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Role Based Web Analytics Reports – Know which report you should be looking at!

Unless you are a one-man army, you may not require every report that can be generated in your web analytics tool set.  I have seen people looking at all kinds of reports all the time and miss the metrics exactly that require their attention.  I believe no one role/person is required to monitor more than one or two metrics over a period of time. And, I wonder why we should be ending up creating hundreds of those colorful slides every year…which only misses the focus on the things that should be taken care.

You could be a Web Developer, Server Administrator, Usability Professional, Web Content Manager, Search Engine Optimizer,  Search Engine Marketer (Paid),  eMail Marketer, Online Store Manager…there is something that you can use from web analytics to optimize for better.  All  you need to do is define the metrics on what you do, and be aware on how it is contributing to or from others metrics.

Creating Role Based Web Analytics Reports in different Levels would help in increasing the focus on those specific defined metrics and also you know exactly on what you would need to concentrate to improve the metrics that you are responsible to.

Let me put this in a pyramid format for better understanding, I am calling it as “Web Metrics Pyramid” -

Let’s try to apply this Web Metrics Pyramid to one of the web business function or a role… with Search Engine Optimization.

Search Engine Optimization Metrics -  It is very important for the businesses and search engine optimizers to define their success metrics.  Like with any function, the reporting frame-work should be split to the Role…which we are calling as “Role based Web Analytics Reports”.

On a typical case, I am taking two roles for Search Engine Optimization – Business and Search Engine Optimizer.

Businesses may not be interested in how a specific URL is ranking in Google rather they would be very interested in how are they doing in Search Engine Optimization as a whole and what’s its contribution in the total traffic acquisition to the website and how is it compared to competition.  (As a sidenote: Make sure you only measure qualified traffic using the metrics like Committed Visits).  The metrics would be “Share of Traffic” or “Average Variance from the Competition”

Search Engine Optimizers on the other hand would pay attention to the site-level metrics for monitoring the trends and page-level metrics for re-optimization purposes.

On both the stakeholders above, it is important they define what is important to their business and objective of the SEO Program and determine the success metrics.  For example, for big brands it could be branding which is objective of the SEO program….so ranking is relatively important to actual visits from search engines as it gives free impressions for their listing in the search engines.  However, for a small biz owners it is $ more important.  He/She may not be interested to get traffic that doesn’t convert to $ at his/her website.  For them it could be “$ earned per Visit from Search Engine “would be a great metric.

Keeping both the stakeholders above in mind, I am creating the web metrics pyramid for SEO. In the above example, let’s assume business targets to generate US$10K a Month from the search engine traffic…so I put “Revenue as the success metric in the Level 1”

The above SEO Metrics Pyramid is created for illustrative purposes only the actual metrics vary based on the business requirements.

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