them. Then the good time can turn into a long time. But Time on Site certainly won’t tell you.

So, there’s lots of metrics and lots of terminology. Understanding the meaning is the first step to understanding what’s important.

This post is for those of you who want a quick primer into what’s important and what’s not. It doesn’t however talk about the “why” – that’s for a future post.