Google Analytics - Exploring metrics…Gotta love benchmarking!

Friday, April 18, 2008

There is so much data available in Google Analytics (GA) that it can be difficult to decide where to start with exploring the metrics. Traditionally analytics focus was placed upon the more commonly measured metrics such as visitors, page views and subsequent conversion for those visits to action. In my opinion it is completely ambiguous to measure conversion against “industry standards”. How do you ever compare the loose term “conversion” to other category websites when marketing efforts always differ, brand awareness comes into play, and there is a multitude of conversion funnels that can occur from one web property to another? For example, conversion to form submission, conversion to sale, conversion to pdf download, conversion to login etc… the list goes on…

Recently Google released benchmarking functionality within GA. Benchmarking is still in beta, but is accessible through all Google Analytics Accounts under the visitors tab in the GA interface.  Benchmarking allows users to compare their core site metrics with websites of similar size and content categories. Finally a legitimate “industry standard” to measure against! Here at 6S Marketing in Vancouver we have found this quick reference ability invaluable. 6S Marketing works with many great clients in the hotel and accommodations industry throughout the region. It is so refreshing to now have the ability to measure the performance of our client sites against the other websites in the industry. Comparison metrics include “visits”, “bounce rate”, “page views”, “average time on site”, “pages per visit” and “new visits”.

My personal favorite is “bounce rate”. I have traditionally found this metric difficult to gage and act upon as it so very dependant on industry and the nature of the site. For example - How interactive is your home page? Is the content fresh and engaging? Are you driving completely qualified visitors to your site? Do your landing pages cater specifically to the content needs of your audience? Etc…

The benchmarking beta is a fantastic way to dictate if you need continued focus on improving bounce rate on site, or if you are meeting the potential of your site.

As Google Analytics evolves we are seeing more and more quick reference functions being built into the tool. Many of my favorite functions are still in beta, namely the Graph By [fig 1 below] functionality where you can view trends by day, week or month (such a seemly simple feature but has made life much easier since it came along). Another really cool feature worth checking out is the metric comparison feature [fig 2 below]. More and more we are seeing features coming out of beta. Thank you to Google for continually innovating and becoming increasingly responsive to the feedback from the Google Analytics Authorized Consultant (GAAC) community.

Good reading:
Avinash Kaushik (Google Evangelist) talks realistically about bounce rates in his blog Occam’s Razor.  http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2007/08/standard-metrics-revisited-3-bounce-rate.html

Also Wikipedia as ever is a good resource to start research in and around any topic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounce_Rate

Posted by Lyn on 04/18 at 08:08 AM
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