Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik

It is a bit hard to believe that it has taken a year to talk about measuring effectiveness of individual pages on a website. It is perhaps a reflection of my belief that we already focus way too much on micro reporting on our websites, most of which is comprised of too much page level analysis.

[For my point of view on how to start your analysis please see this post: Getting Started With Web Analytics: Step One - Glean Macro Insights.]

But I think the time is right to focus on metrics, Key Performance Indicators and tips on how to measure effectiveness of individual pages.

The recommendations in this post are roughly in the order in which you would do the analysis (though there is no reason why you could not do each exclusively). At the back of my mind was the fact that when you get to page analysis you can easily get down and dirty and waste too much time. I wanted to frame this in a way that you can use your time efficiently, you’ll see a focus on that throughout this post.

A Five Step Program to Measure Effectiveness of Your Web Pages:

Here are all the wonderful gory details……

# 1: Don’t Obsess About Your Home Page.

IMHO we obsess too much about our home page. When it comes to improving effectiveness of the website a disproportionate amount of effort is put into playing with the home page.

The irony is that we live in the world of extremely efficient search engines and websites visitors who use those search engines to find our site. This means that if you have done half decent job of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) then most of the traffic will enter your website at a page deep within your site (a page that the search engine thinks is most relevant to what the user is looking for, which is a good thing).

Every page on your website is now a home page, every page has to make the kind of impression that you want your website home page to make. So task number one is to embark on a mission to convert your organization to this new mindset - your benefit is that you’ll focus on what actually matters to your customers.

Next create this graph for your home page to hammer the point home:

On average around 30% of the site traffic sees the home page of this blog accordingly to ClickTracks, even though most fresh content is on this single page. What’s the number for your website?

# 2: Compute Your Cliff - Only Then Jump.

Now that you are off your home page you have time to focus on other important pages on your website. Typically for your website a very small amount of content is going to be consumed by most of the traffic (think 20/80). Hence for you to start working on the most value add stuff on your site focus on the content most people are consuming.

A great way to identify that is to compute your “cliff”, at what point do the numbers fall off the horizon quickly. Here is how that looks:

In the example above after page number 9 consumption of the content falls of the cliff, and there is a long tail. Now you know where to apply your precious few analyst hours.

For each business the cliff might be at a different point, it is important to figure out what that point is so that you can impact the most important pages.

We are not going to ignore the long tail rather since we have finite resources and we want to have maximum business impact we will start by focusing on where we can move the dial. Too often we miss this critical first step.

# 3: Bouncy, Bouncy, Bounce - Its Good For You.

You know how many people see a page, you know which group of pages to go attack first. Now attack!

For the most important pages on your website measure the Bounce Rate. Not the Exit Rate from the page. Bounce Rate.

Bounce rate for a page is the number of people who entered the site on a page and left right away. They came, they said yuk and they were on their way.

I find that Bounce Rate is a great first filter that helps focus your efforts. It is hard enough to get traffic to your website, there is no reason that they should simply bounce off after seeing only one page.

A Quick Tip: The reason to not recommend looking at Exit Rate is that it normally includes people who enter the site any where but exited from this page. They could have ended up purchasing but choose to come back to this page and exit. You’ll find that your most visited pages have have the highest exits (makes sense right). Hence I don’t recommend using Exit Rate for much of anything, it is really hard for your to discern customer intent and use exit rate to glean any solid insights. That’s not the case with Bounce Rate.

Once you have pages with the highest bounce rate you have a set of actions you could take: What’s wrong with the page? Content, calls to actions, navigation.. all are fair game? Who is coming to that page (referring urls, campaign id’s, search keywords etc)? Does it list a expired promotion? And more.

You can see how this is immediately actionable, and since a lot of people are looking at it you’ll get immediate business value from any fixes you make.

My own personal observation is that it is really hard to get a bounce rate under 20%, anything over 35% is cause for concern, 50% (above) is worrying. I stress that this is my personal analysis based on my experience, but hopefully it gives you a feel for what you are shooting for.

# 4: Site Overlay - Something To Love.

Pages to focus on - check. Pages not performing well - check. Why not performing well? Your new best friend the Site Overlay / Click Density report to the rescue.

I have often professed my love for the site overlay report on this blog (or on Valentine Day cards!). IMHO this is a vastly underutilized resources, mostly because it is not reporting and most of the time we want to schedule things and report them. Site Overlay promotes analysis and takes time, but the rewards can be huge.

