Keep on Track
I read a fantastic article last week arguing that many of the metrics that marketers are using to gauge success are “wrong, inaccurate, incomplete or just plain useless”.
Having spent time reporting metrics to marketing teams myself, I agree that analysing the wrong metrics or even the right metrics wrongly can paint an inaccurate picture of a sites performance. I do think however, that all metrics provide us with some interesting insights and are therefore of value, it’s just depends on the objectives for any given campaign that dictate which metrics are of value to it.
So I don’t think it’s about using certain metrics and not others, it’s about spending time analysing the objectives and drawing out the ‘key performance indicators’ (excuse me for the the buzz word babble), the metrics which most indicate how well a site is performing.
Web analytics seems to be a fast developing area with technology advancing all the time, providing us with more and more metrics to measure and report on. Towards the end of last year Google announced a series of new features for analytics, the first one to launch was ‘Site Search‘ which allows you to track the search facility on your site (assuming you have one). Once you’ve set it up you can track what users are searching for, whether they had to refine their search, where they made their search and where they ended up. This is immensely valuable as it can tell you exactly what users are looking for and whether they found it or not.
The second announcement was a new piece of tracking code, that will be necessary in order to take advantage of future tracking enhancements from Google. This includes a limited beta test of ‘event tracking’ that is currently being developed, and will report on how users are interacting with Ajax, Flash and other multimedia on a site. Click here to read a document Google produced to explain the migration process.
Another limited beta test that has been announced is for tracking outbound links, and will report on links that visitors clicked on your site to direct them to another site. In addition to this Google have released an enhancement that will give us the ability to graph multiple data points.