eMetrics: Scanning Visitors
September 29, 2007
A few days ago I wrote about eMetrics and promised to explain them more in depth with a series of articles. To understand the nature of your website you first have to understand that there are two types of traffic that come to a website. Scanning Visitors are visitors that read through the content on your site and leave. Committed Visitors, on the other hand are interested in what your website talks about and they in some cases return again and again to your website. In understanding the relationship between scanning and committed visitors you can begin to see the shortcomings of your website.
There are 3 standard calculations that determine the eMetrics for scanning visitors that include Scanning Visitor Share, Scanning Visitor Index and Scanning Visitor Volume.
The Scanning Visitor Share is calculated in the following way…
Scanning Visitor Share = Number of one minute visits / Total number of visits
This is useful if you want to find out how many people are accessing your website, scanning your web pages and then leaving within about one minute.
The Scanning Visitor Index is calculated in the following way…
Scanning Visitor Index = Number of page views in one minute visits / number of one minute visits
This index is used to show where potential problems may exist with your website with respect to navigation and usability issues.
The Scanning Visitor Volume is calculated in the following way…
Scanning Visit Volume = Number of page views in one minute visits / Number of Page Views
This calculation is used to show just how many people that access your site are scanning your website and then leaving.
In the next article I will write about Committed Visitors and how they are viewed using eMetrics. Keep on analyzing until then,
Luc
The Web: Where Tech and Marketing got married
September 28, 2007
While most people know that the web came into existence because of networking computers, servers, mainframes and other computer appliances together. Now that was a while ago and today IT is only one part of the equation and the other is that Marketing has moved center stage. There is no surprise that the two go hand-in-hand to make the internet what it is.
Techie guys talk “Tech”
If you are not that technically inclined and you’ve happened into a conversation with a technical person then chances are that you don’t have a clue what they are talking about. Perhaps you run a business in the human resources sector and the only things that you really understand outside of emailing; using your BlackBerry or using word is searching job boards and submitting job ads. You are not alone in your struggle to understand more about the web and how it can benefit you in the marketing of your business online.
Marketing Peeps speak performance
Marketing lately is geared towards the performance of a campaign or a call to action. Seth Godin has aptly named this “Permission Marketing” a concept that really targets an audience to hone in on the truly interested amount of people in your product or service. With SPAM being so common place now, Permission Marketing, allows us to see truly interested customer as opposed to sending everyone and their grandmother an email and spamming the hell out of their inboxes.
Marketing and Tech are two different languages
Marketing has its own language and core beliefs. IT and the tech industry at large plays by different rules but for each to co-exist and work with each other it takes time to understand where each are coming from to gain the best insights of both worlds.
The Marriage of Tech and Marketing
The Marriage of Tech and Marketing worlds are largely underway with a movement called “Web Analytics” which is beginning to use the best of both worlds. Marketing people and Tech are on the same page writing a new language that both can understand equally.
As I wrote about the other day, areas like eMetrics are allowing techies and marketing folk to bridge the gap in understanding each other. This is building a movement that I call “Customer Science” or the science of understanding your customer base enough to not only predict your customers needs and wants and cater to them but allow you to better understand your customers and anticipate their behaviors towards you, your company, the systems you implement and more. While this may seem like a bit of a rant believe me when I say it’s coming shortly and has been building for some time now.
eMetrics: The Difference Between Content and Commerce Metrics
September 26, 2007
If you’ve run a website for any amount of time you’ll come to know that there can be a fine line between the content aspects of the website and the commerce aspects of a website. eMetrics, helps in the study of traffic, consumers and developing intelligence to better run your online business.
So what are Content Metrics?
Content Metrics are the statistical information that relate to the initiatives put forth by your company and how your audience views and uses them. Simply put, they are pulse of anything related to the content of your website. They include the following measures that I’ll explain further in the coming days
- Take Rates aka “Conversions’
- Repeat Visitor Share
- Heavy User Share
- Committed Visitor Share
- Committed Visitor Index
- Committed Visitor Volume
- Visitor Engagement Index
- Rejection (Bounce) Rate - All Pages
- Rejection (Bounce) Rate - Home Page
- Scanning Visitor Share
- Scanning Visitor Index
- Scanning Visitor Volume
And then there were Commerce Metrics…
Commerce Metrics are what they sound like because they relate to how your website makes money (or doesn’t make money). I am sure that you are familiar with the idea of “Return on Investment” and basically you can think of websites and web properties in general as investment vehicles like RRSPs, GICs or Stocks. Standard ways in which you measure Commerce metrics on a website include…
- Average Order Amount
- Conversion Rate
- Sales per Visit
- Cost per Order
- Repeat Order Rate
- Cost Per Visit
- Order Acquisition Gap
- Order Acquisition Ratio
- Contribution per Order
- Return on Investment
eMetrics allows you to take stock of the effectiveness of your website, the pages and processes involved in getting people around using statistical data to predict customer behavior. I will be sharing more information with you in the coming weeks about each of these calculations.
Luc
Business Blog posts… what value they can offer your business?
September 25, 2007
With Blogging being an accepted standard today and many businesses of various sizes using it for various means it poses a question… How valuable is blogging to your business? Blogging takes a great deal of time from writing content to brainstorming ideas for the blog to become valuable but then you have to ask yourself as I have had to ask myself “What is your business?” If your business is information then blogging can be very lucrative but if you are making the odd post about your business then it comes a “News wire” about goings on at your company.
A lot of blogging has become less valuable because people treat it like they treat ad-sense a few years ago with the mentality of “if I slap it up they will come!” My goal with the PureWebAnalytics Blog initially was information and now I simply want to provide a unique and authentic to the general public. The core goal of PureWebAnalytics is website maintenance, support and development but having a blog allows me to share experiences, knowledge and opinions with people interested in Web Design and potential customers.
So when you go into setting up a website with a blog or a blog just ask yourself “What value does this add to my business.”
Some useful links for blogging in general are…
Yaro’s Blog Mastermind - http://www.blogmastermind.com/
Problogger.net - http://www.problogger.net/
ROI Revolution: A Blog all about Analytics
September 24, 2007
For those of you looking for a good source of analytic content you will want to check out ROI Revolution’s Blog. They have a ton of interesting articles available to read and if you are new to analytics and want to read a lot of excellent and relevant content than you need to check out this blog. I am just getting into the Web Analytics course that I am taking through UBC that I wrote about in earlier postings so I will be posting more articles in the coming days about this. In the meantime, enjoy the link!
Luc
