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.

Search Engine Ranking Factors 2009

This is definitely worth a read if you're into SEO or if you want to learn more about search engine algorithms: SEOmoz SE ranking factors
http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

Enjoy!

Microsites, what are they good for?

Ok, first of all I've got to apologise for not posting last week, I got distracted with other things, but I did feel bad for not doing it though!
Since this is something I'm currently dealing with in my job, I'd like to talk about microsites or sub sites and how useful they can be for a company, from an SEO and customer and brand standpoint.

What is a microsite?
In my opinion, a microsite is a product or advice driven site of 10-15 unique and optimised pages designed to work in conjuction with your corporate website. There can be many reasons for a business to build a new site and we're going to look at some of those below. In this post, I'm only going to talk about sites that are meant to stay live for a long period of time rather than temporary promotional sites.

Microsites & SEO
I know it may sound obvious, but whatever your reasons are for buidling a microsite, it should obviously never be only for search engines. As with everything in SEO, building something for spiders is very likely going to be at least grey hat and at worse it'll get you banned from google....
This of course doesn't mean that you should not build new sites without search engines in mind. A new site(s) for your business is a good way to be ranked for new keywords which may not be part of your main website. The fact that it has a new URL could also allow you to have 2 or more sites ranked for keywords or their derivatives (maybe long tail), meaning extra traffic and potential business leads.
In terms or URLs, you can either use a completely new one or create a subdomain such as http://xxxx.yourdomain.com. Search engines will treat this URL as a site on its own, and SEO recipes to be used should be the same as for any other site: onsite optimisation, link building and a pinch of social media for good measure.

Microsites & your customers
As mentioned before, you must have good reasons to buid a microsite and your customers are the main target for these new sites. You may come to a point in your business where your corporate site has grown enough and the width of your product range is preventing you from achieveing good results in SERPs because of keyword dilution. In this case, a microsite can help you focus on a specific product and target it at a very specific audience.
You may also build a new site to give more information to your visitors, be it for support, tips or even a company blog.
As with everything in a business, customers and their needs come first so there is no point investing resurces in new sites if you don't need them.

Microsites & branding
From a branding point of view, a microsite can be a very effective way to promote a brand extension, a new product range or a new venture. It is a safe way to experiment new online marketing techniques and target new audiences without affecting your core audience who can still go to your corporate site.
However, remember to keep some consistency with your umbrella brand in order not to send mixed messages to visitors and always have a brand strategy in mind.

Since i'm going through the process of build a network of microsites at the moment as part of the online strategy for my company, I'll keep you updated on progress and results.
Have a good weekend!