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  <id>tag:www.readwriteweb.com,2012:/biz//15/tag:www.readwriteweb.com,2010:/biz//15.20947-</id>
  <updated>2012-02-03T20:13:40Z</updated>
  <title>Comments for 5 Critical Web Metrics To Keep a Close Eye On</title>
  <subtitle>Web Apps, Social Media and Web Technology Resource Guide for Small Businesses</subtitle>
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  <entry>
    <id>tag:www.readwriteweb.com,2010:/biz//15.20947</id>
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    <link rel="service.edit" type="application/atom+xml" href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-atom.cgi/weblog/blog_id=15/entry_id=20947" title="5 Critical Web Metrics To Keep a Close Eye On" />
    <published>2010-07-29T06:10:00Z</published>
    <updated>2010-07-31T06:42:11Z</updated>
    <title>5 Critical Web Metrics To Keep a Close Eye On</title>
    <summary> You probably have a good idea of how many page views and unique visitors your company&apos;s website gets, but how many people are truly interacting with your brand? How successful are your digital marketing efforts? Traditional Web analytics metrics can provide a ton of actionable intelligence about your site&apos;s users, but only when they&apos;re...</summary>
    <author>
      <name>John Paul Titlow</name>
      
    </author>
    
    <category term="How-Tos" />
    
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      <![CDATA[<p><img alt="analytics-referals.png" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/biz/analytics-referals.png" width="150" height="79"  /><br />
You probably have a good idea of how many page views and unique visitors your company's website gets, but how many people are truly interacting with your brand?  How successful are your digital marketing efforts?  </p>

<p>Traditional Web analytics metrics can provide a ton of actionable intelligence about your site's users, but only when they're combined with other measurements does the full picture start to emerge.  With so many measurements and data points flying across your desktop, it's hard to know where to focus.   Here are five metrics to pay particular attention to.</p>]]>
      <![CDATA[<h2>Conversion Rate</h2>

<p>Although it's been a standard metric in analytics software for years, the conversion rate is still one of the most useful for business owners.  For the uninitiated, the conversation rate is the ratio of website users who complete a particular action, or goal, defined by you, the site owner.   For a small business, that might be clicking the "Confirm Order" button in a shopping cart, or signing up for an e-newsletter.    If you don't have any goals set up in your analytics program, you'll want to get those up and running so you can understand how successful your site is.</p>

<h2>Referring Sites and Keywords</h2>

<p>Where is your site's traffic coming from?  If it's other websites, which ones?  If it's Google, do you know precisely which search keywords are bringing people in?   Google Analytics and similar platforms offer reports that answer these questions, and they're worth a look.   Are you seeing a low number of visitors coming from Facebook.com?   Perhaps it's time to ramp up your social media strategy.   Did five people find your site by searching for "widgets for sale" yesterday?   You might want to include those keywords in your site's title tags to get that number even higher.   </p>

<h2>Facebook: Daily Active Users</h2>

<p><img alt="facebook-active-users.png" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/biz/facebook-active-users.png" width="400" class="mt-image-right" />Congratulations, you have a million Facebook fans!  Now, how many of those people are actually interacting with your company each day?   The newly redesigned Facebook Insights puts a renewed emphasis on a metric called Daily Active Users, which is defined as anybody that has commented, liked, visited or posted content to your Page each day.  This number can be rather sobering, but it also provides insight into what's working and what isn't.   If your Active Daily Users seem too close to zero for comfort, try posting different status updates and links.  Pay attention to any spikes you may see in this chart.   Does engagement bottom out on the weekends?  Does it go through the roof every time you ask your users a question?   The answers can help inform your overall social marketing strategy.</p>

<h2>Twitter: Klout Score</h2>

<p>As with Facebook fans, everybody wants a massive number of Twitter followers, but how many of those followers are auto-following, pornoriffic spam bots?   One way to more accurately measure your brand's effectiveness on Twitter is by checking your account's ranking on <a href="http://klout.com" target="_blank">Klout</a>.  This number, known as your Klout Score, is a zero to 100 ranking that estimates your degree of influence within Twitter based on several factors, such as number of active followers, links clicked and engagement with other users.  </p>

