Measure Your Website Performance - A guide to understanding web analytics

One solution does not fit all. What may be a good measurement indicator to one website may not be adequate for another. Keeping this in mind with the goals, one website may want to measure visitors to justify rates to online advertisers. Another site may want members or subscribers to signup for an e-mail newsletter; another may want to measure actual leads and/or sales. Keeping this in mind, the campaign manager may realize that the website that is bringing them the most visitors may not be bringing them the most leads and/or sales. It is important to look at the web analysis as part of the solution, not 'the' solution.

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What is the ideal scenario you would want your prospective visitor, customer, client, to do on the website?

Types of online goals:

1. Page views - this is the foundation of all website goals. This may seem simple in principle, but it can be challenging. News sites, jobs sites and the like have this basic goal in mind. If a news article is spread over 4 pages, the marketing analyst measures how many people reached page 4 (or finished the article) over how many people began the article on page 1. Page views are important because those metrics may dictate advertising rates for that section.

2. Downloads - This may be also an essential goal. A download does not necessarily mean that one person performed one download. A site can have multiple types of downloads like:
a.PDFs (Adobe Document format) as takeaways that people can refer to when they are away from the computer, (i.e. commuting). Some examples are an instruction manual, a brochure, a magazine, or an application;
b.Multimedia files such as music, sound (i.e. podcasts) and/or video. Sites like Vh1.com and iTunes.com have the top ten or top twenty downloads for the day or week;
c.Flash files - how many people download a flash file.
d.Download a blog feed (XML files to read on a feed reader)

3. Forms - How many people fill out a contact form on a website is only part of the story. There are different types of forms out there, such as:
a.Search box - how many people performed a search;
b.Subscribe form - how many people subscribed to a newsletter;
c.Contact form - how many people filled out a contact and/or feedback form;
d.Message Boards/Guestbooks - how many posts were posted

4.Purchase - How many people make a purchase online. How many people put items in the "shopping cart", to how many get to the confirmation page, to how many people successfully check out?

5. Time Spent on the website - How long to visitors spend on key pages? Why do they leave? The time spent may be an indicator of it visitors are finding the information that they need.

The above are some items that may be considered goals for a website. One should not be solely invested in just one goal. It is recommended to use a variety of goals. Visitors do not accomplish the website goal in the same manner or in the same time period. Someone may need to download a whitepaper or subscribe to a newsletter before they decide to fill in a contact form, or make that call in order to make the purchase.
Once you are clear

Certain campaigns can be simply measured over others due to a variety of reasons. A particular campaign is measured over another because it is active only for a given period of time (a day, a week, a month or a season). With this is mind, there are several methods websites can use to track the success of their campaigns.

A website can choose to implement their own web analytics process, either by purchasing software and running reports or by outsourcing the web analytics process. In either case the web analytics tool(s) should be able to show the following:

1.Which websites are referring visitors to your website?
2.Which search engines are referring people to the website and the keywords that they use?
3.How long do these visitors spend on the website?
4.What pages do visitors frequent?
5.How many times are the goal(s) /pages viewed?

For checks and balances, I would recommend using more than one web analytics tool. This can be the web analysis tool that comes with the website's web hosting service and an additional service, paid or unpaid.

In terms of campaign management, one can use any of the above to obtain a gage. As for campaign measurement, one can track for the referring website, how many visitors came, how long did they spent, and how many reached a goal internally.

Externally, referring websites may be able to provide you with their information regarding your campaign. One can take the external information and compare it with the information from the internal web reports to see if there are any major discrepancies. It is important to rely on more than one measurement to verify the status of campaigns and to justify advertising spending.