Posts tagged as:

traffic

What’s the best tool to measure your website?

by Tim on October 25, 2010

What's the best tool to measure your website image In a follow up to last week’s look at why Google Analytics always belongs within your measurement consideration set, a reader sent me the following question:

“I’ve messed around with a bunch of the free analytics tools on the web and have found them to be mostly unreliable. Just a few weeks ago, I had a discrepancy of hundreds of thousands of unique visits between compete.com and Google Analytics stats. This was pretty eye-opening and concerning for me.

I wonder if you have any tips on the most reliable tools to use and stats to trust?“

It’s a great question but one that, unfortunately, needs a long, hedged answer.

The simple answer is to check out my 7 keys to successful web metrics.

The long answer, is, well, long…

It’s never a good idea to recommend any one tool without knowing more about what you want to know about your audience. Sites like Compete are great for competitive information, albeit with some caveats, while GA, Omniture and WebTrends are much better to track the content and commerce performance of your site relative to its past performance. Neither, unfortunately, is great at both. The key is using the right tool to answer the right question.

The challenge is that all analytics programs have some set of accuracy issues and, due to different methodologies in use, it’s rare that you’ll get two different analytics tools to line up. Avinash Kaushik has looked at the difference between accuracy and precision in measurement before and as some brilliant commenter noted, “Apples are apples. It doesn’t matter if your apples are rotten as long as you’re comparing ‘em to other rotten apples.”

As you evaluate tools, it’s a good idea to understand where its particular strengths and weaknesses are so that you’re choosing the right tool to answer the right question. And, that’s one of the core reasons why I believe you’re better off saving money on the tool and spending your budget on a capable analyst.

The differences in these methodologies will be particularly obvious when comparing something like Compete, which uses a sampled panel of traffic, to GA, which relies upon tags placed on the site and cookies placed on a user’s computer. Neither is “wrong” insofar as their methodology goes. It’s just that they’re designed to track different things. It’s really more a question of whether what they track is what you want to know.

Broadly speaking, tools like Compete are more useful if you’ve got a larger site that appeals to a broad audience in the US. It samples a panel of users, currently about 2,000,000 individuals (or roughly 1% of US based web users) and determines how different sites perform relative to one another based on traffic patterns it sees among its panel of users.

Of course, if your site gets more traffic from outside the US, or appeals to a particular market segment not represented in Compete’s panel (or overrepresented, which is just as bad), it won’t give you a clear picture of how you rank relative to your competitors. The flip side is, any issue in how Compete ranks you may apply equally to your competitors, so it may give you useful competitive intelligence all the same. Check out Douglas Hubbard’s two principles of measurement in my review of his book “How To Measure Anything” for more information on why imperfect data is often better than no data at all. And here’s a link to Compete’s methodology, if you’re a glutton for punishment… um… curious (same thing, really).

Now, GA, and its brethren, on the other hand, track individual web browser sessions (not people), based on cookies placed in a web browser’s cache during a visit. Two visitors using the same computer (say, a married couple, or multiple users of a library computer, for instance), may register as the same visitor in your tracking. By contrast, an individual who visits your site from a work computer and a different home computer would show up as two distinct visitors (that’s true for all tag/cookie based tracking tools). Whether that’s a problem for you or not depends on what you’re trying to measure. For most businesses, it’s not a problem. What matters more is in which direction the data moves. Is bounce rate declining? Are visits and visitors increasing? Are sales? Is conversion rate? GA (and other tag-based tools) do a good job of answering these questions as long as you’re always comparing the data to itself. Comparing GA to Omniture, on the other hand, could confuse the matter due to their differences in the way they count traffic.

I realize this is a longer post than usual – and more of a weighty read. (I also just learned why Avinash’s posts are so long – it’s hard to explain this stuff in a hundred words of less). But, I hope it helps all of you as you evaluate the right tool to measure your marketing. And keep those questions coming.

Did I miss something obvious? Do you have a question? Let me know in the comments.

Are you getting enough value out of your small business website? Want to make sure your business makes the most of the local, mobile, social web? thinks helps you understand how to grow your business via the web, every day. Get more than just news. Get understanding. Add thinks to your feed reader today.

