WEB ANALYTICS PROCESS

The primary objective of carrying out Web Analytics is to optimize the website in order
to provide better user experience. It provides a data-driven report to measure visitors’
flow throughout the website.

Take a look at the following illustration. It depicts the process of web analytics.

• Set the business goals.

• To track the goal achievement, set the Key Performance Indicators (KPI).
• Collect correct and suitable data.
• To extract insights, Analyze data.
• Based on assumptions learned from the data analysis, Test alternatives.
• Based on either data analysis or website testing, Implement insights

Web Analytics is an ongoing process that helps in attracting more traffic to a site and
thereby, increasing the Return on Investment.
Web Analytics Strategy-Digital Strategy (Goal)

If web analytics is going to provide any value to your organization, it must be closely
aligned to the key business objectives of your digital strategy

In other words, if you’re not measuring the right elements and outcomes in your web
analytics tool, improving the performance of your digital marketing efforts will be
difficult

If your business objectives are unclear or ambiguous, you will most likely end up with
useless metrics and irrelevant reports. When you don’t know what to measure, you end
up tracking a lot of things that don’t really matter to your business. Often the real
challenge is not what can be measured, but what should be measured.

You can determine whether your digital marketing efforts are succeeding or failing only
if your strategy is clearly defined and agreed upon. In smaller companies this might be a
straightforward exercise, but in larger businesses it can be difficult to get different parties
to agree and articulate what the actual online strategy should be.
As a general rule in web analytics: You shouldn’t quantify something before it has been
clarified or defined.

A strategy is a plan of action or initiatives to achieve a specific goal or set of objectives.

Strategy connects the vision (the over-riding idea or dream for the long-term direction of
your company) to the tactics (the specific low-level, executional details).
Every strategy has three core components.
• Scope defines the boundaries of a particular strategy (the “where”). It specifies whether
the digital strategy applies to a set of websites, a particular region (North America), or a
specific channel (mobile).
• Goals (or objectives) are the desired aims or outcomes of the strategy (the “what”).
They represent what needs to be accomplished, such as doubling annual revenue or
reducing customer churn by 25%. Effective goals usually include a target
(increase/decrease by x%) and have a deadline (to be completed by the end of the year).
• Initiatives are the high-level action plans to achieve the goals or objectives of the
strategy (the “how”). Your company may have multiple initiatives that combine to
achieve a single goal. For example, you might use three separate initiatives—paid search
ad, display ads, and social media—to acquire new customers (the goal).

Online business goals or objectives are usually directly or indirectly related to three main
high-level goals:
• Increase revenue (or profit)
• Reduce costs
• Increase customer satisfaction

Using the wrong metrics and not evaluating the true performance of your digital
initiatives is all too easy without clear goals
To illustrate why business goals influence what metrics we use, imagine if I asked you
about the best metric for evaluating an automobile. You might consider the following
metrics:
• Fuel efficiency
• Horsepower
• Acceleration
• Torque
• Safety/reliability ratings

Rather than deciding on one of these metrics, you’d probably ask what the primary use
of the vehicle would be before prescribing a specific metric. Is the automobile going to be
used for daily commuting, towing a boat, or drag racing? Once you know the main
purpose of the vehicle, you’re better positioned to recommend the right metric(s). The
same principle applies to digital measurement: To identify the appropriate metrics, you
first need to understand the underlying business goals or objectives. If you always
remember to clarify the digital strategy before selecting metrics, your data won’t lead you
astray. You’ll be able to answer important business questions about your digital
initiatives when your data is aligned with your digital strategy.

The digital space is very fluid and dynamic; therefore it is important to periodically
update/revise your metrics and reports to ensure they are aligned with your current
strategy. What answered yesterday’s business questions may not be exactly
what’s needed for today or tomorrow’s questions.

Business goals versus users’ goals

Sometimes the goals of the users of your website might conflict with your business goals.
For example, your primary goal would be to sell product and generate revenue. users,
however, might come to your website to accomplish various tasks that don’t involve
making an immediate purchase, such as researching product options, finding a store
location, seeking technical support for a past purchase, or looking at job openings. Even
when the goals align and a user wants to buy from you, some conflict could still exist:
Ideally you want to maximize the transaction size whereas the individual plans to spend
as little as possible.

