Drop the Vanity Metrics and Focus on Actionable Data

Which is better: six page views per visit or two page views per visit? It depends.

Websites offer dozens of ways to track how consumers are using a site, but many popular metrics are either completely useless or only useful on a case-by-case basis. Two questions must be considered when deciding which metrics to use for tracking a site’s success: what is the purpose of the site, and is the metric in question actionable?

What’s the Point?

Before choosing which metrics to use, it’s vital to understand the purpose of a website or individual Web page. Does it primarily exist to build a brand, provide information to consumers, or directly sell a product? If the purpose is to build a brand, then it’s likely important for consumers to spend a lot of time on the site, watch available videos, and share content via social media links. But if the purpose is to sell a product, the most important issue is simply how close most consumers get to filling up their digital carts, inputting their payment information, and clicking “purchase.”

Actionable or Vain?

Once the purpose of the site is determined, it’s vital to make sure that any metrics that are used are not vain. That is, a metric should only be employed if it can definitively determine cause and effect. Web marketers often use vanity metrics because they can make a site look good even when it’s not performing properly. These types of metrics should be avoided like the plague. The following are a few commonly misused vanity metrics:

1. Bounce Rate: Businesses often use the aggregate bounce rate of their entire website as a key performance indicator. However, this metric is most useful at the page level to determine if the most important pages of the site are keeping users on the site or if they are causing them to leave before visiting any other pages. The danger of looking at aggregate bounce rates is that good rates on less important pages can counteract bad rates on more important pages, making the overall rate look acceptable even though the most important pages of the site are failing.

2. Pages Per Visit: More pages per visit is a good thing, right? It depends. This goes back to understanding the purpose of the website. I recently redesigned my site in a way that makes purchasing simpler and quicker. Visitors used to have to plug through five pages before making a purchase, but now they only visit one. Conventional wisdom suggests that I should be worried if PPV falls, but I’m completely OK with PPV falling as long as the number of purchases stays steady or rises.

A metric more useful to track than PPV is the conversion path. This shows the path consumers take through the website before taking a desired action. While a high or low PPV doesn’t definitively determine how sales will rise or fall, the conversion path provides a business with information that is explicitly actionable.

Demographics Split

Regardless of which metrics are used, it’s critical to recognize that not all Web traffic is equal. A site visitor who found the site via Google is very different from a visitor who arrived on the site by clicking on a link in a marketing email. Metrics should be analyzed separately for each type of visitor because visitors come to the site with different intentions.

Suggested Tools

Choosing which metrics to manage is useless unless you have the tools to actually obtain data on Web traffic. Here are a few valuable tools to help track what’s happening on your website.

1. Google Analytics: This is a great “out-of-the-box” tool that can provide quite granular data on common Web traffic metrics. One of the most valuable aspects of Google Analytics is that it can be used by amateur website managers without much training, but it can also be customized for more advanced users who want a stronger tool.

2. ClickTale: This tool uses JavaScript to record the mouse actions of visitors so you can watch exactly where a user’s mouse hovers over the page. Considering that some researchers suggest that mouse positioning can have nearly an 80 percent correlation with the eye’s focus, this tool provides excellent insight into how users view your site.

3. UserTesting.com: This tool doesn’t actually involve adding code to a website. Instead, five people simply go through a process on your site and provide reports covering what worked well and the problems they ran into.

In the end, all of the tools and metrics that you use on your website should serve the ultimate purpose of your site and be able to explicitly prove whether a change to the site is useful or not. It’s terribly easy to get sucked into using vanity metrics, but if you are using quality data-gathering tools and periodically reassessing whether your metrics are actionable or not, you’ll be well on your way to properly managing your website — whether that means earning two page views per visit or six.

Because this article was published, a donation will be made to Reading Is Fundamental so a book can be given to a child.

Mark Regan currently serves as the chief marketing officer for PowerChord, Inc., a digital marketing agency that connects large brands, independent retail networks, and consumers in a seamless, branded environment. Regan has more than 20 years of experience developing and executing marketing strategies for a diverse range of B2B and B2C organizations. Throughout his career, he has been instrumental in leading initiatives for multi-million dollar marketing campaigns, new product launches, and the integration of social media and interactive tools for companies like STIHL, Club Car, Ariens, Gravely and Sylvan Learning.