Web analytics: key performance indicators

Web analytics can be very powerful, but only if customized to meet your site’s unique needs. Many believe that it’s just a tool to see how many people visited, which becomes quite trite after looking at that data a couple times. You’ll probably say, “Hmm, 500 people visited this week.” But how does knowing that really help?

Web analytics becomes powerful when you start matching the reports to your site’s goals. If your ultimate goal is to sell something, most analytics software can be configured to let you report on how all of the different metrics influence sales.

Let’s call this sample goal of sales a key performance indicator or KPI. (That’s what the experts call it!). You should be defining a few KPIs for your site and focusing on improving those metrics. Increasing the number of visitors to your site does not help if those extra visits are not leading to sales!

Google Analytics calls a KPI a “Goal”, and Omniture SiteCatalyst calls it “Conversion Tracking.” If you’re using something else, the functionality is probably named similarly.

With goals set up, you can go from this scenario:

These are the top 5 Google searches that refer people to my site. Hmm! Interesting?

To this scenario:

These are the top 5 Google searches that lead to sales. I should probably make sure that we continue ranking for those searches!

See the difference?

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