Even though user and business goals may not align perfectly, it doesn’t mean you ignore
what your users want to accomplish. Customer-centric organizations strive to provide a
positive user experience, which often means understanding and supporting various user
goals in order to achieve their own business goals.
There’s a symbiotic relationship between the two types of goals, and each user
interaction also represents an opportunity for behavior modification. For example,
someone comes to your website to read a specific article but stays longer to view
other recommended content. Alternatively, a customer visits your site to pay a
bill online and ends up opening a new credit card account. Online success often
comes down to finding the right balance between accommodating user goals and
driving the desired goals of your organization.

Metrics

After clear understanding of your digital business goals, then you evaluate how your
digital marketing efforts are performing. Assessing performance of your digital
initiatives requires you to either examine reports or a dashboard (a high-level summary
of data from various reports) in your web analytics tool. Web analytics reports provide
various kind of information-including traffic sources (where visitors are coming from),
site content (what content they’re interested in), audience characteristics (what types of
visitors you have), and conversions (what your visitors are able to accomplish). Most of
these reports have both a graphical element (a chart) and a data table. Within each report
you will find two key data elements that are inseparably connected and form the
foundation for all measurement: metrics and dimensions.

In web analytics, a metric is a quantitative measurement of online activity. Metrics are

always expressed as numerical values such as 3,451 page views or a 4.5% conversion rate.
A dimension is a set of attributes that categorize the numeric results into meaningful
groupings. In contrast to metrics, dimensions are always represented as textual values or
words (including dates). For example, if the data dimension were countries, the
dimension values would be Canada, Germany, Japan, and so on. Metrics and dimensions
go together because metrics measure something (numbers), while dimensions describe what
is being measured (text).
Types of metrics
There are three main types of web analytics metrics: counts, ratios, and other
calculations. A count is a number of items -usually whole number e.g 10, 800 orders.
Ratios are calculations of two amounts in order to show the relationship between them—
most commonly dividing one count by another. Most of the ratios used in web analytics
are actually rates, which are a special form of ratio where the two amounts have different
base units (page views per visit).

One of the advantages of ratios is that they compensate for fluctuations in volume,
making it easier to compare the relative performance of different items. For example,
campaign A generated 300 orders from 10,000 visits (3% conversion rate). A smaller
Campaign B created only 50 orders from 1,000 visits (5% conversion rate). Even though
Campaign B had a lower volume of visits it converted them at a higher rate than
Campaign A (5% instead of 3%). You can’t ignore the raw counts for orders (300 versus
50), but the rate is often useful in side-by-side comparisons.

The third type of metric is any kind of mathematical or statistical calculation that is not
a simple ratio, which may involve multiple counts and other operations besides just
division. An example of a metric that is a calculation is (Visits-Entries)/Visits. Majority
of metrics you will use in your web analytics tool will be just counts and ratios.
Calculations apart of the complex web analytics analysis while counts and ratios are
sufficient for most business users to start deriving insights from web analytics.
Common Metrics

Web analytics uses common metrics and most of the metrics appear by default in many
reports, therefore you need to understand what they mean so that you can interpret them
correctly.

Page Views
A page view (or pageview) represents an instance of a page being loaded and viewed in
a web browser. From a business perspective, page views indicate how much overall web
content is being consumed by site visitors. Users can produce multiple page views for a
single page if they navigate repeatedly to the same page during a visit. For many media
sites, page views take on a special meaning because each page view represents an
opportunity to display advertisements. Page views have become less relevant, however,
with the introduction of more interactive Web 2.0 content (Flash/AJAX apps, video
players) that doesn’t conform to the traditional web page paradigm they are still
common. In addition, page views don’t apply to tracking other onsite interactions, such
as downloading files or clicking on external links. Although it’s an old metric, page views
is still widely used for understanding content consumption.

Visits

A visit encompasses all the interactions that a user has with a website during a single
sitting or session. From a business perspective, visits reveal how popular your website is;
the more visits, the more popular it is. During a single visit, an individual might browse
several pages, view multiple videos, and perform various searches. In contrast, a visitor
could simply abandon the site after seeing one page—both count as a visit. As an industry
standard, most web analytics tools will terminate a visit after 30 minutes of inactivity. If
a visitor stepped away from her computer to answer the phone and didn’t return for an
hour, her interaction with the website would count as two separate visits (one for before
the phone call and another for when she returned).

