Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik

#1 Get the Primitive Basics Out of the Way.

#2 Understand Traffic Sources.

#3 Fix Stuff / Save Money!

#4 Two Words: Site Overlay!

#5 Focus on Outcomes (To get rich is glorious! - Deng Xiaoping).

Visits represents the number of sessions on your website, number of times someone interacted with your site. Bounce is the number of those who left instantly!

The Page Views number is how many pages were requested in those visits. Oh and how many in each visit, Pages / Visit.

Avg Time on Site, how long did people stay on your site.

% New Visits shows how many sessions, interactions, were from people (yes people!) who visited your site for the first time.

[Note: Blogs are unique "I'll only read the latest post and be on my way" animals. In as much both Bounce Rate and Time on Site are poor metrics to judge quality.]

First bask in the glory of how good you are (or be sad at how low your traffic is!), for this first look.

Then here is how I analyze the numbers you see above…

For a non-profit (above data) that is a huge number of visits in a month. But I’ll probably want to trend it over time, as much data as you have, to see if it is going up or down.

Next I am deeply impressed at the combo of Pages/Visit and Avg. Time on Site. Most websites will have two or three or five (at most) Pages / Visit. 12 is magnificent, as is almost 7 minutes on the site.

The bounce rate at 35% is very good in context of the number of visits and page views. It is hard to get so many qualified visitors.

I will now do a small dance on the table.

Look at trends.

See how things are over the last few months.

See how things compare between this month (above) and last month.

No matter what web analytics tool you use this will require pressing two or three buttons at most.

With a tiny amount of effort (15 mins or so) you have learned your core metrics and you know how you are doing on the surface. That wasn’t hard right?

This was 5 out of the 35 points of progress. Feels good?

Direct traffic are all those people showing up to your website by typing in the URL of your website or from a bookmark. Some people also call this “default traffic” or “ambient traffic”.

Sometimes you’ll see “non direct” traffic in the direct bucket. From badly coded redirects (remember to make all redirects Permanent) or vanity urls, or even improperly coded campaigns. Now you know why that is important.

Referring URL’s are other websites sending traffic to you. These could be as a result of your banner ad’s or campaigns. These could be all those blogs or affiliates who link to you (after you send the blog authors uninvited and usually irritating presumptuous spam!!).

Search engines, well that’s you know who. Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, others. This bucket will include both your Organic as well as you Paid (PPC / SEM) traffic, so be aware of that.

Finally there is Other. These include campaigns you have run (and then have configured your tool correctly). Email, direct marketing, etc.

I look at the Direct Traffic first because I want to know how much traffic are you getting from people who know you deep enough to know your url or have you bookmarked.

I also like lots of direct traffic because it is “free” traffic, and traffic who knows you so will usually put up with some of your crap.

Finally on ecommerce websites these are “non campaign” traffic which means that they don’t have promotions and discounts etc, so they can be a bit more profitable (though be nice and give ‘em something off!!).

I am going to look at referring url’s to identify sources that I don’t know who are sending me traffic. I might visit the referring pages and see why. For some solid ones I might want to establish a marketing relationship with them.

I’ll also look for traffic sources that should be sending me traffic and if they really are doing that. The referring url world also shares a hint of customer intent, why might they be there. Small gold.

Search of course is God, atleast temporarily. It is how we look for stuff, it is how we find relevant content.

The number, 29.33% tells me how well I am doing. 80% of the web starts surfing at a search engine. I want a lot of that! Look at the search traffic and the keywords to understand which engine is working for you and why.

You probably spent 30 mins looking at the above picture and drilling down to the next level report. You know where people come from and their intent. You are now 10 points into your 35 points of progress! Hurray!!!

As you perhaps already realize you have lost control of what the home page of your website is. Search engines decide what the home page of your website is. People search for you (or click through from a link on another site) and go directly deep into your site.

The top entry pages report, first one up there, shows you how many people are entering on each page of your website, and hence they show the top “home pages” of your website. Super!

