Non-ecommerce sites - web analytics

It has been difficult providing metrics on a non-ecommerce site because, aside from Goals you need industry benchmarks to compare to. Unfortunately, there isnt much out there so you would have to improvise with what you have. Google Analytics makes this very easy and you can provide your client or yourself some real context and understanding behind these metrics.

To put things into perspective, determine what are people looking for when they come to your site.

What are your goals or KPI's ?

Are you looking for visitor loyalty? Time On Site? Page depth? 

By the way, all of these should be part of your KPI's. If you have determined additional metrics thats great too but dont go overboard. It is very easy to report on data but it is entirely different to be able to provide context to that data.

Let's take a look at Visitor Loyalty - 'how often do people visit my site?'

You can see by this image below that not many people come back to the site. So thats step 1 in identifying an issue.

Set a goal for the number of visits you expect for a time period (each week, month, qtr, etc), pick one and make sure your Visits are realistic, compare to the chart above. Compare your performance over time to ensure progress is being made or not made. Either way you can now guage what is happening on your non-ecommerce site. Speaking of comparissons, Google Analytics has a great benchmarking tool. Make sure you choose the industry that most resembles yours when benchmarking.

The image above shows what I believe to be a pretty common thread amongst non-ecommerce sites, particullary branding sites.

Their 1 time visits are pretty high but their return visits are pretty poor. Now that you have focused in on what is going on you can begin making changes to your site in order to increase Visitor loyalty. Give visitors a reason to come. 

If your Bounce rate is contributing to your low Visitor Loyalty, which I am sure it is, try to guide the visitor from page to page. For example; If a visitor lands on a page with a news story, try paginating the story so you continue the meaty part of the story on page 2.

This will help decrease your Time On Site and your Bounce rate. It will also increase your page depth.

WOW! All that with one little tweak from a simple lesson you learned from really looking at your data.

Hope this was helpful.

Stewart Severino
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