It’s not about “what” but “why” - Understanding Web Analytics Graphs
A graph can go in either direction up or down which one can know by reporting using a chart but it is important that one should know why there is a positive or negative change to the graph. And, it is not all the time the graph should have a raise towards its right. There are some metrics when marketer would love to see them fall down.
Intention of some of the metrics would be different based on why a specific feature or a web page is existed in the website. For example, a marketer would want to see less time spent by visitors on a registration page or login page, the same person may be intersted to have users spend more time in content pages which are created for branding and product pages. The marketers expect shoppers spend less time in the over-all shopping conversion funnel, the more time they spend in the funnel is an indication for possible drops while converting into sale, so measuring average time spent in the conversion funnel is important and optimize the funnel for reducing the friction helps to decline the graph on average time spent in the shopping cart funnel.
If the graph on site-search is raising that indicates site’s navigation and usability is to be optimized. It is true that people go to site search when they immediately don’t find content which is relevent for their intended visit to the web page they are in. Though “Search” is widely accepted now online, but still users have to “click” navigation. So, monitoring the site search usage on each page and enhance the content based on the users queries on each page would reduce using site search.
More analysts look at average page views per visit metric (ofcourse, after removing the ouliers which influence with bigger counts) - This metric most people would want to raise it all the time, but there are also instances where you want it to decline.
The bounce rate of your landing page and Abandonment rate at the key pages should also need to fall down towards the right.
If you are measuring page load-times, then you might want to see it decline everytime you generate a graph.
But, we all want daily qualified unique visitors and sessions to be raised. Traffic from quality referrers, competitive terms in search engines expects to be increased.
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February 1st, 2008 at 4:47 pm
[…] unknown wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptIt’s not about “what” but “why” - Understanding Web Analytics Graphs A graph can go in either direction up or down which one can know by reporting using a chart but it is important that one should know why there is a positive or negative change to the graph. And, it is not all the time the graph should have a raise towards its right. There are some metrics when marketer would love to see them fall down. Intention of some of the metrics would be different based on why a specific feature o […]