Researching Web analytics for a news site and a definitely non-ecommerce one at that can be a bit like always being the “different” kid at school. When I first started learning about the topic I felt like I had to cover my ears whenever the discussion turned to conversion (when a visitor to your site makes a purchase or completes a task). (Web Analytics Association, 2008) I knew in general that conversion applies to any website, yet my previous classes typically put forward an ecommerce site such as Best Buy or Amazon where the customer researches something they want to buy and—hopefully for the company—buys the product and continues to return and buy even more products.
These basics of Web analytics made me wish I had a commercial product to sell to make conversion calculation easier. But if you look at the situation from a different angle, it's a similar process for non-ecommerce. And you really have to see it this way because without looking at your revenue or the value created from your online presence, there's A. no demonstrated point in having a website and B. no way of correctly estimating what the site is achieving.
The first real, cogent process I've seen for measuring value generated from a non-ecommerce site was in Google guru Avinash Kaushik's book “Web Analytics 2.0.” (2010) Typical benchmarks such as page visits won't really tell you much that's valuable, he says. You should be looking at visitor loyalty, visitor recency, length of visit and depth of visit, all metrics that can be found in the free Google Analytics reporting tool.
1. Visitor loyalty analysis measures how often your unique visitors come to your site. (Kaushik, 2010) But more than that, it will allow you to segment your visiting audience and concentrate on those who keep returning to your site. You can find out how many people really are your friends, where they're coming from and what they're seeing on your site.
2. Visitor recency shows you how many visitors have come to your site in a period of time by measuring the time between visits. (Kaushik, 2010) It would be ideal if they visit you multiple times in a week, for example, and even if they aren't, you have a way to track how your efforts are increasing or decreasing the frequency of visits.
3. The length of visit doesn't tell you the average time on site, a traditional method of measuring Web traffic through analytics software such as Google Analytics, but it will tell you how many visitors are on your site for a given period of time. (Kaushik, 2010) Through this tool you can discover that key group of people who stay on your site for more than a minute.
4. The depth of visit will tell you the number of pages in each visit to your website, not an average number of pages. (Kaushik, 2010)
Once tied to your business objectives, these metrics can take you far. (Kaushik, 2010) You can better measure conversions if you know important visitor activity such as the how often they visit, how long they are on your site, how many pages they visit, how frequently and recently they visit and how loyal they are to you. These tools allow you to track real progress for a site that lives off brand awareness and the spread of knowledge, your kind of sales.
You don't have to read the book to dig into these metrics, but can find them on Kaushik's blog, Occam's Razor in this article.
The last step in this equation is to assign values to actions taken on your site. (Kaushik suggests making use of offline values assigned to actions such as giving a brochure download on the site the same economic value as what it costs you to send a brochure in the real world or acquire an e-mail list. (2010) Google suggests two ways of doing this: assigning values to your goals as Kaushik demonstrates, or set up ecommerce tracking in Google Analytics. (Clifton) Setting up the tracking may help you in making more accurate counts of items that convert customers to your goals.
References
Clifton, B. (n.d.) Measuring non-ecommerce site value. Retrieved from: http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1011367
Kaushik, A. (2010) Web analytics 2.0: the art of online accountability and the science of customer centricity. Indianapolis: Wiley Publishing, Inc.
Web Analytics Association. (September 22, 2008). Web analytics definitions. Retrieved from: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&ved=0CK8BEBYwAQ&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.webanalyticsassociation.org%2Fresource%2Fresmgr%2FPDF_standards%2FWebAnalyticsDefinitions.pdf&ei=J6nLT97JE66L0QGI6rmkAQ&usg=AFQjCNFP1XPpBbnyL03FKfksg7A87siKIg&sig2=ap3gX0XDbyx-Cwj3G442Yg
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