Simply open up your worst performing pages, or any other page, in the site overlay and analyze where people are clicking. Is the pattern where you expect it to be? No one is clicking on Buy Now or Next? Everyone seems to ignore your key left navigation structure? Why does the search box have most of the clicks? You get the idea.

By analyzing the patterns of clicks on the page you can get a great idea of how customers are reacting to your web pages and what they are or are not doing.

A Quick Tip: The site overlay feature can impart exponential wisdom if your tool allows you to do segmented site analysis, as in my example above using ClickTracks (click on the image for a bigger screenshot). I am not only looking at where all the traffic clicks but the second set of numbers on each link are clicks by traffic from Search Engines. Notice that they tend to be different (Marshall’s blog link seems to get half the number of clicks from search visitors compared to other visitors).

Segmented click density helps you understand what different streams of traffic are looking for on your web page and if your website platform allows you to then you can start to create some custom site experiences (or at the very minimum it will suggest ideas for multivariate tests - more below - or behavior targeting).

# 5: Think Holistically - Multiple Metrics, Key Context.

You have just finished analyzing the click density for links on your important web page. Don’t forget the key context that is sitting waiting for you for that page.

Most web analytics tools now give you all the key context you need within easy reach. Here’s what I am talking about from Google Analytics:

Or here is how it looks in ClickTracks (click on either image for higher resolution images)

The context metrics that you get for your Page Analysis efforts include: Time on Page or Time to a Page (unique computation in ClickTracks I believe) or % of Exits or % of Entries at a Page or Keywords that drive traffic to a page.

When you analyze the page on your website all this data gives you key context about performance. Maybe your page is performing sub-optimally because it is getting traffic for the wrong keywords. Or there is only deep content on this page yet 90% of the visitors who see this page enter the site on this page. Or it takes visitors 500 seconds after they enter your site to find this important page (and by then they have lost their patience with you).

Page analysis at this level is not easy, but you don’t have a choice. There is no pat answer that if you only look at one metric that you’ll understand why the page works or sucks. You are going to have to look at the whole story and something will jump out at the Analyst (not the Report Writer), and the fix will be obvious.

Try it, do this for the top ten pages on your site (or use the bouncy rule to identify five pages and go do this). I promise you that you’ll be surprised at how much you’ll learn if your web analytics tool provides you with this kind of context for your web pages.

That’s it, a simple five step program to help you revolutionize the process of finding insights that in turn will ensure your web pages are performing as well as they possibly could.

A Quick Closing Tip: We expect that if we simply do reporting then our pages will get better. If there is one lesson I have learned in this context it is that if you want to improve your web pages then you have to immerse yourself in them. You can’t pick improvements or problems off a excel spreadsheet data dump. You will actually have to interact with your web pages. I’ll get off my soap box now. :)

So you have all your problems identified, and you have a bunch of ideas to fix.

Now want?

MultiVariate Testing Rocks - Period.

Don’t give into the temptation of deciding what goes live on the site (or in a meeting get a HiPPO sway you on one idea that goes live). You don’t have to choose one version of the page, go test all your ideas.

Multivariate testing (click here to learn more) is really gods gift to all of us. It has become cheaper, it has become easier, it frees you from the clutches of bureaucracy that hindered optimization.

Below is the “cute’ified” version of a slide that I use to explain multivariate testing and how easy it is to test different images, calls to action, content and layout to understand which works best for your customers.

Multivariate testing empowers testing many different ideas and letting the customers vote on what works best for them (and yes please don’t worry it will most often result in a nice impact on your own bottom-line).

There are many great tools out there to do MVT testing such as Offermatica, Optimost, SiteSpect and Google’s Website Optimizer. The last one is completely free. You only need to have a AdWords account (even if you don’t use it very much) and you can test on any page for any traffic (test for not just your AdWords traffic and not just your search landing pages).

For any MVT tool just put a couple pieces of JavaScript tags on the page and you are on your way (and I am sure that the fact that you can get started 100% for free should not hurt). Give it a spin today.

What do you all think? Do you already do all this? None at all? Any special tips and tricks that you want to share about web page optimization? Disagree with something above? Please share your tips / tricks / feedback / critique via comments. Thanks so much.

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[There is a updated version of this post, please check it out: Blog Metrics: Six Recommendations For Measuring Your Success.]

On May 13th our son Chirag turned three and yesterday this blog turned one. I am more excited about Chirag’s birthday but my family members might disagree. :)

When this blog was four months old I had a blog post titled: How To Measure Success Of A Blog. It was my first attempt at providing a framework that pulled together different data sources to provide a holistic view of how to crack this tough nut.

