The importance of Web Analytics allows for the measurement, collection, analysis, and reporting of internet data for the purposes of understanding and optimizing web sites for search engine optimization. There are two categories: off-site and on-site web analytics. Off-site web analytics includes the measurement of a website’s potential audience, visibility, and comments that is happening on the Internet as a whole. On-site web analytics measures a visitor’s journey once on your website. For example, it tracks which landing pages encourage people to make a purchase. Web Analytics is typically used to improve a web site or marketing campaign’s audience.
Exactly what are the metrics of web analytics? The metrics of web metrics refers to measurement, the science of measuring websites. More specifically, measuring website events and extracting trends. Website events could be human clicks. There are various terms used to describe the science of recording and interpreting website statistics which include: web metrics, web analytics, web stats, and site stats. E-metrics refers to the analysis of electronic businesses. The analytics part is the act of distinguishing categories within recorded stats, and analyzing for any patterns.
Some important metrics that can be used to indicate whether or not your site is performing the way it should would be to look at the average sale price, profit margin, overhead, conversion rate, and visitors. Average sale price is an important metric to analyze because you can directly alter your product’s prices to be higher or lower thus affecting the average sale price. Profit margin can reduce your overheads or increase sales to improve profit margins. This can help bring traffic and sales to your site knowing that visitors will buy due to a lower price meaning higher overall net profit. Conversion rate can be controlled by using good web analytics tools so you can see how people are behaving on your website. Finally, the level of visitors you get is linked to your marketing efforts whether paid or unpaid.
For an e-Commerce site, you should monitor: new visitor conversion rate, return visitor conversion rate, pageviews/ visit, items/ order, average order value, landing page bounce rates, landing page load times, traffic sources, orders per customer per year, and shopping cart/ checkout abandonment rate. In more detail:
New Visitor Conversion Rate:
This area allows you to clearly see what’s going on with first time visitors on your site from search engines or other ad campaigns.
Return Visitor Conversion Rate:
Not everyone buys on the first visit. The goal is to get the user back to your site. By analyzing your return visitor conversion rate, you will be able to see how likely you are to convert your return traffic into buying customers. This is usually higher of the two.
Pageviews/ Visit:
Pageviews per visit can reflect how well your site engages your audience. An increasing number of pageviews per visit can indicate that your content is interesting and therefor visitors are spending more time browsing your site. However, a high pageviews per visit metric can also indicate unnecessarily complicated processes such as checkout or product browsing.
Items/ Order:
If there is a suggested product feature to encourage add-ons, you would benefit by tracking how many items you sell per order.
Average Order Value:
This will vary greatly based on your industry and it would be best to analyze this metric over time.
Landing Page Bounce Rates:
A bounce occurs when a visitor visits a page on your site, and immediately clicks away and goes no further. High bounce rates can be caused by a number of factors such as: excessive load times, irrelevant content, unattractive site design,etc. Be sure to monitor you bounce rates on all your important entry pages including your home page and any SEO or PPC landing pages.
Landing Page Load Times:
Excessive page load times can wreak havoc on your bounce rates. You can monitor your page load times on different connection speeds.
Traffic Sources:
Google Analytics is a great tool to use to analyze your traffic sources.
Orders Per Customer Per Year:
Calculate how many times a customer orders per given period. By analyzing this amount it helps to determine how much money you should be spending on marketing or re-marketing.
Shopping Cart/ Checkout Adandonment Rate:
You should measure what percentage of visitors abandon the shopping process at each step in your checkout. For example, how many abandon after adding an item to the cart? After entering shipping and billing info? etc. Too high of an abandonment rate could signal a serious checkout problem.
Sources:
10 metrics every ecommerce site should monitor
Business Know How
Web Metrics Site Statistics