By adding the bounce rate (in case you don’t know what it is please read: Standard Metrics Revisited: Bounce Rate) you have a indicator of how engaging :) each of your “home pages” are.

Ditto for the keyword report. Search is where all the traffic is, for now. I did a quick custom report in IndexTools and it shows Visits and Bounce Rate.

Simple: Stinkiness. Your site’s.

You are looking, first, for pages with the highest bounce rate. Remember bounce rate measures this from a costumer’s perspective: I came, I puked, I left . Or technically speaking: single page view sessions.

Pages with a high bounce rate are not delivering on the promise that is driving customers to your site. The ones in the top ten Entry Pages report need your attention.

You fix ‘em and you are increasing the likelihood that people will go deeper into your site, and maybe convert.

The keywords report is even more interesting. Here you have Intent. The customer is telling you why they might be coming and keywords with high bounce rates are where you are not meeting that intent.

It could be that you are ranked for the wrong keywords. It could be that the pages these folks are landing on don’t have the right calls to action. Fix it.

[I have mentioned this before: Blogs are a unique beast, people come mostly only to read your latest post, your bounce rates will be high because of how that metric is defined, it is ok. On any site that exists to have any customer interaction - for profit, non-profit - it is still a awesome metric.]

No matter how sophisticated you are you can use the Google Website Optimizer to do A/B or Multivariate tests. It take six minutes to set up a GWO A/B test. And the tool is free. Pick pages you want to fix, create a couple versions of the pages, put them into a test. You’ll improve the pages based on customer feedback.

I look at landing pages of the top keywords (one click report in most web analytics tools) and see how I can improve the copy / content / images / calls to action.

I’ll take time to segment the paid and organic traffic for all the search engines and stop spending money on the paid keywords where I have high bounce rate, until I figure out why the bounce rate is so high (maybe wrong keywords, maybe you are driving traffic to generic pages and need custom landing pages etc).

It takes you about two minutes to get to each report and another minute to look at the numbers and press a few buttons. At the end of the half hour you have created for yourself a specific list of focus areas. You know exactly where you need to start when it comes to fixing pages on your site and potentially improving your paid campaigns.

You are up to 20 of the 35 points. And you know what you are doing!! Congratulations!!!

Click density. The report, in almost every tool, shows the number of clicks on each link that you have on the page.

Each tool will show it slightly differently. Google Analytics, above, shows “colored bars” and if you hover the mouse over the link it also shows goal conversion metrics. ClickTracks shows the clicks as a % (very helpful). Others show a “heat map” and others still draw boxes around elements on the page.

Perhaps my favorite of them all is ClickTracks because it also shows context, key metrics, about the page right in the site overlay report. Sooooo helpful…..

[Click on the above image for a higher resolution version.]

It is showing % Page Views, Time on Page, Time to the Page (why does everyone not have this awesome metric?), % Exits and Keywords that brought people to the page. Nice.

You are looking for clusters of heavy clicks. I look for the top two or three most clicked links and I’ll try to reconcile that against links that I want visitors to click on. I’ll see what people are clicking on below “the fold”, any surprises there?

I also look at links that ultimately drive high conversions (you can have conversions on a ecommerce website, or as in the GA screenshot above, a non-ecommerce website).

I am looking for things that connect with people. Do more people convert on my site if they click on Product Comparison on the home page or go directly to a Product Page?

I’ll try to follow the couple heavy clicks and see what people do next. Walk in their shoes. Experience my own website.

Check out referrers to each page, that could explain bounce and exit rates.

Identify improvements to your pages.

Consider merchandizing and cross sell and up sell opportunities now that you know what people like (for example no one is clicking on your blinking promotion in the middle of the page because it looks like an ad).

If your tool allows you the ability to do this, segment the clicks. Where do people who convert click vs everyone else, or vs everyone who comes from a search engine or Canada or on a DM / Email campaign? Segmentation rocks !

You can take up as much time you have available on this. Initially you’ll probably spend 30 to 60 mins exploring your top pages. At the end of that you’ll be up to 25 out of 35!

