WEB ANALYTICS: IN FOCUS
Published: March 28, 2007
The Best Website Metrics Are...
 
Holding on to your visitors

Analyzing what is going on inside the site can seem overwhelming. It is the place where most web analytics products will give you the most information. Unfortunately, for most purposes that information is useless.

We're not interested in how many page views it took people to get to this point, how long it took or what the most popular pages were. Such information is so broad, so top level and contains so many contradictory elements that it is actually misleading. It is only of practical use when applied to a single page or section of a site, and we're trying to determine how people are interacting with it. So my advice would be to discard or ignore much of the data available at this point. 

Prospects
Visitors will do many things inside a site. Almost every visitor's path is unique. People will look at some pages for minutes and others for mere seconds; they will reverse back through a series of pages and revisit something, then they'll move forward, back up and generally confound any attempt you could make to find common patterns of behavior.

It doesn't matter because we never need to look at a site that way.

For the purposes of Integrated Path Analysis, all that matters is what percentage of readers end up looking at a contact form or at a bunch of items in a shopping cart. What happened between the landing page and that point is irrelevant. There is no standard terminology to define people at this point, but we need to measure them, so we can call such people "prospects."

Integrated Path Analysis doesn't care what, why or how people changed from readers into prospects, simply what the ratio is between the two.

The percentage of readers who become prospects is our prospect ratio. By combining our prospect ratio with our cost-per-reader, we can determine the cost-per-prospect. Using the earlier example, if 25 percent of the people who read the site put items in their shopping basket, we have a cost-per-prospect of $15.40.

At this point (and not before) we have a potential sale.

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