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Technorati Tags:
analytics, Avinash Kaushik, douglas hubbard, douglas hubbard review, E-commerce, Google Analytics, how to measure anything, how to measure anything review, measurement, metrics

Tagged as: analytics, compete.com, google analytics, measurement, metrics, tracking, traffic

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Grow traffic now (Small Business E-commerce Link Digest – March 26, 2010)

by Tim on March 26, 2010

in E-commerce, Marketing, del.icio.us links

While we’ve suggested that it’s not always a good idea to grow traffic in the past, what should you do when it is the right thing to do? We’ve looked at how to grow your traffic before and, a year later, have found some additional resources worth checking out. So, um, well, check these out:

Search and social are two of the best ways to grow your traffic. Lisa Barone has an article on Small Biz Trends that marries those two ideas, looking at how to improve your Facebook page’s SEO. The great thing is that several of her tips apply equally well whether they’re on Facebook or your own site, too.
And speaking of SEO for your own site, Econsultancy offers up a list of 9 common SEO campaign mistakes, along with tips for how to avoid them. SEO may sometimes seem like a black art, but as Econsultancy notes in its piece and as we’ve shown before, the basics of SEO are, well, pretty basic.
Back to Facebook for a second, Wildfire’s blog has a good look at 7 strategies for marketing your facebook fan page. As with Lisa’s article above, many of these strategies work equally well on your own site. Not sure whether to drive traffic to your company’s Facebook page or your site? While you certainly want to drive traffic to all your sales and marketing channels, you may also want to look at which sales and marketing channels are most effective for your business.
Finally, it’s best when looking at how to grow traffic to have an integrated plan. McKinsey Quarterly shows one way to do that with a look at 4 ways to get more value from digital marketing (Free registration required; it’s worth it).

What’s working for you? Found a great tip that we’ve overlooked? Tell us about it in the comments below. And happy hunting in the quest for more – and more qualified – traffic for your business.

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Technorati Tags:
E-commerce, e-commerce, e-marketing, ecommerce, Facebook, Google, google, internet business, internet marketing, marketing, marketing best practices, online marketing, search, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, sem, seo, social, social marketing, social media, social search, social strategy, solutions, strategy

Tagged as: E-commerce, Facebook, grow traffic, interactive marketing, Marketing, online marketing, Search, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, sem, SEO, social, social marketing, Social Media, social media marketing, social network, social networking, social networks, social search, social strategy, traffic

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You don’t want to grow your traffic. Not yet, anyway.

by Tim on January 26, 2010

in E-commerce

I saw a friend of mine recently and he kept talking about his company’s goal to increase traffic this year, from roughly 100,000 monthly uniques to about 125,000 unique visitors, while maintaining a consistent conversion rate. His company is betting the economy is going to turn around later this year and plans to increase search marketing to steal share from competitors.

It sounded like a decent strategy to me, but then I happened to ask him, “What’s your bounce rate?”

He had the decency to look sheepish as he answered, “44%.”

If I were the type to say, “OMG,” this would have been the moment.

Now, 44% may not sound that high to you. And, for certain types of sites (blogs come to mind), it might not be that bad. But if you’re paying for your traffic? Yikes.

Traffic, after all, is a funny thing. It’s a simple number to get your head around. And everyone knows bigger is better, right? Plus you can talk about it at business lunches and cocktail parties to impress your friends and intimidate your competitors. But the thing that makes it funny is that you don’t deposit traffic at the end of each month. You deposit profits. And if a healthy chunk of your traffic – more than 2 out of every 5 folks, in my friend’s case – leaves your site without even bothering to look around, you don’t get many opportunities to turn that traffic into profits.

By lowering his site’s bounce rate to 30%, my friend would achieve the same business goal and wouldn’t have to increase his PPC budget to do it. Sure, he’d have to pay some money to fix the problems causing the brutal bounce rate. But the benefits of an improved bounce rate continue once the funding stops. And, if he grows traffic after fixing bounce rate, then he gets even greater benefit out of the marketing spend.

I’ve taken a look at this topic in the past and recommend these 6 steps to improving bounce rate.

If your objective is to grow traffic, ask yourself why. Sure, some cases exist where focusing on traffic instead of bounce rate makes sense, but you’ve got to do the following items at the same time:

Keep bounce rate down. Seriously. I’m not kidding about this one.
Improve meaningful business metrics (sales, average order value, repeat business, CPM, etc.) along with it.
Maintain – or lower – your cost of acquisition. If your cost of acquisition is going up faster than your traffic levels, ask yourself whether you are getting enough incremental sales to cover that cost.

One of the best pieces of advice I ever got was this:

“When you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging.”

Bounce rate is sometimes a deep hole to dig out of. But adding traffic to a high bounce rate site – especially if you’re paying for that traffic – is like using a backhoe instead of a shovel to keep on digging. Stop digging. And start profiting instead.

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Image credit: DWRose via Flickr using Attribution 2.0 Generic.

Technorati Tags:
bounce rate, call-to-action, continuous improvement, conversion, conversion rate, E-commerce, e-commerce, e-marketing, ecommerce, internet business, internet marketing, landing page design, landing page optimization, marketing, marketing best practices, online marketing, page design, performance, ppc, ppc marketing, search engine marketing, sem