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| The Future of Website Analyticsby Stephanie Lummis |
Last week at the Google Analytics Partner Summit in California I had the opportunity to hear Avinash Kaushik speak about the future of web metrics. If you haven’t heard of him, Avinash is GA’s Chief Evangelist. I’ve been a fan for some time – his book Web Analytics: An Hour a Day is a go-to resource for me. (Check out his blog: Occam’s Razor).
Avinash spoke about his worries for the future analytics – how the current set of web stats tools is incapable of accurately measuring success. As well the current thinking on how to define success needs to change. Today, web analytics is focused on measurement of behaviour on your website. This is good because your site is likely (or should be) the centre of your communications strategy. The trouble is the way people interact with your company today is becoming increasingly fragmented, so your website doesn’t give you the whole picture.
Distribution - There are more distribution paths, such as RSS, to push your content onto other websites.
Contribution - With web 2.0 tools it is possible for anyone to contribute (like it or not) to the body of content about your business – through blogs, Facebook, Twitter, comments, and reviews on third party sites.
Consumption - By that same token, consumption of your message (or messages about you, because you have no control) also takes place in all of these areas. Research tells us that people trust third party word of mouth more than corporate messaging, thus they are increasingly turning to sites like Twitter or Technorati to research companies and products to gain an unfiltered view. They may or may not end up on your website at all.
"Hits" is a miss Visits and hits are still gobbled up by c-level executives as measures of success but are largely insignificant. (I don’t mean to be rude but I’ll let you in on some insider info – among industry folk hits stands for How Idiots Track Success. It’s completely meaningless and glommed onto because it’s the biggest number, so it must be good. But if it’s still in your vocabulary, purge it out and deny ever using it.) Visits can be useful, but not on its own. As I’ve written about before, all the traffic in the world won’t help you if your site is ineffective, so you need to pair visits with other metrics to accurately judge its worth.
Conversation Starters This brings us back to the original worry. If current key metrics are not accurate and interaction with our organizations and brand is happening on sites outside of our control, how do we measure success? The word of the day (or perhaps the year) is Conversation. It is fair to say that fans of your organization – the influencers, repeat visitors, sneezers, etc - not the one-time visitors - are the people you need to care about.
The contributions are happening in all manner of social media sites. Are they carrying on your conversation starters? These measures will give you an indication:
Conversation rate – replies sent and received per day - because it’s not a conversation if you don’t reply
Words in post vs. words in comments – are you eliciting a response?
Retweets – how viral is your message?
With all this fragmentation, it is more important than ever to tag all external links so that when someone does click to your site, they can be properly attributed in Google Analytics and you can continue to track their behaviour. See Google’s URL builder.
Beyond Conversion So it’s not about volume and who has the most followers. Think reach, velocity, demand, and activity. You need to look beyond the conversions on your website to the outcomes. Th behaviour of the person after they have bought, downloaded, signed up, etc. is the true barometer of your success.