Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [249]
Exit Rate
The exit rate is the rate at which people leave your site after visiting more than one page. The exit rate is usually reported by page, and you can see which pages have higher exit rates than others. This gives you an understanding of which pages may not be as persuasive as others. Or, it can help you understand whether there is information, design, or something that simply makes people leave from a certain page.
Conversion Rate
The conversion rate is the ratio between people who simply visit your site and those who do something that makes you money. This is the extension of your goals. Whether it is a sale, lead, registration, or subscription, if it makes you money, then it is a conversion. Other types of conversions that can be tracked are downloaded files (such as white papers), visited pages, subscriptions, video views, and other events.
As we will delve into next week, determining your conversation rates is an important part of developing a true measure of success. Developing and tracking all the goals within a website provides a more extensive measurement of effectiveness and the ability to gain insights into more data, visitor behaviors, and visitor preferences.
Additionally, adding monetary values to each conversion will enhance your measurements. It is one thing to count the number of conversions and report a rate of conversions, but adding the aspect of monetary value based on the actions and the activities of your visitors will add an additional layer of available analysis to your repertoire. Calculating your financial gain based on conversions will enable you to measure an amazing number of activities and measure how profitable those activities are when compared to others.
Better decisions are made when financial goals and measurements are used. Decision makers who may not have the time to listen to the majority of your analysis will be particularly interested in a “bottom-line” analysis that focuses on revenue and profit and can be quickly summed up in a statement such as “Look how much we made, and we can make more by doing this….” Adding dollar signs to your reports is a sure way to get more attention.
Tuesday: Establish Goals
Goals are critical to understanding the proper role of analytics. Most marketers spend their time reporting information rather than analyzing visitor performance. As emphasized throughout this book, you need to have the goals of the website and your marketing campaigns established, published, and understood by everyone involved. The only way to develop a clear understanding of the success of the campaign of the website is to measure the established goals, rather than inconsistent measurements of nonessential data.
Eric Peterson, who wrote and self-published Web Analytics Demystified (2004, Peterson) and The Big Book of Key Performance Indicators (2005, Peterson), explained the importance of goals in an interview with Direct Marketing News (August 11, 2006): “Web analytics works best when measurement expectations are clearly defined in advance, not after the fact or on an ad hoc basis.” (You can find the article at www.dmnews.com/from-dm-news-special-report-on-web-analytics-peterson-says-web-analytics-getting-better-all-the-time/article/92290/.)
Unfortunately, most companies and marketers I talk with are used to developing ad hoc reports or reports that are unfocused on the primary goals of sales, leads, registrations, or other actions and more focused on activity reports that are usually heavily flawed because they are generated on-the-fly and may not include all of the relevant information. There are too many factors involved in an ad hoc reporting situation, and as a result, reports are generally inaccurate, are potentially misleading, and are a terrible basis for decision making.
So, what should be done? The very first step is establishing the goals of the website. Identify the purpose of the website from the corporate or business standpoint. In short, what do you want? To make money? To raise awareness? To increase