What you watch depends on the business you’re in. Different businesses have different definitions of success, and as such, different metrics to track. They also have different user communities and competitors, meaning they need to watch the Web beyond their own sites in different ways.
Consider a search engine and an e-commerce site.
The search engine wants to show people content, serve them some advertising that’s relevant, send them on their way, and make some money for doing so. For them, it’s good when people leave—as long as they go to the right places when they do. In fact, the sooner someone leaves the search engine for a paying advertiser’s site, the better, because that visitor has found what he was looking for.
By contrast, the e-commerce site wants people to arrive (preferably without going through a search engine because they won’t have to pay for the advertising) and stay as long as possible, filling their shopping cart and buying all sorts of things beyond what they originally intended.
The operators of those sites not only track different metrics, they want different results from those metrics. And that’s just for the sites they run themselves. The retailer might care about competitors’ pricing on other sites; the search engine might want to know it has more results, or better ones, than others. Both might like to know what the world thinks of them in public forums, or whether social networks are driving significant amounts of traffic to their sites.
While every site is unique and has distinct metrics, your website probably falls into one of four main categories.
- A transactional site wants visitors to complete a transaction—normally a purchase. There’s an “ideal path” through the site, resulting in a transaction of some kind. This can also be enrollment (signing up for an email) or lead generation (asking a salesperson to contact them), so the outcome can happen in the real world, too.
- A media property provides content that attracts and retains an audience, and makes money from that content through sponsorship, advertising, or affiliate referrals. Search engines, newspapers, well-known bloggers, and others are in this category.
- A collaborative site is where visitors generate the content themselves. Wikis, news aggregators, user groups, classified ad listings, etc., in which the value of the site is largely derived from things created by others fall into this group.
- A Software-as-a-service (Saas) application is a hosted version of software someone might buy. Here, users expect reliability and may pay a monthly per-seat fee to use the service. Revenues come from subscriptions.
It’s common for portions of a site to fall into several of these categories. An analyst firm that sells reports is a media property and a transactional site at the same time. A popular blog is as much about collaborative comments its users leave as it is about Google Adwords on the pages. A video upload site is a media property filled with content users provide. And a free-to-try SaaS site that encourages users to subscribe to a premium version has a transactional aspect.
The key is to decide which of these categories you’re concerned with, and then determine which metrics and tools you should use to understand your web properties, your community, and your competitors. There are many metrics—like performance and availability, for example—that matter to every website; there are others, such as content creation, that matter only to collaboration sites.
Related posts:
