Return on Intention

The best thing about digital media is the worst thing about digital media. Data. Online its easy to track just about everythings, but often so much data is produced that its easy to get lost in it, especially if you new to the game.

Every business, organization and person has a slightly different idea of what success is. For some people, their primary reason online is to provide information and sway opinions. For others the goals is sell products or attract new sales leads. For each case, there is a different set of KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators). You can spend hours digging through numbers and never find insight if you don’t know what to look for. So regardless of what your goals are, or if your new to the game are 3 metrics you can’t afford to ignore. These metrics are not the be-all-end-all, but they are a really good place to start and refer back to from time to time to monitor general health.

1. Is anybody listening?

No matter what your goals are, your website or online presence isn’t doing any good if no one hears it. Yep this means traffic, but before you go looking for your monthly “hits” report lets talk about your metrics options. Hits are about the worst option you have. A “hit” is a request sent the web server. This means when you type www.google.com into your web browser, a request is sent to Google’s server asking for the home page. That’s a hit. Then to load the Google logo on that page the web browser sends a request to Google’s server again asking for that image. That’s another hit. Suffice to say, Hits don’t measure people, it measures request to the server. If your home page has 20 images and two css (cascading style sheets) files, then one person loading your home page once will result in 23 hits. Not a good metric really.

The best metric to use for gauging traffic is unique visitors. Most web analytic programs have this metric built in, so it won’t take much to find the number, just look. Unique visitors will show you actual people, not server requests. It is a much more accurate number and one that is essential to keep track of. Keep in mind that you are not necessarily looking for a big number, your job is make that number grow. If you have 10 hits a month, then make it 20. This is about growth, not volume.

2. Does Anyone Care?

While traffic is good, its not the whole story. Not only do you need an audience to send your message to, you also need to know if that message is working and relevant to the audience. Engagement is what we are looking for.  Measuring engagement is hard and can be done in many ways, but the simple and quick way to start to find insight is by looking at time on site.  This metric can be substituted with time on page, but both get at the same point. Time on site (or page), as its name implies, is how long someone stayed on your site. The longer they were on your site, the more engaged they were with your content. If your website is boring or too hard to use, the user will give up and go away, so a long time on site usually means that your are doing a good job of engaging your visitors. Beware, sometimes a long time on site is the result of people going around in circles looking for content. This means that your website isn’t so frustrating that they give up right way, but the content they want to find is hard for them to get to.  Look at other metrics like returning visitors and click paths to try and get a better idea of what your time on site stats are telling you.

3. Is it doing anything for me?

The granddaddy of them all – conversion. If you have an action that you want a visitor on your website to perform, and they perform it, you have a conversion. If you are trying to sell online, then every sale is a conversion. If you want people to sign up for a newsletter, then when they do its a conversion. These are real tangible results we’re talking about here. Most web analytic programs have a way of setting goals to track conversion, but at its crudest level you can calculate a conversion rate by taking the number of people who took the specified action and divide it by the number of visitors you got in the same time period. If you had 3 people out of 200 sign up to your newsletter in a week, then your conversion rate would be 1.5%.

Wheres the insight?

The real insights you can gain from these metrics are what they tell you all together. Each one tells a fact, but together they can tell a story. If you have a low unique visitor number, then you have an awareness problem. Your solution is in marketing. If you have a high unique visitor number, but your time on site number is low that means either: A) people are finding what they want to know on your site right away, or B) people think that your website is not the one they want to deal with for this subject matter. If your conversion rate is high, then the most likely scenario from the previous sentence is A and your doing great. If your conversion rate is low, then the answer is more likely B, and you need to work on your website.

These three metrics can go a long way in helping you steer your online efforts in the right direction. The name of the game is continual improvement, so see where you are now, try some things and keep what brings up your numbers.

This week in a meeting a client asked for us to take over their adwords accounts. Their fear is that their bounce rate from those campaigns are too high.

For the most part, this client has great organic traffic for their core offerings, so their adwords campaigns are focused on targeting markets that could benefit from their services, but who are searching for different means to solve their problems. Not a bad strategy, overall.

The problem can arise that if you drive traffic to your website to show the user a different solution that what they we’re looking for the bounce rate can be very high. Many users will see that what they searched for is not exactly what is on the page and immediately hit the back button. In this case the clients fears were justified.

So whats the right course of action? Shut down or reduce the budget on the campaigns because they don’t produce a good conversion rate? That defiantly would reduce the advertising budget without  reducing the overall number of measurable conversions. Normally that sounds great, especially in this age of accountability, but there is an underlying problem here. Sometimes the conversions cycle is so long that you can’t track it.

When we asked this client about their users and how they come to start using the program the organization offers, the most common story is “I heard about you guys, but tried other means of reaching my goals. After they all fail and I realize that there is no magic bullet to solve my problems, then I remember you guys and get signed up.” The average time between first being exposed to this client and the end user signing up for their services is 3 to 5 years. If their initial exposure to the brand is online (which most often it is) and then it takes 3 to 5 years for a “conversion”, how do you measure that? Answer: You can’t.

This is very similar to the argument of direct advertising over brand advertising. Most often you can’t directly measure how well a branding campaign works. Good branding can influence behavior, but it happens over time. On the web we like to think that everything can be measured, and we can tie it all to ROI. If something isn’t performing in black and white numbers by the end of the month, we kill the program. Unfortunately, we can’t measure everything, and we can tie less to ROI that we wold like to believe. As in this case, with a cycle of 3 to 5 years, we can’t measure it accuratly, and definatly not by the end of the month.

If we look at their bounce rate and the cost it has on their conversion rate, we would cancel the program. That’s what the numbers tell us to do. But what the customers? The people who are behind all the numbers tell us if we stop the campaigns then that initial exposure won’t exists. Without that exposure, their unmeasurable conversion cycle could be disrupted, and we wouldn’t know it for 3 to 5 years.

Number are numbers. They don’t tell us to do anything. Its the interpretation of the numbers that has meaning. Make sure your brand story and customer perspectives are taken into account when “Reading the Numbers”.