Last week I read yet another excellent post by Avinash Kaushik over at Occam’s Razor on the metrics that should be tracked for content sites. It gave some excellent metrics to get started with, but there are a few more additional metrics that I believe can increase your insight into your content site.

The analysis work can be broken down into three main categories that all play into each other. They are the:

1. Analysis of the visitors
2. Analysis of the content
3. Analysis of the conversions (yes you can have conversions on content sites).

This post will address the first of these categories, and I’ll address the others in later posts.

Visitors:

This was the main area that Avinash focused on and so I’m not going to repeat his points, but I will add a couple of metrics that I believe are just as important. The four excellent metrics that he mentioned were:

• Visitor Loyalty: How many times do visitors visit the site during the reporting period?
• Recency: How long has it been since a visitor last visited the site
• Length of Visit: How long does a visitor session last?
• Depth of Visit: How many page views per visit?

In addition, you should also track the quality of your unique visitors by determining if they help expand the base of your returning visitors. As with any site, you always want to strive to attract a wider range of your target audience who will then hopefully turn into part of your loyal base of visitors. To do this you use basic metrics, but it’s how you use them that will shed light on the quality of your unique visitors. The metrics are:

• Total Visits
• Unique Visitors
• Returning Visitors
• New Visitors

Trending the ratio of new visitors vs. returning visitors will help you see over time the balance that your site has. The ratio will fluctuate, especially if you’re actively marketing your content one month and not so much the next. It is important, however, to look at this trend so that you’ll be able to dig into the data, if necessary, to find any unexplained fluctuations.

The next piece of the puzzle is to figure out the quality of your unique visitors. While it can be helpful to track the trends for each of the metrics above, it’s important to look deeper to figure out the effects that an increase or decrease in total visits and/or unique visitors has on your returning visitors. In order to do this, you should look at the trends for the percentage increase or decrease each has from the previous reporting period.

Two of the possible scenarios that you could potentially see are:

• If unique visitors are steadily increasing by 10% each period and total visits are up about the same percentage, it may appear that everything is going great. Looking at the returning visitors may, however, change that perception. If the returning visitors are flat then it means that the unique visitors who are coming to your site aren’t the audience you should be targeting.
• If your total visits are down 10% you’re probably not going to be running out to the bar for a celebration drink, but there could be a silver lining. If during that same period your returning visitors jumped 10% you at least know that some of the work you’ve done in previous months to attract unique visitors to your site has paid off.

Many people look at short term solutions to boost traffic, but to be successful in the long term you need to build a strong loyal base. Assuming you’ve got great content, the next step should be to constantly test various marketing initiatives and track each to see which methods succeed at delivering the highest number of new loyal visitors at the lowest cost. Getting traffic isn’t generally that hard part, but getting quality traffic can be if you don’t track and test properly.

Filed under: Analytics on Thursday, July 26th, 2007 by Nate Linnell |
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.