Metrics that are actionable

If a metric isn't actionable, then its just fluff that fills up space in a report
and doesn't mean very much. Whilst metrics can be interesting, there is a
difference between a metric that is interesting and one that is
actionable. Below I've listed a number of metrics that I define as
actionable.

1. Beat Panda - Measure Content

Whilst the Google Panda updates of 2011 have looked to address a

number of quality issues, one of the key ones in my opinion was the
amount of good, quality content on a page. Many pages of thin or
duplicate content across your site could potentially cause your entire
site to fall foul of Panda. One way to assess this on your own site is to use
custom variables to measure the content on your page. This works very
well if you have an ecommerce site or any site where you collate
reviews:

Action to take -

• Measure the number of reviews on your pages and see if pages

with little or no content are as visible in Google

If you want to learn more about using Google Analytics custom variables,
checkout this tutorial video.

2. % Visitors who view product pages

The reason this is important is quite simple, no view of a product page =
no product sale.

This is one that is usually taken for granted by many ecommerce sites.
They assume that because they have lots of product pages, that visitors
will automatically find them. However there can be barriers to a visitor
getting to your product pages, for example poorly designed navigation,
poor internal site search, unclear category names etc. Also lets now
forget that many ecommerce sites have other sections of their site such
as a blog, a news section, buyers guides, videos and help pages, so a
visitor can easily get distracted by one of these and end up leaving your
site without ever seeing a product page.

Actions to take -

• Improve internal site search

• Improve navigation menus

Pro tip - make sure your internal site search works for both plural and
singular product names. A classic mistake I've seen over the years is
exact matching of queries to product names which means either singular
or plural returns no results.

3. % of people who search your site then exit

If a visitor has made the effort to type in what they are searching for on
your site and still left without buying, then you should take a closer look
into why. So many internal site searches are not only badly designed, but
also return bad results. If your website is like this, then you are losing
sales. Actively improve your search results pages to make them more
relevant and useful. it still amazes me that SEOs obsess over Google
SERPs, yet neglect to take a look at the quality of their own despite
having control over them!

Actions to take -

• Test it and make sure it actually works

• Do the results you see make sense
• Include special offers or discounts in results
• Enhance results with images - see Apple for a good example:
If you haven't got it setup on your site yet, check out this information
on setting up site search for Google Analytics.

4. Page load speed

If it isn't already clear to you, Google is obsessed with speed. I can see
why, a faster web is better for everyone and we all get frustrated if a
page takes longer than a few seconds to load. Google have confirmed
that site speed is part of the algorithm, albeit a small part. They've also
made it measurable in Webmaster Tools and more recently they made it
available in Google Analytics.

Now that we can measure load speed in analytics, it becomes much

easier to see the results of the actions you take. Its also easier to see
which pages of your site are slower than others, which allows you to try
and work out why and fix the issues.
Something I wanted to point out here too is that you shouldn't be
worrying about site speed because it forms a small part of the Google
Algorithm. You should be worrying about it because it is important to
your visitors, they will not come back to your website if they are left
hanging around waiting for the page to load.

Actions to take -

• Look at which pages or sections of your site are the slowest

• Focus on improving the speed of your money pages
 • Bug your developers and educate them on why its so important

If you want to learn more about what you can actually to do speed up
your site, take a look at Craig Bradford's site speed for dummies part
one and part two on the Distilled blog.

5. Average Order Value

This metric is all about squeezing as much revenue as you can from each
order. Quite often, an SEO will start a project and the first thing they do
is assume they make more revenue for the client by getting more traffic.
Whilst this can be true, the quickest wins can often come from taking a
good look at ways to get more value from the existing traffic.

There are actions you can take though if you are looking to drive traffic
that will increase your order value.

Actions to take -

• Add up sells as much as you can to the buying process - Amazon

are awesome at this
• Look at keyword trends to see which ones drive a higher order
value
• Look at traffic sources to see which ones drive a higher order
value

6. Measure SEO Variables

Similar to point one above, you can also use custom variables to track
various SEO variables of your website such as -

• Pages tagged with Rel=canonical

• Pages that are linked to sitewide
 • Tag certain "types" of content across your site

Action to take -

• Measure things such as the above and see how these pages
perform in search results

7. Completion of Tasks

This one falls outside Google Analytics but I still wanted to measure it as
it can be a great way of getting quick feedback about your site. I'd
recommend taking a look at 4Q survey for this one, they offer a free trial
so you can give it a test drive and see what you think. Avinash wrote a
pretty in depth review of it on his blog if you want to read a bit more into
it.

