Return on Intention

Global warming is a topic that gets  lot of air time. I’ve seen Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and it sounded very convincing. I’ve also heard that the reason for the temperatures rising doesn’t have anything to do with global warming, but have more to do with outside circumstances surrounding the measurement tools used to collect the data. Personally, I think that paying attention to our impact on the environment and reducing our consumption of energy is the right thing to do whether we have a threat of  becoming extinct or not, but global warming isn’t really the point of this post. Accurate measurement is.

The saying goes “You care about what you measure”, after all how can you improve something if you don’t know how your doing with it, or whether your getting better or worse at it. In this example, climate change is what you care about, so its measured. To get a measurement you need a tool for collecting data and a system for analyzing that data into meaning. If you want to increase your businesses sales, you have to track the sales over time. This will tell you whether or not your improving or not. This doesn’t help much on its own, you also need to know what changes have taken place that can be used to explain the movement of the trend. A big problem with trying to identify the actions that cause the changes are to figure out what actually makes a difference and what doesn’t.

Assume that I try to see what has caused a 10% increase in my sales. The first thing I notice is that on the days my sales increased I wore a blue tie. I might be tempted to mandate that all sales people wear blue ties. While there is some data that indicates the color of your clothing can have an impact on how people perceive you and therefor have an impact on whether or not they want to do business with you, it is not a proven fact that my blue tie has anything to do with my performance. It might just as likely be true that I happen to wear my blue tie on the sames days that the state employees get their paychecks, so they are more apt to buy because they have the money now. So what impacts the increased sales, the tie or the cash on hand.

The most believable story I have heard against global warming is that the thermometers used to gather the temperature readings  are located near airports in most major cities. When the airports where built they were located outside of the city. As the cities grew, the large amount of concrete and asphalt from the city development crept closer to the where the temperature readings where taken. The concrete and asphalt held the heat from the day longer and raised the temperature of the immediate environment making the readings of the thermometers higher than they were previously. Whether or not this is actually the case, it illustrates the errors that can occur in metric gathering and analyzing. Check your metric gathering tools and see what other elements could effect its readings or your analysis of them.

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.