This is a very visual easy to understand way you know exactly how people browse your website, what is working and what it not. No tables, not numbers, no graphs, even your HiPPO will get this!

If you segment your data, you can do that later when you are a bit sophisticated, you not only understand data in aggregate, all visitors, but now you are starting to understand different types of people on your site. And now you can treat them differently!

Visitors are coming to the website, but is it having any impact on you.

If there is a impact on your bottom line. Are you converting enough? Not as much?

What’s selling and what is not? Why is it selling? How much of it?

All web analytics tools have a capability to help you understand outcomes. Omniture, WebTrends, CoreMetrics, VisualSciences, Google Analytics or whatever else you have. Get the above stuff.

If you don’t got it, you ain’t going anywhere.

Consider understanding of these beauties: Days To Purchase and Visits To Purchase (More here: Excellent Analytics Tip#6: Measure Days & Visits to Purchase)…..

They help you understand user behavior on your website, and in turn tell you what kinds of actions you should be taking.

I have mentioned how segmentation rocks, do that. Segment your site traffic (paid vs organic, campaign vs direct, new vs returning, from different Geo’s and so on and so forth).

If you have a non-ecommerce website do this: I Got No Ecommerce. How Do I Measure Success?

You probably spent 30 mins looking through your initial set of reports and since this last module was worth 10 and you are now up to 35 points!

Congratulations you have graduated this delightful Web Analytics Primer!!

Give yourself a pat on the back, or have someone do it for you. :)

Great metrics almost always are uncomplex.

Because we did not make much headway with recommended metrics foisted on us, our response has been to create complex metrics. Six things each with its own unique multiplier / variable predicting the position of the sun when visitors click on your site.

Here is the thing to think about: Decisions in companies are not made by one person. If you want action then the democracy needs to understand performance, the democracy need to make decisions.

Not you. Certainly not your consultant. Or best friend.

If you are the only person who understands the metric, the Key Performance Indicator, then you have just guaranteed that your company, big or small, will not take action. Because you know the metric, but not the business.

Don’t sexify, uncomplexify. Solve for the masses making decisions. It is not as easy as you think, try.

Is the metric you have chosen relevant to your business?

Since we have so many metrics we pick our favorites and then stick with them. The problem is that each business is unique, even businesses that seem like they might be in the same business.

In Web Analytics: An hour A Day I use the example of Best Buy and Circuit City. You might think that they should / would / could measure their website with similar Web Metrics. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

The only thing they have in common is the fact that they sell large screen TV’s on their website. Everything else is different. Their business models, their priorities, how each tends to use the web in its multi-channel portfolio.

The metrics you would use for each company to measure success would be different.

It is ok to seek inspiration from your friends and competitors. In the end truly stress test that the metrics you identify are relevant when it comes to measuring the success objectives that are unique to you and your website.

Remember what works for Jason might not work for Shane. And those two are close! :)

A few years back I was interviewing at one of the biggest companies on the web. They had just closed their quarter, it had been tremendously profitable. I asked them what the reasons were for that great success. The rest of this is absolutely positively 100% true.

Them: “We have just kicked off the query against our data warehouse, it typically returns the results in three months.”

Me: Stunned silence.

Granted they were a big business. But still.

I learned a very important lesson on that day. Be on time or die.

That big company’s stock price is a fraction of its price at that time. While not all of it is related to their ability to measure, you can imagine how hard it is to be successful in your business (on the web for Pete’s sake!) if it takes you three months to know what worked three months ago.

Great metrics can be provided in a timely fashion so that your business decision makers can….. make timely decisions.

I am not a big fan of real-time (see this post: Is Real-Time Really Relevant? ). But between real time and three months there is a sweet spot. Find out what your sweet spot is and then ensure your data can be collected, analyzed, and metrics provided with insights in that sweet spot.

Even the greatest metric in the world is useless if takes nine days to get (with insights!) when your world changes every three days (key word bids, affiliate bonuses, email promotions, web page updates, whatever).

Be timely.

Sacrifice complexity and perfection for timeliness.