Quick sidenote, if you are into Analytics and not following Avinash
on Twitter or reading his blog, you should be! He is also speaking
at Mozcon in July and I've heard great things about his presentations.

Actions to take -

• Ask your visitors questions that matter using this software and
feed the answers back into your strategy

8. Share of Search Landscape

I really like this metric. The main reason I like it is that it is a metric that
anyone can understand, even people who don't get SEO will understand
this. This is because its very similar to a traditional marketing metric of
market share, so it can be used when demonstrating SEO growth and
targets to your clients.

Here is an example of how this may look (dummy data!):

9. Form Field Tracking

This is such an easy one to action and can make a big difference to your
conversions. If you are able to identify fields that are consistently
confusing customers and perhaps making them abandon the form, then
you are able to look into why and remove these barriers to conversion.
You can even take a step back and ask yourself if that field is even
required at all.

Action to take -

• Identify form fields that are causing problems and either remove
them or improve them

Pro Tip - you can use Google Analytics events to track which form fields
are causing problems. Here is a good thread over on the Analytics help
forum which points you in the right direction for setting this up.

10. Branded vs Non-branded Search Traffic

If you are an SEO, or you employ an SEO agency, you should be

measuring this metric. The great thing about measuring non-branded
traffic is that pretty much 100% of the credit can be given to SEO efforts.
Whilst credit for branded search increases can be credited to a number
of marketing channels such as PR, offline advertising or online display
advertising.

Action to take -

• Measure non-branded keywords and see which ones convert best,

then focus on increasing rankings for these

11. Conversion Rate

I'm pretty sure you are all looking at this metric, but I bet that some of
you are not using it properly. By not measuring it properly I mean that
you are probably looking at this overall figure:

You can't take any actions from this figure. In order to take actions, you
need to segment by relevant dimensions such as traffic source, type of
visitor, location, keyword etc.

Action to take -

• Segment conversion rate by best performing dimensions and

invest more resource into those dimensions

Metrics that help you get stuff done

The following metrics are focusing more towards helping you get stuff
done. You should really make sure you use all available data to fight
internal battles and give the business case to effect change at your
clients company. Make sure that you backup your recommendations
with solid data, however be careful not to confuse key stakeholders with
complicated stats or fancy graphs. Just give them the data they need and
visualise them in a meaningful way.

I'm going to give a couple of client examples here, whilst I can't give away
the client themselves, hopefully these examples will demonstrate the
power of data in getting things done.

1. Client didn't appreciate the value of content

A client of mine launched a microsite which had lots of good content on

it about their upcoming releases and products. When their main site
went live, they took down a lot of this content. This was despite our best
efforts to stop them! We saw traffic drop slightly and growth wasn't as
fast as it had been in previous months. After a few months (yes I know!)
we finally got the content put back up and we pretty much instantly saw
an increase in traffic.

So the next chance I got, I did a short presentation to one of the company
directors who had the power to make things happen at the client. He
wasn't involved much in day-to-day SEO but still had the power to
influence the rest of the company's attitude towards SEO. I showed him
a simple bar chart showing the traffic drop and the subsequent increase.

It worked a treat and he now understands the power of content and how
it effects organic traffic. This means that future tasks that involve
content won't be buried deep at the bottom of the developers list and
will be slightly closer to the top. Influencing change ftw.

2. Developers didn't like SEO tasks

One client of mine has a team of developers who are probably the
smartest I've ever worked with. However they'd previously worked with
SEO companies who had got them doing work which didn't make any
difference to traffic or revenue. These guys are super busy and didn't
want to spend their valuable time on tasks which didn't make a
difference. This made them a little resistant to future SEO tasks.

So when we had a situation where it was possible for Google to crawl

literally billions of pages on their site, most of which we didn't really
want Google spending their time crawling. After some work, we
managed to make some changes with the help of the developers to solve
this problem and make Google focus on the important pages and spend
more time crawling those.

A month or so later, we saw some very good results both in terms of

increased traffic and could also see through server logs that Google
were doing exactly what we wanted them to do.

With the help of the client, these results were shown to the developers
and they were given credit for the increased traffic. They were able to
see the results of their work which makes it much easier now to get them
to work on SEO tasks.

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