Web metrics - back to basics

As it is an issue that seems to arise quite often nowadays when talking about the performance of websites, I thought I'd go back to basics with a post on web metrics.
If you're new to the web with little or no experience of monitoring a website, it is very easy to get confused with the amount of data available from the web analytics tool you're using, so how to know which data is useful and how to interpret it?

What are web metrics?
web metrics is the data relating to your website, whether it is visitors, page load time, referrals, time on site.....and the list goes on. One of the best advantages of working online is that pretty much everything is measurable and the web analytics tools get more and more sophisticated every day. But sometimes this can lead to information overload, especially if the data is not understood correctly, so it is important for every business to choose web metrics that are relevant to them and in line with their overall objectives.

How to choose the correct web metrics?
Just look at your overall business ovjectives and see how web activity relates to those. For example if your overall objective is to increase sales by 10% for the year, it'll be important to know how many customers have actually bought online, how many visitors turned into leads.
Web metrics need to be aligned with business and online marketing objectives.

Basic web metrics
the basic web metrics, the one that everybody refers to are:

• Unique visitors: the overall number of visitors to your website based on IP address. This is a crucial metric to assess the performance of your website over time as you'll want this number to increase.
• Visits: total number of visits to a website for a specific period. this differs from unique visitors as a unique visitor may be attributed several visits. The number of visits will always be equal or higher than the number of unique visitors.
• Time on site: amount of time each visitor spent on your site. for most businesses, the higher the better as the most time visitors spend, the more likely they are to find something of interest to them
• Page views: total number of page views across all visits. this metric is very useful if your site offers a lot of content such as news, articles....
• Average page views per visit: useful to judge the stickiness of your website, how good it is at retaining visitors.
• Bounce rate: number of visitors coming to the site and leaving without clicking on any link or visiting a second page. A high bounce rate usually reflects poor usability or irrelevant content.
• Hits: This is very often a misunderstood metric as it does not trully reflect performance. Each page of a website can return a lot of hits based on the elements present on it, so a high number of hits doesn't necessarily represent a healthy website.
• Referrals: which websites your traffic is coming from - search engines, partners, directories...this is very useful to target your activities and see which web channel is performing the best for you.

I realise that I have just covered the very basics here (and I know a lot are missing) but I hope it can help some people getting started with web analytics. Next week I'll cover some more advanced metrics and talk about the importance of setting up goals and ideal scenarios/paths/funnels to make the most of your website.