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.

Forget about these…

1. Hits
   Hits were all the rage in the 90′s. “100,000 hits yesterday!” was often heard. Wow. Problem is, a ‘hit’ counts any hit to the web server, like images, not just pages. So, pages with images received more ‘hits’… so it was a pretty inaccurate/unfair metric… and a better metric to measure web popularity came along; the ‘pageview’ metric.
   
2. Web Counters
   Remember those? Again from a bygone age. No-one ever mentioned what time period the number was for, let alone what it actually measured. And those that did have them often got upset when the number stayed really really low…to the point where they would artificially inflate their own numbers.

Of limited value…

1. Browser Types
   Pretty much only good for knowing which browsers our users are using. But, today, every site should be made to render properly in multiple browsers.
2. Platform Types
   Likewise with the browser types, however, many providers now separate this out to mobile platforms, and as mobile platforms become more ubiquitous, we keep an eye on this. However, it’s important to see what content the mobile users are viewing and ensure it’s readily available to those platforms.
3. Resolution
   Again, good for understanding how to design the site with minimum widths in place. Note however, there’s a difference between screen resolution and browser size – two different values, two different results.

Basic, fundamental metrics…

1. Page Views
   This tells you the amount of views our site pages are getting – in particular, this allows us to see how the site fares over time. A view counts as a loading of a page. Still considered a very important metric, but the increasing amount of flash/AJAX built websites, and the increase in online video, means fewer page views are counted, even though the same amount of content is being looked at. Therefore, we need to consider our ability to track AJAX built sites, and Flash driven interactions. Any metrics platform worth it’s salt will be able to track this through custom tagging (which Omniture, of course, does).
2. Visits
   A ‘visit’ is the equivalent of when someone arrives at our site and starts looking at pages. A visit can consist of many pageviews, or just one. The industry standard is to expire the visit after 30 minutes of inactivity, or 12 hours of constant activity.
3. Unique Visitors
   A unique visitor counts the number of distinct people (well, really computers) that are visiting (making visits) our site in a particular time period. A unique visitor can make up many visits, each containing many pageviews. This is still one of the best metrics to use for site popularity. Bear in mind though that it’s important to understand the timeframe as well. Daily, weekly and monthly unique visitor metrics vary because of the reporting period.
4. Referrers
   This is a great metric – it tells us all the sites that people are finding our site and visiting from. If we don’t know where people are coming from, then we don’t know how our marketing efforts are doing, and where to spend additional money. There will also be Direct/Type In’s in this report, which provide a good indication of how many people start directly at our site (or from a bookmark). We seemingly get a huge amount of traffic from Google Organic search (which incidentally also has the best conversion rate – see below), but, read on…

   This is one to be slightly wary of as well… As this metric shows where a visitor originated from on the first visit, future visits can also be attributed to this original site. The wary part is that sites like Google write a cookie that hangs around for a really long time (6 months, versus the standard 1 month for media sites) and so if the first visit comes from Google, then two additional visits as direct type in’s, the referring domain will always show as Google (3 visits, whereas it should be 1 from Google and 2 Direct).

5. Search Engines
   This metric is a more detailed version of ‘referrers’ and tells us which search engines people are visiting our site from.
6. Keywords
   Hugely important metric. As it sounds, this metric tells us the top keywords that people are typing in at search engines and ultimately clicking through to our site. It’s basically an even more valuable, in-depth version of the ‘top search engines’ metric.
7. Geo
   Where are they coming from? Particularly useful for marketing overseas. You’d be surprised at how the content visited differs from country to country, and even regions within a country.

Spend more time looking at the following…

1. Average Time Spent
   This metric indicates the amount of time a visitor spends on our site and pages. It’s usually a good indicator of the quality of our website. The longer the time spent, usually, the better. However, a long number can be an indicator of a bad website experience and that people can’t find what they are looking for. It’s best to combine it with the bounce rate and exit pages (see below) to get a more accurate picture of the quality of site content. Also, the average time spent doesn’t take into account the last page seen (it has no way of knowing when the visitor closed their browser or walked away), so typically blog home pages suffer from this.
2. Entrance Pages
   All too often people just analyse and improve the homepage, because they think that’s where the majority of their traffic arrives from. However, the reality is that many people will arrive deep into the site through search engines. Looking at this metric reveals which of our pages are most often used as entrance pages. We look to improve these pages and make sure it’s easy for visitors to navigate from these pages – otherwise these entrance pages will become exit pages.
3. Exit Pages
   This metric indicates the amount of ‘exits’ from pages on our site. Therefore, it reveals the pages that drive people away. But remember, some exit pages are more natural exit pages, like purchase confirmation or ask for information signup confirmation pages. We look for the highest exited pages that seem to be an important path in our site flow (user journey), like course pages or information pages, and improve these.
4. Bounce Rate
   This is one of the most under-used, but most revealing metrics. To put it simply, it indicates the amount of people that, upon arriving at our site, immediately leave. Therefore, it’s a great indicator of the quality of our site. Bounce Rate is the percentage of single-page visits from entrance page visits for individual pages. A bounce rate below 40% for pages is considered good.
   
   While single-page visits / entrance pages is good, we also use page views / number of times this was an exit page…a slightly different view. This shows overall how much traffic left from this page.
5. Internal Search Keywords
   This is definitely a key metric and one of the most revealing and a subject of a future post. By looking at the keywords people use to search internally, it shows exactly what people are wanting/expecting to see on the site.
6. Multi Page Rate
   This is an interesting metric, used in combination with the Entry and Exit metrics. Basically, this one shows how well a page view contributes to a multi-page visit. Key pages should have a high multi-page rate percentage, as should key entry pages.
7. Repeat Visitor Rate
   This is another great metric to use, and is a great indicator of the quality of the site. Simply put, the more visitors return, the better the site is likely to be. The higher the percent of repeat visits versus first time visits is another great indicator to use for site quality.

The Holy Grail, well, definitely the most important…

1. Conversion
   Knowing the conversion rate is one of the most powerful things to know and act on. And not just conversion for the site as a whole but conversion rate by page or set of pages. Conversion doesn’t automatically mean that you have to be selling something. While it is the most common definition for conversion, it can also be a very powerful metric to highlight how user progress through content (pathing is similar but not quite the same). Ideally have a funnel for each conversion to understand where people are leaving before they convert – a prime candidate to analyze conversion rate and funnel is pages within an checkout form – traditional retail stuff.  However, any multi-page process will produce a funnel. Another important view is to look at conversion rates by referrers, which gives a good indicator of the value of various sources.We correlate conversions by country, by campaign, by promotion, by traffic source, by keyword (paid and organic), by path etc, which gives excellent insight and allows us to constantly look at ways to improve the conversion rates.
2. Value
   What is value? Value is many different things for many different reasons. Value might be an estimation of the value of a visitor, of a lead, of an application, of a purchase, of a request for information. You often hear that a company has lost millions of dollars when their site goes down. This is because they know on average how many orders might be placed and the dollar value of the orders…therefore they can calculate value.

   We also calculate value; the average value of a lead. Leads are a primary KPI on our site. Leads submit applications. Applications drive revenue. By reverse calculating through the funnel, we can calculate the value of a lead. Hence, the importance of leads. And hence the importance of understanding conversions.

In a future post I’ll explain why just looking at the numbers really doesn’t accomplish much. The value is in the strategy. Metrics are used to measure business goals and user goals – therefore, understanding both business goals and user goals is critical, as it helps to shape the information tracked, which ensures that you get the best value from the metrics provided, and ultimately the best insight and ROI.

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