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Everything Needs a Good Foundation

 




    While often made to look effortless and understandable, website metrics can be one of the trickiest and most confusing reports that a single person can look at. The issue is typically an overload of information which causes stress and overthinking in response to the mass amount of numbers.

     The best advice I could give anybody would be to break all the numbers that are causing the overload and split them into sections; this way, you are working on one piece at a time, each one branching off the other, giving you the ability to understand the once very overwhelming information. 

 The first step of this would be building the foundation. When you build a house, the foundation is one of the first steps and could be noted as one of utmost importance. It holds everything together, and although it is basic, everything gets built on top of the existing foundation. If the foundation were not there, nothing else would be able to be made. 

 Foundational Key Metrics 
     • Page-a definable unit of content (i.e., how many pages did the consumer view during their session)
     • Page View- how many times a page was viewed 
    • Visits/Sessions- the number of times a consumer views a website
    • Unique Visitors- a person who has visited the website once will only be counted once during a specific period 
     • Event- Any action that has a particular date and time assigned by the website (i.e., logging into an account) 

 All the keywords shown above are crucial to understanding the foundations of website metrics, which will also be the foundation of possible future reports that are made in the future with this data as support.

     The foundation is also one of the more straightforward perks of data that will be easy to preview and understand at first glance. They are simple, and this data could help support a hypothesis regarding consumer behavior and what they are doing online. This is also the data that will give you a very brief glance into the overview of the website and how consumers are using this website. It will not tell you hyper-specific details but will provide you with a general idea of the current ongoings of consumer behavior throughout the website. 
 According to WEBFX, the top seven key metrics to watch are: 
     1. Organic Traffic
     2. Page load time
     3. Bounce Rate
     4. Organic clickthrough rate (CTR)
     5. Pageviews per session 
     6. Average session duration
     7. Conversion rate 

    While looking at this list, it could be noted that it is very similar compared to the foundational key metrics shown above. Overall, the vital foundational metrics and the essential metrics to observe are how many people viewed your website, how many times they viewed the website, how much they explored the website, and how quickly they did they leave. While this looks bare minimum and basic, it gives you the foundation to explain consumer shopping behaviors for the website. This information gives marketers the ability to improve the consumer’s shopping experience.
References

22, M. S. on F. (2022, January 26). 7 key website metrics to watch in 2021 [+how to improve them]. WebFX. Retrieved March 20, 2022, from https://www.webfx.com/blog/marketing/key-website-metrics-to-watch-in-2021/ 

Comments

  1. AnonymousMarch 21, 2022 at 2:57 PM

    Samantha,

    Great information!

    Meg

    ReplyDelete
  2. Mark TietbohlMarch 25, 2022 at 11:05 AM

    Events are interesting because they CLEARLY tell us what is happening on our site. This is important and why events do matter.

    ReplyDelete

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