It has been eight months since then and I wanted to use my blog numbers for the entire year to revisit the framework and tweak it a bit to make it better based on recent learnings.

My hope is that you’ll find specific ideas, metrics and tools that you can use to measure how your own blog (personal or professional) is doing.

Measuring success of Social Media in general is an evolving art (not quite a science yet) and you have to be up to the challenge of both thinking a bit differently and be ok with leveraging several different tools.

Here are the important metrics / KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) for measuring success of your blog:

• Raw Author Contribution (posts & words in post)
• Unique Blog Readers (content consumption – Unique Visitors & Feed Subscribers)
• Conversation Rate (measuring success in a social medium)
• Technorati “Authorityâ€? (measuring your impact on the world!)
• Cost (what!)
• Return on Investment (what’s in it for you/your business)

Let’s visit each recommendation in detail……

# 1: Raw Author Contribution.

If you want to achieve success, you’ve got to pay your dues. This KPI measures the answer to the question: “So what have you actually contributed?“.

My recommendation is to measure two simple things: 1) Number (trend) of posts in a given time period and 2) Words in posts.

I admit that neither of those two is a proxy for quality, but it is a foundational metric that might hold some answers if other metrics below are “sub optimal”.

You can get these stats from your blog log files or in my case I use the General Stats plugin for wordpress.

My stats: 12 months, 97 posts, 160,851 words.

Success? It depends. In my case the goal was to have fewer posts but with higher quality and lots more content in each. If I graphed the words per post over the last 12 months you’ll see a nice gradual upward trend, and if I correlate that with the trend in comments per post (also going up) it would give me a primitive indicator of quality. So I would consider this KPI to be indicate initial niceness.

For your blog you’ll watch the trend and watch for that trend to go in the right direction. As you can imagine it is quite ok for you to have lots of small posts with fewer words, watch the trend and for no large gaps (absence) in that trend.

# 2: Unique Blog Readers.

So how many people read your blog? And is it trending in the right direction? There is a tiny challenge with measuring this.

None of the current crop of accessible web analytics tools (except for perhaps Visual Sciences) track RSS feeds, which is a important content consumption methodology for blog readers. The RSS measurement tools, like feedburner, are just beginning to provide traditional onsite metrics.

My recommendation, for now, is for you to compute Unique Blog Readers by yourself by combining two metrics that are measured slightly, only slightly, differently. Unique Visitors, from your web analytics tool, and Feed Subscribers, from your RSS tool.

Unique Blog Readers = Unique Visitors (to the blog) + Average Feed Subscribers (consuming your feeds).

Here is how the trend looks for Occam’s Razor for the first year…..

Some people who subscribe to your RSS feed probably visit your blog from time to time, so there is slight over counting. Also Feed Subscribers is probably even better at measuring uniqueness than Unique Visitors using a web analytics tool like ClickTracks or Google Analytics or Omniture or WebTrends or HBX etc.

But here is the important point: Look at trends.

Over time if your trend is going in the right direction you are doing fine. See the last two columns above.

While I think that looking at the combo metric is optimal, if you wanted to use just one then you could use the growth of your RSS Feed Subscribers.

For the most part it is immune to vagaries of one time events that might impact your visitor stats (see Months 2 and 12, column four above), and it shows great commitment from your readers to sign up for your feed.

The only “funny” number in the feed stats for me was when a post got on the digg home page. Notice that otherwise the trend is nice and steady growth, the bump you see is when Google started reporting Google Reader data.

Success? For this blog I am absolutely surprised and grateful. I never imagined that a year later I would have approx 20k visits from 12k unique visitors (month 11) or that I would have approx 3,000 feed subscribers. It is a case of you all just showing up and me very grateful to all of you! Thanks!

For your blog you want a nice steady growth for the Unique Blog Readers metric. If yours is a professional blog I encourage setting of goals, say 10% growth every month, and then measuring against goals. It can be unbelievably motivating.

# 3: Conversation Rate

Blogs are a social medium and they facilitate excellent two way conversations. For your blog measure the Conversation Rate (not conversion! :)).

Average Conversation Rate = # of Reader Comments / # of Posts

For my blog the Conversation Rate is 13 (approximately 13 comments per post).

That is 1,523 minus 115 (a recent post got too many comments so I am eliminating it as an anomaly) times 0.9 (since approximately 10% of the comments are mine) divided by 97 (number of posts).

For me the most awesome part of the experience is the content you all contribute. Notice you all have written as much in comments, approximately 120k words (eliminating approx 31k from my comments), as I have in posts (161k)!!

