Web Analytics : How to Identify Useful vs. Useless Metrics

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“You can’t manage what you don’t measure” – old management adage

Junk in, junk out – popular quote among web analysts

I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately. We have all kinds of data about our websites: total visits, total pageviews, pages/visit, bounce rate or average time on site. This is only maybe 1/10th of the information we have available about our websites.

But the question here is…so what?

I know the number of total visitors to my site, so what?

I know how many people bounced from my pages on average, so what?

I know how much time people spend on my website, why should I care?

What are the functional benefits of this data? What kind of useful information can I take from all this and apply it to make more money? Or to make more useful articles for my readers?

The truth is, this type of aggregate data (like total pageviews) is useless. The functional benefits of these types of metrics are almost non-existent. Instead, you have the emotional benefits like bragging how much visitors you got to your site (more=better), bragging how ‘above average’ your site is in terms of time spent (compared to the average) and so on. Good for your ego? Yes. Good for making more money? Well…

Welcome to the “So What?” World
This question was popularized by the web analytics guru Avinash Kaushik (he has hundreds of articles and, recently, is releasing free video series on the Google Analytics official blog.) My experience shows that asking this question on any type of data gives you instant clarity on whether that data is useful or not.

For example, you know you had 30.543 visitors for this week. So what? Mmm……you don’t know? The reason why this type of data is often useless is because it’s aggregated, and aggregate data doesn’t tell you much.

SEGMENTED data does (it’s easy to segment in Google Analytics using the ‘advanced segments’ feature).

Here’s one thing you can do with segmenting: You can create a segment which consists of people who visited 3+ pages on your site. After you create the segment, you can see, under ‘traffic sources’ where those people came from (which referring sites or what keywords in the search engines).

I HIGHLY RECOMMEND you watch this video from Google where the spokeswoman creates segments in real time and shows you how to make use of them. For me, I never really realized the power of segments till I saw a live example (and it’s no surprise that one of the best way to learn something is to see other people showing you how it’s done).

Back to our ‘so what’ test. I’ve created a segment of people who visit 3+ pages on my site. So what? I can now see which traffic sources stayed most of the site. So what? I can focus on attracting more visitors from those traffic sources/keywords if my goal is to get people to stay more. Why would I want that? Well, this might be the goal if you’re owning a blog/publishing articles and news. This leads me to the most important point in this article…

What is the Goal of Your Website?
Avinash Kaushik paraphasized this question in another way: “Why does your website exist?” Again, this is a question to give you a “reality check” and help you figure the functional benefits of your website.

What’s the goal of Scope for Money? I would assume it is to help people make more money with SEO/Social Media/Affiliate Marketing. The goal (in monetary terms) is also to generate more page views which will increase the prices for their BuySellAds advertisements.

Why is This ‘goal’ Question so Important?
Because measuring success is important (if you don’t see a target, how are you going to hit it?). So many people talk about ‘success’ without really defining it. In reality, what most people mean by “I’m going to be successful in this” is “I’m going to reach this target/goal”.

Let’s take Scope for Money as an example. Their goal is to provide useful articles for making money online. How will they measure this? Number of comments? That’s not a very reliable metric because people don’t just comment because they think the article is useful. Many of them simply leave a comment to get a link to their website and that’s often the sole motivation. So, is there any reliable metric Scope for Money can use to determine how ‘valuable’ their articles are? One good idea would be to add this at the end of their articles :

This is what Google uses at the end of each ‘help’ type of article (Scope for Money can replace ‘information’ with ‘article’). So what they can try is measure the % of people who view the article and click on ‘yes.’. For example, if an article has 1000 views and receives 10 ‘yes’’es, the percentage of people who like the article would be 1%. That’s the metric. Now, take all articles and compare them using this % metric to see which ones were found to be most helpful by readers.

Or let’s take a short example on my site. Recently I wrote an article on background check services and was hoping to solicit feedback from visitors on what service they found to be most useful. What can I do here is make a small poll at the end of the article asking people: “Based on your experience, what’s the service you found to be most useful?” and once they select one, a text window will appear asking them WHY they chose that option.

The main point is: It all starts with the goal/s of your website (which is usually visitor-oriented like getting more people to buy a product or stay more on a website and money-oriented like getting bigger CTR from AdSense or more advertisers). Based on those goals, you create metrics (they call them KPI = key performance indicators in business) by which you measure how far you’ve got with that goal.