I absolutely love this one. Smooch, smooch, kiss, kiss.

I credit my early experience with ClickTracks for that love. Dr. Stephen Turner and John Marshall had eliminated all the non value added stuff from the application so that no matter where I went, what report I opened, it was instantly useful.

It was a combination of the fact that there were fewer metrics but also the fact that they were presented in a way that made it easy to understand performance and get the first blush of insights.

Instantly useful is when you understand quickly what the metric is, and you can find the first blush of insights as soon as you look at it.

Here is a great example, the What’s Changed report in ClickTracks:

Anyone can tell you what your keywords were this month, or last month. The ClickTracks reports shows you “what you should care about”, keywords that rose in their importance this month and which ones reduced in importance.

All the complexity is “hidden”, there is no crap, just stuff you should care about. In front of you.

Now does that not simply kick butt? [Click on the image above for a higher resolution version.]

It will take some nice analysis and time to understand all the nuances and unlock the mysteries and deep stuff (just like say for example with your wife / girl friend, less so with your husband / boy friend!).

But the first blush is there. As soon as you look at it.

[I think Google Analytics V2 also does this well through use of layout and color and summaries or things like Compare to Site Average, Compare to Past etc etc. But I admit I am greedy. Every time I look at a report, current or new, I ask for more instant usefulness! Phil and the team humors me by making stuff even better.]

In a data democracy metrics have to meet the bar of being instantly useful. And not just that, think of your boss, her boss, his boss. How little they know. If send them a metric and it is not instantly useful then it will be instantly ignored.

You want instantly useful, no explanations required, because that will give you the opening you need to show your “deep stuff”, explain the nuance, highlight your analysis!

Smooch, smooch? :)

Uncomplex? Single Page View Visits. Easy to understand, explain and propagate. Enough said. :)

Relevant? It identifies where you are wasting marketing/sales dollars and which pages stink when it comes to delivering on the “scent”. Those two things apply to most web businesses. Bam!

Timely? Bounce rate is now standard in pretty much every web analytics tool, and available in every report. Every day. Nice!

Instantly Useful? You can just look at it and know what needs attention, what needs to stop. You see 25 - 30% for your site and instantly you know things are fine. You look at a page with 50% bounce rate and you know it needs attention. You see a campaign / keyword with 70% bounce rate and you know there is a fire.

Data quality on the web is not perfect, things change too fast, everyone wants a piece of data yesterday, your competitors are strong. Don’t spend time getting things perfect when it comes to your metrics.

If you have 90% confidence in the data (how it is collected, processed, and presented) then make a decision. Don’t wait for perfection.

Too many times we spend too much time being distracted by missing tags and the hoopla around deleted cookies and more. Follow best practices, then move on. Go for precision and not accuracy.

As Mr. Stuart Gold says: An educated mistake is better than no action at all.

I owe Steve Bennett the CEO of Intuit all the credit for this important lesson.

Steve is fond of pushing everyone to identify their “critical few”. Priorities. Goals. Metrics.

My interpretation of Critical Few: When the proverbial crap hits the fan what is most important.

That statement has a phenomenal clarifying power.

If your business was on the line how would you know things are going well or badly? Cutting through all the clutter of data, what are the metrics that are your Critical Few?

Almost all of us have too many things we measure, too many things that distract us, take away our precious time / attention.

You probably have at most three Critical Few metrics that define your existence. Do you know what they are?

If you have 12 then you have too many.

Metrics no matter how great have to stand the test of time. And business changes. Repeatedly.

I recommend this simple Metrics Lifecycle Process…..

The idea is quite simple really: Use the four attributes test to identify your critical few metrics, go measure them, then analyze the data you collect, take action. Here’s the fork on the road. If you can’t action anything then perhaps it is the wrong metric for your business. Eliminate it. If you can take action figure out how you can improve it further.

Execute the Metrics Life cycle Process in a timely manner, I recommend atleast once a quarter.

Some metrics will stay, those are your best friends, others will outlast their value, give them a warm hug and say bye bye.