Metrics Matter

Writen by Philippa Gamse

Your web traffic reports offer unparalleled opportunities to learn more about your site visitors and their behavior.  Are you taking advantage of these opportunities?Knowing the hot content areas on your site can give you great ideas for future product and program development.  Rita Risser (http://www.FairMeasures.com) developed a whole set of online checklists and policy guideline documents based around the subjects that her visitors were searching for.

Calls to Action

One of my favorite mantras is "Every Page of your Site Should Have a Strategy".  You should absolutely know which segment of your target audience each page is aimed at, what's in it for them and what you want as a result.  Provide clear (and clickable) calls to action at every point in your copy where the reader might be ready to make the next move - whether it's "Sign up for our newsletter", "Buy our product", or "Contact me to ask about our services".

Sometimes this means directing the visitor to the next page that you'd like them to see.  Dave Paradi told me:

"I realized that people were entering my site on one of two specific pages, which are a couple of my articles that now have great placement on Google.  I also noticed that almost all of these visitors entered and exited on that page, not visiting any other pages. 

"So how could I get them to see the rest of the site - particularly the products that I hoped they would buy?  I included a link to my products page at the bottom of each article.  And last month, the products page jumped to the second most visited page, and it appears that many visitors, based on the value of the articles, are checking out the products."

And he's taking this a step further:

"It hasn't yet resulted in increased orders, but I think the next area I need to address is writing more successful copy for the products page."

At the Risk of Repeating Myself . . .

I like to think of Web traffic analysis as "market research that cannot lie".  The reports show you what visitors do on your site of their own accord, without prompting or other influence.  Not to discount focus groups, surveys and asking your favorite clients for feedback - those are important tools as well, but not as powerful.

So, if you haven't clearly defined the strategies, target markets and outcomes for your site, and if you aren't looking at your metrics to evaluate the success of these, then you're shooting in the dark with your Web investment.  The examples in this article show you just a few of the many ways that you can use this information - I hope that you're now motivated to find out more about your own site.

(c) 2003, Philippa Gamse.  All rights reserved.

Philippa Gamse, CyberSpeaker, is a Web strategy consultant and professional speaker. Check out her free tipsheet for 23 ideas to promote your Website: http://www.CyberSpeaker.com/tipsheet.html Philippa can be reached at (831) 465-0317.