Use context to give your web metrics real meaning

The trouble with basic web traffic reports is that they deal in raw data and not information. If you get 100,000 visitors to your site in a month or day, would you consider that a good number? What if I told you that your 100,000 visitors represented less than 1% of your customer base? Or that it was a decline from 1.5% of your customer base. Not such a good result, is it?

What about if on another traffic report you saw you were getting 10,000 visits to your online customer care section? Are you happy with that? What if you found out that 40% of those visits resulted in a call to your call centre?

It’s not enough to just to choose the right web traffic numbers to measure. We need to do the right analysis or comparison that will give our numbers real meaning. It's context that helps turn raw data into actionable information. It's the relationship between numbers that give real value.

Here are three ways to create more context in your web analytics metrics:

1. Ignore month to month comparison. Since a month can have 30, 31, 28 or in leap years 29 days, the comparison is not valid. You're comparing apples and oranges. We suggest you adjusted your metrics to a daily average. That way the daily average for February can be compared to the daily average of March reliably.
   
   
2. Always look to longer term trends. Make comparisons with your current year to one or two previous years so you can observe long term implications. Some traffic metrics change slowly over time and you may not notice a shrinkage or incremental growth in your results unless you compare to sometime in a previous year.
   
   
3. If your business is concerned with channelling more of your customers from your Call Centres to your online customer care, many of your metrics need to be related back to your number of customers. For example, if you measure Visits per day we suggest you also measure % of visits as a ratio of your total number of customers. This will help you see whether your online customer care is achieving the customer adoption you desire.