Success? My goal when I started the blog was to get approximately 3 comments per post, but since I was meeting the goal at mid year I raised it to 5 comments per post. So I would deem this as a success. But it is important to stress that this is your contribution to me meeting the goal, if it were not for your willingness to engage in the conversation this would not happen.

For your blog set a goal for this most social of social mediums. It is also a great reflection of your content creating a level of engagement with your target audience. As with other metrics watch the trend.

# 4: Technorati “Authority� (benchmark externally).

Technorati elicits mixed feelings, but I am a fan. If you just stick to your blogging and write great content then there is no better authority, at the moment, that will provide you a metric to compare your impact on the blogging universe.

It is a simple metric, there are 70 million blogs and if they were ranked from one to seventy million then what would your rank be.

There are two things about Technorati that I like very much: 1) You have to consistently stay relevant, links to your blog are counted on a six month rolling window so you can be good once and then enjoy the ride. You have to keep producing good content that people will link to. 2) It is democratic. Unless you are part of a content network etc, you will have to earn every link the hard way and your peers vote with their links. Can’t beat that validation, I think that is why we are hooked on Technorati (we all want to be loved!).

Here is the trend for my blog over the last 12 months….

That last point might be bit of an anomaly, I expect the ranking to settle back to around 3,500 in six months.

Success? The blog started on May 15 and my goal was to have my Technorati ranking be under 10k by end of 2006. I was happy to reach that goal in October (thanks to all of you in the blogosphere). I should probably have a new goal now. I’ll shoot for a under 3,000 Technorati ranking by end of 2007 (it is important to note that meeting that goal is much harder than is might seem).

For your blog, personal or professional I recommend a similar goal setting exercise. Here is a great way to do that: Do a quick Technorati search for all the blogs in your own ecosystem. Create a goal to beat the highest listed blog in that ecosystem in x months, where x is aggressive. :)

# 5: Cost.

What is the cost to your life, business, time of your blog? Compute it and you’ll be surprised.

I use a simple formula. I only blog at most twice a week (in the last few months it has bee just once a week which is why some of the growth numbers above are surprising to me, maybe if I blog once a month my numbers will shoot through the roof!). But my computations I still spend approximately 25 hours per week on blog and directly blog related work (research, replying to email, creating draft posts, etc etc).

Assuming my time is worth $75 per hour….

Annual cost of the blog = 25 * 4 * 75 * 12 = $90,000.

If this was a real job that is how much I would have earned. And that is not even computing the opportunity cost (which if you are a business committing to blogging you should absolutely also compute).

That is a huge number, even at $75 per hour. It makes me carefully evaluate what I am trying to accomplish with this resource (and if it is really worth not watching The Daily Show, or any TV for eight months).

Success? I had no goals for this and I don’t think that is the real cost of my investment in the blog, it is probably much higher. While I blog for the love of it, I recommend that we should put a number on the cost of what it takes to blog. In multiple ways it can be insightful.

Interestingly this is an addiction and I don’t think that the investment is going to go down. But atleast I know, and so should you.

# 6: Return on Investment.

The question you are trying to answer is: “So what do I get out of it all?”. Sure it sounds selfish but it is important.

Let us get this out of the way: If you are a “real” blogger, :), you probably do it for the love of it and you will do it even if you had to give up sleeping. All because it makes you happy. And there is no price that you can put on a ROI of happiness. If you are one of those (and I am!) then for a moment leave that aside.

You (and I) should track ROI. Use what you have: job offers you get, proposals for marriage, increase in salary at work, sales driven to your ecommerce website from the blog, reduction in the cost of PR because now your blog is so omnipresent and a big bull horn (for businesses this is big), number of paid conference speaking engagements, and so on and so forth.

I don’t have a ROI number to share with you this time around. I do have a new consulting gig that I just started and the blog had something to do with it, but it is too soon to compute ROI on that. I did get a offer to write the book (Web Analytics: An Hour A Day), but because I wanted to keep the blog pure all that money is going to charity.

Success? The next time I do this I’ll compute ROI and show what I get for a investment of $90k per year into this blog, by including some numbers. But I have to admit that I would probably keep doing this even if the ROI is not positive, especially if you all continue to engage in the conversation with me like you do (because what you teach me through your comments is work more than $90k per year).

I hope that you’ll find this post helpful in measuring the success of your own social media efforts (be they blogs or other such efforts).

What do you all think? Did I cover everything? Is there a metric you use that I have not highlighted above? Have tips for me on how better to compute ROI? Please share your feedback and critique via comments.

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