#webmetrics

Track website performance with tools like Google Analytics, monitor SEO metrics, analyze speed, user behavior, and conversion rates.

I will admit it, when I first heard of this course my first thoughts were being given massive amounts of analytic data and learn how to analyze it to present to my client.

What I found was completely different.  I was presented with an opportunity to study for my Google Analytics Certification as part of the requirements for this course.  Although I took the exam three times, I did pass it and now I am working on my journey towards Google Adwords certification.  

What I gained from  this course is the understanding that whether you use free analytics solution like Google Analytics or a premium service like ClickTale, it requires an individual or team dedicated to analyzing the data so the best possible effort can be used to increase ROI.

The assignment for my Mastery Journey Timeline is to provide three examples of what I accomplished from my original post about this course from back in August.  However my only goal listed was “Understand how Web Metrics & Analytics Function”.  Pretty generic I would say, especially after learning all the valuable tools and and ways to use them this month. 

I have enjoyed the challenges set forth in the class and the discussion posts have been a great part of the learning environment for this course.  Moving forward i plan to take this knowledge and use it as part of my complete web systems providing services.  

This webinars were terrific and provided some great insight to how to manage the information given by analytics.

Website statistics, which are known as “web metrics”, measures different type of data on your website. I read two different articles on website metrics and compared them, and after learning about what the terms meant, I decided which metrics I thought were the most important. If I had to choose only 3 website metrics to analyze my own website, these are the three that I’d pick:

-       Referrals

-       Unique Visitors

-       Conversation Rate

These three metrics were the common metrics that were mentioned in the articles as the most essential to measuring how well your business/website is doing. I believe as well that referrals matter because you find out where your traffic is coming from, unique visitors tells you how many people are viewing your page, and conversation rate lets to you if you are completing your goals.

     In the article, “The 6 Most Important Web Metrics To Track for Your Business Website”, Noah Parsons explains that a referral is tracking users as they click on different links to reach your page (search engines, blogs, etc.). Referrals basically will tell you where your visitors are coming from. How will a business know if their marketing tactics are paying off if they aren’t able to see where their traffic is coming from? Think about when you walk into a store and they ask you “How did you hear about us?” Just like how you may hear about a business through a commercial, a friend, billboard, or a newspaper, referrals work in the same way. When businesses ask you this question, they are trying to figure how what is working for them. Referrals let you know which sites, bloggers, and companies are getting you the visitors and these should ultimately be whom you want to build relationships with.

A unique visitor is the number of people who actually visited your site during a time period, whether it’s yesterday, over a month, or last week. This a little different from page views because page views measures how many times your site gets clicked on. Although these metrics go hand and hand, the difference is that the unique visitors counts every person that visits your page, and can even tell you your amount of repeated visitors. Therefore, it is easy to determine how many new people are visiting your page, and how many people are finding your page useful and are coming back. This metric is one of the most important because you know how small or large your audience is. You will also know if your marketing is effective or if you are wasting your time and money.

No matter if you are a business owner, product or marketing manager, or a sales guy – you need to know what your competitors are doing. The more you know about your competition, the better you can make business decisions that will allow you to differentiate yourself and to create a competitive advantage to your business. Without proper competitive insight, you can easily make the wrong educated guesses that could lead to business failure.

There is great information that can be found in many places: from news feeds, company databases, social media networks, monitoring and website benchmarking sites, patents and trademark directories, to key information such as PPC and SEO metrics from iSpionage.com. And most of the time, you can get a lot of this information for free. Creating a competitive dashboard has never been more accessible. So where do you begin? Here are a few tips on what your competitive dashboard should look like:

Start with the Basics

The first section we recommend is to have the basic company information such as: company description (and logo), headquarters, industries and specialties that the company is focusing on, years founded, type of company (public or private) and the number of employees. There are a few great sources for this information: LinkedIn, CrunchBase, AngelList and ZoomInfo are just a few examples. Once you have found all of this content, we recommend putting this into a table (Excel or Google Docs are usually the tools used for this – create a tab for each section of your dashboard). Here is an example of an Overview Table:

