Several Uncommon Metrics Worth Taking a Look At
September 2nd, 2008 by Joy BrazelleWe all know how important metrics like average time on site, number of visitors, visitors by
segments and of course, conversions are. But, there are some other less known metrics that
really can provide some great insight.
Internal Search
The best way to find this information is to set up your analytics to report on what visitors
search on when they get to your site.
The first thing to do is make sure that your search is set up to be trackable. To do this,
just do a search on your Web site. Look at the URL that displays when the results display.
You should see something like (if you have searched for dvd):
www.mydomain.com/searchresults.asp?keyword=dvd
If your results simply show:
www.mydomain.com/searchresults.asp
ask your programmer to switch the form submit method from a POST to a GET (this should be a
quick, simple change).
Once your search results are trackable, then just configure the report.
WebTrends – Paramater Analysis Report
ClickTracks – Internal Search Report
Google Analytics – Site Search
You may be suprised at the big disconnect by what you think visitors call your product or
service, or what you want them to compared to what they actually do.
Robot Traffic
You will need to analyze your log files to get this information. ClickTracks has a good
Robot Report that breaks down your site by individual pages and tells you the:
Number of Visits (Best metric to see how well your site is being spidered overall)
Frequency of Visits (Best metric to see how your SEO results are improving)
Date of Last Visit
Days since Last Visit (Can be confusing because 0 is actually the best result)
Here is a site in dire need of some SEO
Geography
Most analytics packages have some report that tells you where visitors are coming from
broken down by country, state and even further (DMA). Obviously, you must take this
information with a grain of salt due to the limitations of how this information is gathered
(by IP address which can resolve back to an ISP). But, as local search gains more
popularity, it is worthing spending a little time to drill down to a more local level.
Information gleaned from these reports can be used to improve your local pay-per-click
campaigns.
For more information on local search, if you are in the Philadelphia area, you may want
to sign up for Simon’s Local Search session at SearchCampPhilly
