Blog Post #1: Foundational metrics

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Web metrics for business fall into several different categories including foundational, visit characterization, visitor characterization, engagement and more. This blog post will focus on what a business needs to analyze to begin to understand web analytics, starting with the foundational analytics. Without the foundational analytics, it’s hard to begin to understand more about the website, its content, optimization and how consumers are behaving on the site. 


  1. Page

Pages are the pages that comprise a site. For example, my blog, the Book Bee currently has only one page - the home page. Better websites have more robust pages that can often include information about the company, like an About Us or Contact page, as well as more pages detailing Products, Services, or Resources. My current company’s website (https://www.us.endress.com/en) has hundreds of pages, which can bog down a customer’s experience. There are many pages that go unread by any consumers at all and this can be measured by having analytics in place that see which pages are the most valuable for a customer’s online lifecycle. 


  1. Page view

A page view is measured on how many times a user or visitor views a page. Many businesses monitor page views to see which content is the most valuable for their customers. When pageviews rise steadily over time, it can be a sign of good SEO and website growth. On the downside, high page views could show lagging website performance and inefficient page load times, as users may have had to click around to find what they needed, versus being served the right page at the right time. Hubspot said it best when they stated that, “Context is key when looking at raw page views. (Juviler, 2022)”


  1. Visits

Visits can also be named as “sessions” in some analytics tools, but provides an insight into a single user’s visit to a website and what actions they took. For example, 100 visits to a Products page could mean that although the page was visited 100 times, only 20 unique visitors (or users) were actually on the site and those 20 visitors would have viewed the site five times each. The KPIs for website visits vary by company type, industry, customer type and many more, but there are several benchmarks that exist on the web for businesses to determine average goals for visits for their industry and business type. Website visits can also tell you the source of the data - from mobile phones, tablets, desktop and more. In retail, research from Zyro states that more than 57% of visits to retail websites are made using mobile devices (30 Illuminating Website Facts and Stats for 2022, 2022). 


  1. Unique visitors

As touched on prior, unique visitors represent the single user that visited the website within a specific time period. This metric is typically done by matching the user’s IP address with their visit. A visitor has to accept website cookies to be able to measure unique visitors correctly (Indeed, 2021). Unique visitors can help marketers understand the behavior of a customer on the website, as well as measure who is returning and new visitors. The most common ranges for unique visitors are daily, weekly or monthly measures. 


  1. Events


An event on a website are user interactions (sometimes called actions) on a website that are separate from pageviews. Common events on a website could include clicks, downloads, form submits, video plays and much more. 


This simple, but understandable graphic from Hotjar shows the difference between pageviews and events. 

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Hotjar, 2022


Many businesses use website events to learn more about what actions customers want to take on a website. It’s one of the more quantifiable ROI web metrics in the foundational category and can help marketers understand what items on the website create action.


These foundational metrics help provide support for business owners, marketers, and marketing teams around websites.  



References: 


30 Illuminating Website Facts and Stats for 2022. (2022, February 24). Zyro Blog. Retrieved May 30, 2022, from https://zyro.com/blog/illuminating-website-facts-and-stats/


Juviler, J. (2022, January 4). 12 Metrics Website Owners Will Be Tracking in 2022 and Beyond. Hubspot. Retrieved May 30, 2022, from https://blog.hubspot.com/website/engagement-metrics#:%7E:text=These%20metrics%20can%20tell%20you,to%20understand%20without%20hard%20data.


Indeed. (2021, April 2). Guide to Unique Visitors. Indeed Career Guide. Retrieved May 30, 2022, from https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/guide-to-unique-visitors#:%7E:text=A%20unique%20visitor%20is%20calculated,time%20with%20web%20analytics%20tools.

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