Basic Metrics

This post will explore some of the basic metrics used to analyze customer behavior. There are four terms that make up the foundation for web metrics: unique visitors, visits/sessions, page views and events. These can be combined with other measures and metrics to determine consumer behavior. Other metrics include click-through, click-through rate, bounce, and frequency, conversion and conversion rate. All of these combined create a better understanding of the consumers and their behavior patterns.

The unique visitors are the number of individual people visiting a site. Each person/visitor is counted only once. Unique visitors are a superior approximation of the number of actual people visiting the website. The number of unique visitors gives the business a general idea how many people they are reaching with a particular website, page, ad or link. The number of unique visitors can be compared to the business’ competition. Google + has surpassed the 100 million monthly users mark and that is a low number when compared to other social media networks. According to Mashable.com, in the same time period, Facebook had over 800 million unique visitors, Twitter over 180 million and LinkedIn over 160 million. This gives Google an idea where they are within the market and that they need to improve their unique visitors.

Visits or sessions can be defined as an interaction with a web site by an individual consisting of one or more requests for a page. Page views are the number of times a page is viewed and events are any logged or recorded action that has a specific date and time assigned to it by the browser or server.

Click-through refers to the number of times a link on a website was clicked. The click-through rate gives the ratio of how many times the link was clicked over the number of times the link was viewed. The click-through rate is the basis for online advertising and measuring its success. However, it has become an unreliable measure. In a new study by Pretarget, they found the correlation between click-through rates and customer engagement is lower than just ‘hovering’ over the ad. This is important because it can give the business an idea of which ads are successful as of clicks or whether they should change their strategy. CEO and Founder of Keith Pieper suggest from the study that optimizing viewable impressions and hover time could be a better measure than click-through rates. Since the Internet is always changing, learning when to use a better advanced metric could be important for brand goals.

Bounces are visits that consist of only one page being viewed. Frequency is the number of times an action is performed on a website by a unique visitor. The frequency will give an idea of what the unique visitors are doing on the website. This will show the business what part of the website works and what does not. Facebook released a statement in October 2012 that clicks do not matter as much anymore but reach and frequency do. By maximizing those key points, the company could have better brand engagement and possibly increase ROI. Measuring frequency shows customer behavior on a website and analyzing that data can help change the website to better market their target audiences.

Conversion is the number of times a desired outcome is accomplished and the conversion rate is the number of conversions over the number of visits. There are steps that are needed to increase a brands conversion rate, according to an article on Mashable.com. The first is to understand your customer. Following what they search for and even look at gives feedback to the company. Making the website more relevant also attracts customers. By using the information collected by following them, the website can be tailored to their needs. Another technique is using offline learning to enhance the online experience. Follow what your customers do in stores as well as online. Be consistent. The messages need to echo what attracted the customer to the website. And lastly is test the content before posting it live. All of these steps will help increase your conversion rate.

The basic metrics mentioned above give the company an understanding how their consumers behave and interact on the website. It is also helps predict how consumers will behave on the website and how to convert that behavior into the intended reaction.