by Kris Lande, Product Marketing Manager
At this year's VRMA show in Washington DC, I got the chance to attend some great educational sessions throughout the week. One of my favorite sessions was "Measuring Online Success: Following the Metrics the Matter" presented by Mark Randle and Rebecca Lundregan of Visual Data Systems.
In the session Mark and Rebecca discussed how to measure your company's website success by looking at the nine metrics that they feel matter the most. Here is a rundown of the metrics that matter according to the presenters:
1. Average Time on Site: What is the total time for all visits when divided by the total number of visits?
2. Average Pages per Visit: What is the total page views divided by the total number of visits?
3. Bounce Rate: Bounce rate represents the percentage of initial visitors to your website who see a single page and immediately leave to a different site. Also known as 'hit and run' visits, and not to be confused with 'exit rate.'
4. Exit Percentage: This is the percentage of visitors leaving your website from a particular page.
5. New Visits vs. Returning Visits: This shows you data for new visitors compared to returning visitors and is determined by a tracking code and not by an IP address.
6. Goal Conversions: Setting up goals on your site is a great way to measure if your visitors are navigating through your site as you'd like them to. An example of goals to set up would be getting visitors to a 'contact us' page, the booking page or the 'email a friend' page.
7. Paid Traffic vs. Organic Traffic: This is the overall visits brought to your site by either your SEM (search engine marketing) pay-per-click efforts versus the traffic brought to your site by SEO (search engine optimization) organic efforts.
8. Map Overlay: The map overlay is a great way to see where your website visitors are coming from by geographic area.
9. Google Custom Search Statistics: Google Custom Search creates a customized web search on your site with results from your website pages.
Great recap Kris. Your notes are stronger than mine, so thanks for sharing. I too thought they did a terrific job with the session.
Posted by: Cort Roussel | November 02, 2009 at 08:23 PM