<h2>Email Open & Click-Through Rate</h2>

<p>Even as social media takes center stage, good old fashioned email marketing can be extremely impactful.   If you send out regular e-newsletters, be sure to pay close attention to the open rate on your email campaign reports.    It will only be a fraction of total subscribers, but you can ensure more people open your emails by not sending them too frequently, writing attention-grabbing subject lines and generally being useful and informative for your subscribers.   Some email marketing software, such as Campaign Monitor, <a href="http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/post/2782/ab-testing/" target="_blank">offer A/B split testing</a> so you can try out multiple versions of the email and see which one works best.    Next, you'll want to drill down to the click-through data.    How many people clicked on something?  What did they click on?   This data can have enormous significance for your business and help you make decisions when forging your email marketing strategy.</p>

<p><br />
<em>Are there are any other Web traffic or engagement metrics that you look out for?   Leave more examples in the comments. </em></p>]]>
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  <entry>
    <id>tag:www.readwriteweb.com,2010:/biz//15.20947-comment:229125</id>
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    <title>Comment from John Parker on 2010-07-29</title>
    <author>
        <name>John Parker</name>
        <uri>http://www.LEADSExplorer.com</uri>
    </author>
    <content type="html" xml:lang="en" xml:base="http://www.LEADSExplorer.com">
        <![CDATA[<p>Analysis and comparing web analytics of 2 websites in B2B:<br />
<a href="http://bit.ly/dj1tDo" rel="nofollow">http://bit.ly/dj1tDo</a> (including conversion rates)</p>

<p>Klout:<br />
Website 1: Klout score: 6 true search: 11 amplification: 3  network: 1<br />
Website 2: Klout score: 8 true reach: N/A amplification: 4  network: 1 </p>]]>
    </content>
    <published>2010-07-29T08:49:27Z</published>
  </entry>

  <entry>
    <id>tag:www.readwriteweb.com,2010:/biz//15.20947-comment:229250</id>
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    <title>Comment from Michael Whitehouse on 2010-07-29</title>
    <author>
        <name>Michael Whitehouse</name>
        <uri></uri>
    </author>
    <content type="html" xml:lang="en" xml:base="">
        <![CDATA[<p>Solid list, but I think you're missing two very valuable ones:</p>

<p>1) Bounce rate: it measures how many one-and-done, single page view visits you have. In the words of Avinash Kaushik, it measures how many visitors "came, puked, and left." If a site owner can't retain the majority of his/her traffic for longer than one page-view, then he/she has serious problems.</p>

<p>2) Satisfaction/net promoter: the five metrics you listed above try to measure site/brand impact by proxy, but you could go straight to the source and use a survey to ask your visitors how satisfied they are or how likely they are to promote your brand. Those are intuitive, heart-based metrics to balance the more rational, head-based ones you listed above.</p>]]>
    </content>
    <published>2010-07-29T13:13:59Z</published>
  </entry>

  <entry>
    <id>tag:www.readwriteweb.com,2010:/biz//15.20947-comment:229306</id>
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    <title>Comment from Lucy Beer on 2010-07-29</title>
    <author>
        <name>Lucy Beer</name>
        <uri>http://www.webtrainingwheels.com</uri>
    </author>
    <content type="html" xml:lang="en" xml:base="http://www.webtrainingwheels.com">
        <![CDATA[<p>I'm not buying into the Klout thing just yet. I think there are other ways to determine if and how your Twitter strategy  is paying off, according to your own set of relevant indicators. The whole "Klout" concept is still seeming a little high-school-popularity-contest to me. Am I just missing the point?</p>]]>
    </content>
    <published>2010-07-29T17:00:18Z</published>
  </entry>