Unique Visitors

Unique visitors (or visitors) are the inferred users who visited a website during a specific
reporting period. From a business perspective, unique visitors show the audience reach
of your website. When an individual visits a website more than once during a reporting
period (daily, weekly, or monthly), she will be counted as only one unique visitor. When
a visitor first comes to a website, the web analytics tool uses a persistent cookie to assign
her a unique, anonymous ID that will identify her if she returns to the site. With unique
visitors, we infer each unique visitor is a unique individual; however, in web analytics a
single individual can be seen as multiple unique visitors or multiple people can be
mistakenly viewed as a single unique visitor. For example, if you browse a website from
a work computer, home computer, and tablet device, you’ll be seen as three separate
unique visitors. If you visit the same site using two different web browsers, each visit
through the Firefox and Chrome browsers will be viewed as separate unique visitors. If
you delete your tracking cookies between visits, you’ll be seen as multiple unique
visitors.

Different members of a single household may appear as one unique visitor because they
visit a website from a shared computer and web browser. Although imperfect, the unique
visitor metric gives you a reasonable estimation of how many distinct individuals are
coming to your website. The only way to get a clearer measure of how many actual people
visit your site would be to identify all individuals through authentication (visitors
identify themselves when they log into your website), which wouldn’t be feasible in
many cases. Web analytics tools can also report how many new and returning visitors
you have, which can be helpful in understanding how acquisition or retention efforts are
performing.

Average Visit Duration (Average Time Spent)

Average visit duration (average time spent) is the average length of a visit or session on
a particular site. From a business perspective, it indicates how much time visitors are
typically spending on your site, which sounds useful but is problematic for a couple of
key reasons.
 • Average time spent includes only the time spent on the site for all of the pages
except the visitors’ exit pages. Web analytics vendors use the timestamp (a
combination of date and time) of each new page request to calculate the average
visit duration and time spent on each page. When you enter a landing page, for
example, a timestamp indicates when you entered the page and then when you
proceed to the next page; the web analytics tool subtracts the first timestamp from
the second timestamp to determine how much time was spent on the previous
page (the landing page). This approach is used throughout the visit to calculate
the total visit duration but runs into a problem on the final exit page: There is no
closing timestamp to understand how much time was spent on the last page.
Single-page visits and exit pages, therefore, are excluded from the average visit
duration calculations.
• How much time somebody spends on a website is difficult to interpret without
more context. For example, if you found people were spending a long time on your
site, the optimist within you might get excited because you could interpret this as
a sign that your content is valuable and highly engaging. However, your pessimist
side may see the long average visit duration as visitors being unable to quickly
find the right content and becoming increasingly frustrated as they scour the site
for what they need. Without additional context from an onsite survey or time
expectations for a particular site (we want people to stay a long time or get them
in-and-out quickly), interpreting average visit duration can be difficult. The
average time spent per page can be a useful metric to pinpoint particular page-
specific issues, but context is still important. Unless you specifically ask visitors
through an onsite survey, you may never know why people are spending an
inordinate amount of time on a particular page.

Page views per Visit

Page views per visit represents the average number of pages viewed during a visit or
session. From a business perspective, it can show how engaged visitors are with your site
content or at least how much page content each visitor is consuming during a single visit.
Your business goals will shape how you use and interpret this particular metric.
Companies focused on lead generation will want to streamline the online application
process, so reducing the average page views per visit might be important if it increases
the number of leads. Media sites that are dependent on ad revenues will want to
maximize the page views per visit without jeopardizing the return frequency of their
visitors. Considering page views per visit in combination with the average visit
duration, you can get a sense for the typical activity levels of your visitors during a single
session and compare that to what’s expected by your organization. For example, if your
company provides extensive editorial content online but most of the visits are short in
nature, it could point to a problem that needs to be addressed (wrong content, poor
linking, bad naming convention, weak navigation).

Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is the percentage of entering visits (entries or entrances) that are single-page
visits or entering visits that leave (bounce from) the site after viewing only one page.
From a business perspective, the bounce rate reveals the effectiveness of your entry
pages. In other words, what kind of first impression are these pages having? Are your
landing pages encouraging visitors to go deeper into your site? If a particular page has a
high bounce rate of 80%, that means four out of five visitors entering the page are
bouncing and not viewing any additional pages. Typically, a high bounce rate means
something is wrong with the landing page, which could be due to a number of factors:
• Messaging and content that doesn’t match visitors’ expectations
• Poor page design or layout
• Slow loading times
• Web browser compatibility issue (perhaps it doesn’t display properly in the
browser)
• Insufficient links to other related content
• Confusing site navigation or no search options
• Weak or hidden call-to-actions (for example, call-to-actions are placed “below the
fold” of the web page where the visitor needs to scroll down to see them).

