Not separating the different sources of traffic
This mistake is actually more common. The vast majority of people have no mechanism in place to separate the performance of different campaigns. This is one of the key reasons for Google's success. If most people knew what they were getting for their Google ad money, the bids would be much lower.
In the examples I gave above, I was only able to assess the effectiveness of these sources because I could separate out the conversion rate for them from the rest of the traffic.
Properly done, this can streamline the sales operation of the entire business.
Last year, I saw a telesales operation that had a system for displaying the incoming inquiries on the sales operative's monitors. The information displayed included the original source through which the prospect had entered the site. The telesales staff could then select which of the incoming inquiries they wanted to pick up. They were on commission and didn't have to handle inquiries in the order they arrived. They had very quickly worked out that people who had come from certain Google ads were much more likely to buy than any other source. Competition among them to grab those calls was fierce.
By the time I saw the operation, the average response time from incoming inquiry to outgoing call was down to 20 seconds. The company estimated that adding this information to the prospect data increased sales by 20 percent, yet it took only a day or two of a single programmer's time.
There used to be a time when websites were lucky to see success from one visitor in 50. In other words, the average conversion rate was 2 percent. These days, we have a much better understanding of how to build a site that can sell.
I am seeing sites with conversion rates of 20 percent or even 30 percent. What characterizes these sites is that they don't necessarily have huge amounts of traffic; what they have is a clear understanding of who their market is, how to reach it, and what the website has to do in order to get a sale from that market.
They know exactly what the performance of each Google ad or affiliate is and what return on investment each produces. They know in advance how much they can spend to acquire business, and they know what the conversion rate of a new opportunity needs to be in order to achieve success.
Where to focus
The more I analyze websites in an effort to try and improve sales and marketing, the less concerned I am with overall numbers.
Total visitors is a nice number to report to the board, but there's not much I can actually do with it. If I want to improve the site's traffic, then I have to work with one specific source at a time. If I want to improve the conversion rate, I have to look at individual sections (or pages) of the site one at a time, or the individual sources.
I've stopped even reporting Total Page Views any more, even to the board. It's a number with no information in it.
Count your sales or enquiries first, and then work back from there. Where did they come from? What was the conversion rate for each source? It really doesn't matter how many pages your server spat out. The total number of visits has no meaning unless it is sitting beside your conversion rate.
People who run shops don't count how many people looked in the window. They count how many stopped at the till. The web is no different.
Brandt Dainow is an independent web analytics consultant and the CEO of ThinkMetrics. Read full bio.