  <entry>
    <id>tag:www.readwriteweb.com,2010:/biz//15.20947-comment:229370</id>
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    <title>Comment from Marco Luega on 2010-07-29</title>
    <author>
        <name>Marco Luega</name>
        <uri></uri>
    </author>
    <content type="html" xml:lang="en" xml:base="">
        <![CDATA[<p>Analytics is one of the most useful tools I've found for deciding how to promote your site. One of the MANY ways I use it is to see if I need to work on getting ranked higher for certain keywords. Lets say I'm focusing a clients website like <a href="http://www.ibpapers.net" rel="nofollow">http://www.ibpapers.net</a> on the keyword <a href="http://www.ibpapers.net" rel="nofollow">ib exam papers</a> and im getting 100 visitors from that via Google a day. I'm ranking number 1 on the SERP. But I also see that I'm getting 80 hits for the keyword <a href="http://www.ibpapers.net" rel="nofollow">ib past papers</a> but I'm ranking on page 2 for that keyword. I know then that I should work on getting a higher ranking for that keyword because there are clearly a lot of people searching for that.</p>]]>
    </content>
    <published>2010-07-29T20:33:02Z</published>
  </entry>

  <entry>
    <id>tag:www.readwriteweb.com,2010:/biz//15.20947-comment:229598</id>
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    <title>Comment from John Rainey on 2010-07-30</title>
    <author>
        <name>John Rainey</name>
        <uri></uri>
    </author>
    <content type="html" xml:lang="en" xml:base="">
        <![CDATA[<p>One key metric that was not mentioned was offline activity.  A lot of online interactions drive offline sales be it a store location or via the telephone.  I think it is critical to keep in mind the complementary nature of offline and online activity and how the two, together, drive conversion.  At IOVOX, we've developed an advanced marketing analytics platform, VoxAnalytics, to help businesses better understand the effects online and offline advertising have on lead generation and sales. We do this by linking telepone numbers to online keywords, PPC links, mobile ad banners, etc. in order to create a holistic, real-time picture for more accurate tracking and analysis of multi-channel marketing success.</p>]]>
    </content>
    <published>2010-07-30T16:51:41Z</published>
  </entry>

  <entry>
    <id>tag:www.readwriteweb.com,2010:/biz//15.20947-comment:230307</id>
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    <title>Comment from Frank Adams on 2010-08-02</title>
    <author>
        <name>Frank Adams</name>
        <uri>http://www.webhostinglogic.com</uri>
    </author>
    <content type="html" xml:lang="en" xml:base="http://www.webhostinglogic.com">
        <![CDATA[<p>Good points on traffic analysis tools but I think there is one that must be considered aside from those mentioned. Geographical locations of the traffic must be added to the list. For a business owner selling stuff online, the locations of your customers is an important factor</p>]]>
    </content>
    <published>2010-08-02T07:52:36Z</published>
  </entry>

  <entry>
    <id>tag:www.readwriteweb.com,2010:/biz//15.20947-comment:230640</id>
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    <title>Comment from roger on 2010-08-03</title>
    <author>
        <name>roger</name>
        <uri></uri>
    </author>
    <content type="html" xml:lang="en" xml:base="">
        <![CDATA[<p>These are great tools, i personally use clicktale which has the best of the bunch in my opinion. Its heatmaps are second to none.</p>]]>
    </content>
    <published>2010-08-03T13:01:47Z</published>
  </entry>

  <entry>
    <id>tag:www.readwriteweb.com,2010:/biz//15.20947-comment:237459</id>
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    <title>Comment from Cronimon.com on 2010-08-24</title>
    <author>
        <name>Cronimon.com</name>
        <uri>http://www.cronimon.com</uri>
    </author>
    <content type="html" xml:lang="en" xml:base="http://www.cronimon.com">
        <![CDATA[<p>@ roger: tnx for your input about clicktale - i will check it out. We are also currently developing a solution for tracking key-metrics in realtime. I would love to hear your opinion about our product and our presentation:</p>

<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bV2gEZGdfWQ" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bV2gEZGdfWQ</a></p>]]>
    </content>
    <published>2010-08-24T13:40:47Z</published>
  </entry>

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