A high bounce rate can also be no fault of the actual landing page, but in fact due to a
problem created by the upstream traffic source, for example a wrong campaign message
would lead to a high bounce rate. For example, you would anticipate a high bounce rate
on a store location page because visitors search for address information and leave when
they find it. The same applies to blog posts where visitors are looking for only
information that answers a specific question and nothing more. If a landing page was
designed to direct visitors to external partner websites, you’d expect the page to have a
high bounce rate.

Exit rate
Exit rate is the percentage of visits that terminate or exit on a particular page. From a
business perspective, the exit rate highlights potential site issues that cause visitors to
leave your site prematurely. Every visit or session ends at some point, but when or where
visitors exit can be important. In the case of a multi-step process, such as making an online
purchase, you don’t want the majority of your visitors exiting at the second step (billing
information page) in a six-step process. The exit rate is different from the bounce rate
because it focuses on all visits, not just entry traffic to web pages. For example, the exit
rate will include single-page visits (bounces) to a particular page as well as visitors who
navigate to the page and then abandon the site.

Context is equally important when evaluating exit rates for key pages. If a web page is a
logical exit point, then you would expect it to have a high exit rate. For example, an order
confirmation or thank you page that is shown after a successful online purchase would
have a high exit rate. When a page is an initial or transitional step in a multi-step process
or multi-page content series, you expect to see some attrition from step-to-step, but an
unexpectedly high exit rate may indicate a problem. For instance, a recent web design
update mistakenly removes a form field option that impedes a visitor’s ability to proceed
forward.

You might have other key pages on your site that you would prefer not to have a high
exit rate, such as your search results page or homepage. In some cases, it will be easy to
spot the problem that is causing the high exit rate (broken links, missing content), and in
other cases you may need to use onsite surveys to determine what is causing visitors to
exit prematurely. Although web analytics can answer many behavioral questions (who,
what, when, where, how), it can never answer attitudinal questions, such as why
someone is choosing to abandon a website.

Conversion Rate
Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors (or visits) that reached a particular outcome
or performed a target action. From a business perspective, the conversion rate displays
how effectively your website is getting visitors to do what you want them to do. Each
organization’s online business goals will define what it wants visitors to do and what
represents a conversion (a desired action, behavior, or outcome). For retailers, a
conversion is a purchase or order. For other companies, it could be an application
submission, a subscription, a newsletter sign-up, a scheduled appointment, or an app
download.
How Web Metrics Work Together
All of these metrics share different insights into how your website and digital campaigns
are performing. Web analytics tools contain some of these tools to give data for your
digital measurements. Web analytics measures online activity and all of these metrics
cover different aspects of the online experience. When you combine them (e.g Page view
counts, average visit duration, bounce rate etc) the different data points provide
complementary insights that can help you understand what’s happening with your
website and campaigns. In the example below, Web analytics measures focus on three
main areas:
• Traffic volumes. Page views, visits, and unique visitors
• Visitor behaviors. Page views per visit and average visit duration
• Page-level interactions. Bounce rate and exit rate

Conversion rate is a unique metric for the following reasons:

• It is the only metric that is directly tied to measuring business outcomes.
• The metric isn’t uniform because the numerator of the conversion rate can be any
form of success (order, subscription, application, lead), which will vary across
organizations by their business goals.
• You could have multiple conversion rates that measure different aspects of your
business. Understanding the business logic behind event tracking and conversions
will be critical to driving real value from web analytics.

Measuring Events and Outcomes

Websites, campaigns and apps have become more dynamic and interactive. Therefore,
there is need to measure metrics that go beyond simple page views. These include events.
An event represents an interaction of interest that occurs during a visitor’s journey
through a digital property. With event tracking in web analytics, you can measure how
users interact with different content elements, such as clicking or touching buttons, tabs,
links, or other on-page elements. For example, you could use events to track interactions
with a video player, product configurator, or online game. Care should be taken not to
measure superficial interactions that won’t help you improve the performance of your
digital initiatives. You need to measure events of what is important to your business. One
way to avoid problems with tracking too much is to focus on outcomes or conversions
that are central to your business goals.

