ThinkMetrics' CEO refutes common analytic measures, and describes what to measure instead.

You should not analyze what search engines are sending you traffic. You should not analyze what paths people take through your website. You should not analyze the average duration your visitors spend on a visit, or the average number of pages they read. None of these things will help you in the slightest, and in some cases they will even mislead you.

Averages confuse
Average statistics for websites are commonly given for duration (the amount of time people spend on your site), and for average page views (the number of pages people read during a visit). This information is extremely misleading and will probably cause you to make incorrect decisions. The problem with an average is that it can be horribly skewed by the extremely high durations (like the person who spends three hours on your site because they are trying to copy the design) or -- more commonly -- extremely low numbers. 

Two types of people are visiting your site; people who glance at your home page then leave very quickly because the site is not what they are looking for ("scanning visitors") and people who are interested in what your site offers and spend time in it ("committed readers"). Averaging all the visitors to your site into one number mixes scanning visitors in with committed readers. This tells you nothing. This fusion of the two is not appreciated by most people, and the assumption is the numbers are talking about committed readers. However, the fusion of these two into one number drags down the amount of time most people believe their committed readers are spending on the site. This has been going on for so long and is so widespread that most web designers believe people spend four to six minutes on a website, when in actual fact most people spend much longer. This is especially true if they are looking to spend serious money, such as in a travel or loan site.

The reason you need to separate scanning visitors from committed readers is that they represent different modalities of management within the site. Improving scanning visitor performance is about how well the site is selling itself to new arrivals as a place to stay. Improving committed reader performance is about how well the site is then selling your products or services as something to buy.

It is therefore absolutely essential that you separate out committed readers from scanning visitors before you calculate average duration and average page views. This will typically show you that those people who do spend time on the site are spending twice as long as you had previously imagined. 

I strongly recommend you think about what constitutes a scanning visitor. It's not just someone who only looks at one page. If someone views three pages in 25 seconds then leaves, it's pretty obvious they just scanned those pages looking for something, but didn't find it. You need to determine -- for your site -- how long it should take to determine what the site has to offer.

What is interesting about committed readers is how long they spend on the site and whether there is a difference between committed readers who convert and committed readers who do not. It is not uncommon to find that the committed readers who spend the longest on your site are the ones least likely to convert. This usually indicates that they were committed to the idea of buying from you but were unable to find what they were looking for after a detailed examination of your site. If you believe you had what they were looking for, then you probably have a navigation problem. It is thus important to cross-reference the average duration for committed visitors with the number of pages they read, and cross-reference this with where they came from, what search phrase they used, and so forth. In fact, once you get down to this level of analysis, you may find it is better to start to do some form of quartile analysis and contrast committed readers who do engage in your target action with committed readers who do not on many different levels.

Search engines don't matter
Most of the time it doesn't matter what search engine somebody came from. The only time this is important is when you are spending the money on search engine optimization or PPC advertising and you need to analyze what you are getting for either of these investments. 

What is much more important when analyzing the sales performance of your site is the phrase people use in their searches. In order to analyze your phrases easily you need this information amalgamated across all search engines. What you want to know is what percentage of the people who searched for "buy a widget online" bounced when they hit your site and what they landed on when using that phrase. The difference in sales performance between different search engines is practically non-existent. The difference in sales performance between different search phrases can be astronomical, even when all of those phrases are relevant to your site. I have seen conversion rates from PPC advertising range from 0.5 percent to 50 percent on the same site. If you've got a spread that wide you want to know and it really doesn't matter which search engine these people saw the ads in.

Next: Why paths don't matter, and the core of web analysis summed up as a simple 1-2-3. (Page 2 of 2)