  Financial Metrics

Unless your competitors are publicly traded companies, this section is quite difficult to assemble – but you should still try to get the following information for each of your competitors:

        Revenues (past quarter, year)

        Information about their Cost of Goods and Services (COGS)

        Gross Margin

        Profitability or EBIDTA

Try to find any information coming from press releases (check PRNewswire) or Industry Reports (Gartner, Forrester, Frost & Sullivan, IDC, etc.) or any other information you would find by searching with Google or Bing. If you can get any of this information, then the next set of metrics can become highly valuable: financial ratios. Indeed, if you can get as close as possible in completing the following table, it will allow you to assess and benchmark your own company: are you spending as much in R&D as your competitors? How does your profitability level compare to them and what is your revenue per headcount? These are all important metrics that can make sure you are not comparatively overspending in any area of your business.

    Funding and Acquisitions

How much do you know about your competitor’s funding and latest acquisitions? While these are not data points we need during your everyday work, they are most useful to have handy when you need to know. For example, most investors have a five to seven years window on their investments. If one of your competitors is about to hit that timeframe, there are most likely in discussions with the investor about finding an exit or someone else to buy their shares. Understanding also the kind of acquisition they have made in the past can also help you to better evaluate where each of your competitors are heading. Some of the information you want to capture includes:

Funding

        Date of funding

        Round Type (seed, A round, pre-IPO, etc.)

        Amount

        Investors involved

        Estimate of valuation / ratio

        Link to any press releases

Acquisition

        Date of acquisition

        Company Name

        Industry or specialties of the company

        Amount

        Estimate of valuation / ratio

        Link to any press releases

Some of the sources that are useful for this section include CrunchBase, PR Newswire, The Software Equity Group (for the valuation and funding ratios) and of course Google and Bing.

  Web Metrics

With some much business happening thru the web, it’s critical that you get a complete summary of all the web metrics you can get your hands on: web traffic ranking, number of sites linked, site load time, number of page views per visitor, web site reach, PPC budget, top PPC keywords, etc. There are several sources where you can get web metrics including Alexa, Compete.com, MOZ, and of course lots of great information from iSpionage.com. Here is an example of a web metrics table you could build:

    Social Metrics

In addition to web metrics, we also must know how all of our competitors in the world of social media. Again all of this information is freely accessible to anybody:

LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com)

•       Number of Followers 

Facebook (www.facebook.com)

•       Number of Followers

•       Number Posts - this month

•       Number Page Mentions - this month

•       Average # posts / month

•       Average # mentions / month 

Twitter (www.twitter.com)

•       Number Followers

•       Number Tweets - this month

•       Number Mentions - this month

•       Number Retweets - this month

•       Average number tweets / month

•       Average number mentions / month

•       Average number retweets / month 

YouTube (www.youtube.com)

•       Total Uploads

•       Total Views

•       Number Subscribers

•       Average Views per Video

AngelList (www.angel.co)

•       Number of Followers 

Klout (www.klout.com)

       Klout Score

  PPC and SEO Metrics

Last but not least, we all need to know as much as possible about our competitors’ PPC and SEO metrics, including: PPC budget, top PPC keywords, average ad position, top PPC competitors, top SEO keywords, and top Ads in Google and Bing. Of course, all of this information can be found on iSpionage.

    Keeping it up to date

We recommend that you take the time every month to make sure that you competitive dashboard is kept up to date. Depending on the number of metrics and companies you are tracking, this should not take you more than a day or so to update all the data points. The challenge is to get into the habit of doing this on a regular basis and not forgetting to do it after a few months. Once you have this in your hands, it will be much easier to work when doing a strategic plan, updating your business plan, working on a new product launch or when you will do your next sales meeting.

We are very happy to inform you all that we just integrated a bunch of web metrics from Alexa. In addition to traffic ranking, you are now able to get the following:

Page views per Visitor

Traffic Reach

Web Site Keywords

Site Load Time

Number of sites links

As always, we welcome all of your feedback and ideas in order to improve our product. We are working hard to make this the best competitive intelligence tools for your needs.