Digital marketing initiatives are primarily focused on influencing specific actions. When
you think about the purpose of your campaigns, websites, or apps, their success will be
defined by whether they encourage people to complete certain desired actions or not. For
example, the key outcome of an e-commerce site is an order or purchase, which is directly
related to generating sales and revenue. A conversion or outcome can still be important
to evaluating the success of your digital initiatives. For non-transactional sites, a desired
outcome might be subscribing to an e-mail newsletter or completing an online
application. Although these actions may not be directly tied to revenue or cost savings,
they can represent a successful online outcome.

You can measure all kinds of outcomes online, but not all conversions are equal. A macro
conversion is the main outcome that you want visitors to accomplish on your site. These
key outcomes are some of the most important metrics (counts) that you measure. If your
website serves one primary purpose or goal, you will most likely have only one or two
macro conversions. In large corporations, however, a single domain commonly serves
multiple purposes (branding, sales, and support, for example), so different teams may
have their own macro conversions. Clear goals serve to ensure the business prioritize on
the right outcomes (focus on important outcomes).

Frequently, a visitor has to pass through several steps or stages before she can complete
an important outcome. A micro conversion measures the actions or milestones that
precede a macro conversion. The micro conversions act as leading indicators for potential
macro conversions and help you pinpoint where attrition (users have challenges) is
happening in the conversion process.
Sometimes the micro conversions represent actions that need to be completed in a
sequential process. For example, a visitor can’t buy anything if she doesn’t add a product
to her shopping cart. In other cases, a micro conversion might signify that the visitor has
taken a step closer to a final conversion. Most customers move through a series of phases
in their buying cycles:
• Awareness/Acquisition
• Research/Consideration
• Intent/Lead
• Purchase
Companies can map different user interactions to each stage in this conversion funnel
process to understand how visitors are progressing toward the final key outcome.

To better understand how micro conversions contribute to a key business outcome

consider the steps a potential student goes through when deciding which university to
attend. Before he even considers what he wants to study, he sees advertisements for
various programs from multiple schools (awareness). Once he’s determined what he
wants to study, he evaluates what each program has to offer (research/consideration).
This might involve watching embedded videos about the program, viewing testimonials
from recent graduates, downloading a PDF brochure, and interacting with a virtual
campus tour. After reviewing the different programs, he submits admission applications
to his top three schools (intent/lead). After receiving an acceptance letter from all three
colleges, he makes his final choice and submits his registration (purchase). In this
example, the final registration is the macro conversion in this online process. All of the
interactions in the research/consideration phase would be potential micro conversions
The university’s marketing team might define some of these activities as essential steps
in a prospective student’s decision-making journey, and others might be viewed as
optional. The application submission would be a mandatory micro conversion that
precedes a prospective student’s decision to register. In this scenario, the university could
evaluate areas where attrition is occurring in its conversion process and identify which
actions are most influential in getting students to register. For example, the marketing
team might find people who watch the videos are three times as likely to register, and
therefore, they decide to feature the videos more prominently on key pages to drive
conversions. The combination of micro and macro conversions will give you powerful
insights into how your digital business is performing and help you to pinpoint areas
where you can streamline or enhance your visitors’ journeys to conversion.

Key Attributes of Effective Metrics

In web analytics, there numerous metrics that you can use to measure digital activities.
The right metrics should be the ones that help you to steer business performance in the
right direction. When you decide on which metrics to use, consider the following five
criteria:
• Simple-Avoid overly complex metrics that are hard to capture, understand,
interpret, or act on. If you choose metrics that are simple to understand, they’re
more likely to be used and not misinterpreted by different users.
• Relevant-Your key metrics should be pertinent to your business goals and the
current needs of your organization. Clarify your business objectives and then identify
appropriate metrics. Update the metrics periodically to stay fresh and aligned with your
present business strategy.
• Timely. Data from the metrics are needed to make timely business decisions. In web
analytics most of the data is either real-time or near real-time.
Credible. Ensure your organization can trust the metrics. Metrics should be accurate,
reliable, repeatable, precise, complete and consistent.
• Actionable-Actionable metrics are easier to interpret and convert into tactical
responses because they directly relate to levers in your business that you control or
influence. Metrics are useful or actionable if applied to specific areas observed at the
aggregate level.