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By Christine Parfitt
Expert Author Article Date: 2007-10-22 My Google Analytics stats show that 70% of visitors spend less than 10 seconds on my site and 66% of visitors visit one page only. When I first looked at these metrics I was really concerned that I was doing a terrible job at engaging my visitors. I came up with a list of actions such as linking to related posts, improving the categories, encouraging comments etc . I'm absolutely certain that there's a lot of room for improvement and that action plan is still valid. However, I do have a much better insight into the metrics after reading Avinash Kaushik's fantastic book on web analytics. Time On Site When someone first visits a website, a session is started and the time is logged. From that point, every time a request is made to the web server, there is a timestamp. The time spent on a page is calculated as the difference between the timestamp when the visitor goes to the page and the timestamp when they visit another page. All well and good except that there is no way of knowing how long the person spends on the last page they visit as there is no time stamp to indicate the end of that event and the beginning of the next. The tools calculate the time spent as zero. This makes the metric particularly misleading when the website is a blog. Although I might like people to go deeper, read other posts and have a look around, it's perfectly understandable that someone visits and just reads the latest post. The problem with the stats is that whether they spend 10 minutes reading the post or 5 seconds deciding it's not interesting, the time on site is still zero which then distorts the overall "average time on site" metric. Page Views The number of pages viewed is usually considered to be important when trying to measure the level of engagement. The more pages someone looks at, the more interested they are in the website as a whole. It's not quite so straightforward with blogs. Subscribers and repeat visitors are a good measure of engagement and yet these visitors will typically come just to read the latest post, or the last few posts which will probably be on one page. And then of course they might not visit the site at all and read the posts somewhere else like a reader. So what should you measure? Well I guess the metrics are still useful as long as you understand the inherent flaws. And subscriber stats and number of comments are useful indicators of engagement. Anyone want to offer some feedback on what metrics they find useful and the best way to measure engagement on blogs in particular? Comments About the Author: Christine Parfitt is a search marketing strategist and the founder of Semfire, a search marketing company based in Australia. She specialises in paid search and shares news and best practices at Semfire Search Engine Marketing Blog. |
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