Less Is More With Web Statistics
By C. David Gammel, CAE
Most website statistical reports are a waste of time and effort. WebTrends and Google Analytics offer dozens of reports, dashboards, and summaries yet provide little insight into the value your site is creating for your members. It is easy to get overwhelmed.
Effective metrics should help you make decisions. Can you take action based on a measurement? If not, it probably isn’t worth a lot of your attention. For example: “Your total page views went up 2.5 percent this week over the previous week.” What can you do with that information? Not much.
What Matters Most?
To make the most of web statistics, identify a few metrics that indicate actual progress toward important goals.
The first step is to identify a specific goal you are trying to achieve. For example, many web goals are built around trying to get someone to take a particular action. The action may be to sign up for a newsletter, register for a conference, or buy a book.
Whatever the goal, you must know each of the steps involved in reaching that goal and understand how the website will contribute to achieving those steps.
With these steps in mind, develop measures that show people are progressing along your desired series of actions. This focused data collection will give you actionable intelligence on how to speed your site visitors along your desired path.
Driving Membership via Web Statistics
I’ll end with a concrete example: membership renewal. For this example, let’s use an email campaign that drives members to the website to renew their membership. The following measures can be used to improve this process—and increase your membership renewal rate:
Opens and click-throughs of the e-mail message. These measures allow you to gauge the effectiveness of your subject line and determine if the presentation of renewing in the body of the message was compelling. You can use these statistics to conduct A/B tests of different language on a sample of your members before sending out the message to your entire list.
Progress through the renewal application. Track your members’ progress through the renewal application. Where do people tend to leave the site if they do not complete the renewal? That information tells you where you may have a barrier that can be removed or reduced to increase your overall online renewal efforts.
For example, it’s quite common for many people to terminate the process when asked to log in because they don’t remember their user name and password and don’t want to bother with looking them up. Giving users a secure link directly to payment without requiring log-in removes that barrier and may dramatically increase online renewals.
The membership renewal case outlined above is a simple example—but implementing this one measurement process will give you more value than you have ever received from a standard web analytics report.
Remember: web stats are only valuable when they enable you to take action to improve the measurement. All else is a waste of time.
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