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Web Metrics

A full version of this article is available at http://www.managers.org.uk/ (written, July 2003)

Web metrics measure internet sites as a business tool for communicating with customers. Knowing how to measure a website is as important as knowing what you want to measure.

Design your website with measurement in mind, pick the right site-metrics software, decide what and how you want to measure. Typical questions include:

• Are you attracting new people to your site?
• Is your site sticky? Which regions are not?
• How proficient is your conversion of browser to buyers?
• What site navigation do you wish to encourage?
• What attributes describe your best customers?
• What is your churn rate?
• How do you measure loyalty?

Getting a handle on what is important to you is the first step before archiving web logs and analysing them.

Web logs

If you are hosting your own website you can readily access the web log files. These are long files which contain lots of seemingly random data and are not easy to read. However, looking at your log files this is what you should be able to decipher:

• Hits – entire site, average per day, home page. Hits are not a single user. They can be part of page or a graphic. On average 16 hits is equal to 1 visitor
• Page views – average per day, document view. This is more useful as you can see which pages are the most popular
• Visitors – unique, one-time visitors , more than once visitors, length of visit, origin of visit
• What type of browsers your visitors use, who they work for, what time of day they visit their site
• Where they were referred from e.g.
• a search engine and the words they used. Knowing what people are looking for can help you attract more customers and whether it is something generic such as ‘running shoes’ or specifically you by your brand ‘Reebok’
• a portal e.g. Oxmedianet. You can judge whether your website listings are working

If you can’t decipher this yourself due to time or technical constraints. Get some software. But before you buy any, decide what you want to measure, take it for a test drive so that you pick the right metrics software and learn how to use it thoroughly. Basically there are 4 levels of tools ask what you want to have:

• Monitoring – for deciphering what people want and how to get them to stay longer on your site
• Feedback – trying to provide a better user experience by personalising the site according to demographics
• Leverage – increasing customer profitability by cross-selling, customer profiling and providing customer satisfaction
• Strategic – optimising your business model, getting rid of low-margin customers, tracking customer life-time value

On average any statistics you have containing numbers of visitors are inaccurate by as much as 30%. This is because robots, caches and dynamic IP addresses falsely boost/diminish your hits

Measuring the site: benchmarks

Some benchmarks you can easily calculate using your web log information are as follows:

• Stickiness = total no. of time spent on a page/ total no. of visitors
• Freshness = average content area refresh rate/ average section visitor frequency
• Skip factor = no. of visitors who skip intro scripts/ no. who don’t skip * 100
• Migration = average no. of exits from an area/ average no. of visits to an area * 100
• Focus = average no. of pages visited in a section/ total no. of pages in the section * 100
• First purchase = required clicks to purchase/ actual clicks to purchase

Any good website will keep its stickiness factor high and its freshness factor less than 1 (i.e. update your site regularly) and its first purchase factor low to increase its sales. If people keep returning to your site then eventually they will buy something. Therefore, keep your eye on these benchmarks and try to improve your performance.

Can’t measure everything

Archiving data can be an expensive process. Therefore, think carefully about what you want to measure. Admittedly log files become most useful over time but can take up a lot of space. More expensive analysis tools can compress and archive log files before classifying them for future use.

Software to help you

It is always helpful to download some open source software to help you analyse your log files and visualise how people use your website. In this way you can get an idea of what you can do and what you would like to do before committing your company to buying software that can sometimes be unwieldy and expensive and not really want you need.