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Online Marketing: Six Web Metrics You Must Understand

Determining the effectiveness and/or ROI of your company's Web site is based on real data: number of unique visitors, the keywords and phrases people use to find your site, the pages that are downloaded most frequently, and that all-important metric -- conversion.

The only place to get that information is from a Web analytics program. If you haven't looked at your data and don't know how to get it, the first step is to contact your IT department (or your Web hosting company, if applicable).

Depending on your analytics program and its degree of sophistication, you can analyze various types of data. What follows are the very basic metrics you should tracking each month:

1. Number of Unique Visitors

Don't be swayed by the number of "hits" to your site. This is a misleading indicator as it includes an HTML page and the objects that make up the page, such as jpeg files, that get downloaded with the page (whether or not the person clicks on objects). Hence, one person can register significantly more than one "hit" per session.

Instead, pay attention to the number of unique visitors (which is almost always lower than the number of "hits") that visit for any given time frame (day, week, month, year). Unique visitors are real people, as opposed to search engine spiders or bots, and are counted only once per visit, no matter how many pages viewed per session.

2. Top Pages / Top Entrances

The "Top Pages" metric tells you which pages are most popular on your site, which in turn can help you plan future content as well as help you determine which pages can possibly be deleted or revamped.

Top Entrances, on the other hand, tells you how people are entering your site. It's not always the home page. If dozens of other Web pages are pointing to your site (meaning, you have lots of inbound links), visitors may be entering via lower level pages. Many people, for example, enter my site through my newsletter and marketing articles they find on the Web.

3. Top Keywords

Analyzing your keywords will show you which phrases people are using to find you -- and which ones they aren't. You may think people should be finding you using the search term "small widgets" when in reality they think of you as "thinga-ma-jigs." If you're site is already optimized, you can use this information to confirm your optimization strategies are working.

Reviewing your keywords is also a good way to determine the types of people visiting. I once wrote an article about a cartoon character and how it was marketed. In two weeks, I had thousands of kids visiting my site because my article was popping up in their searches. I removed that article from my site, fast!

4. Top Referrals

Your Web site most likely has sites that link to it. You can quickly see which sites are sending you traffic by looking at your "Top Referrals" data. This metric is important because it allows you to see which links are the most active as well as the effectiveness of your online advertising efforts. Last year, for example, I paid $150 for a listing in an online marketing directory. To date, only one person has clicked through from that Web site -- which means I won't be renewing my listing.

5. Top Domains or Robots/Spiders

While you're analyzing your data, do a quick check to ensure the top search engines are visiting your site. Some analytics programs will show this information as "Top Domains" or "Robots/Spiders." You should see listings from "googlebot," "MSIECrawler" "Inktomi Slurp" and other search engine spiders or bots.

6. Conversion Rate(s)

What is "conversion"? It's the action you want people to take when they visit your Web site: download a brochure or free offer, submit your "contact us" form, or sign up for your newsletter. For retail or consumer sites, it's the actual number of sales.

To determine simple conversion rates, take the number of people who took the desired action and divide by the number of unique visitors, then multiply by 100. If 3,000 people visited your site last month and 105 of them signed up for your company's e-newsletter, then your visitor-to-subscriber conversion rate is 3.5%.

Effective online marketing begins with regularly analyzing the data from your Web analytics program. Give visitors the content they want by analyzing top downloaded pages, tracking conversion rates, and continually tweaking keywords and search phrases. You'll see a noticeable increase in traffic -- which will ultimately lead to increased sales.