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July 1, 2005
Govern by the Metrics
Are you managing your web site through the captured metrics? In the old days, you needed to pay your ASP extra for add-on products like Web Trends in order to track and manage your web environment. Today, most ASP vendors offer some form of metrics and I am going to encourage you to review yours on a monthly basis. Why? Metrics are a form of measurement that over an extended period of time will reflect where your online brand is heading. A few of the ones that interest me include:
Unique Visitors, Page Views, and Visits: This metrics provide you an idea of usage within the site itself. I didn’t include hits since that number is more dependent of objects than actual usage of information. Yes, some of your visits will be from search spiders but hopefully that would remain consistent month after month. My personal goal is to increase that usage by 10% across the board per month. So if my monthly average for June was 250 unique visitors, then I would like to have 275 in July.
Keyword Searches: Keywords or phrases are important to review in order to determine what people are searching for to locate your site. For my site, metadata, data architecture, and information architecture lead the way month after month. Therefore, I need to be sure to use these phrases in my titles, paragraphs, and headers to ensure that I stay at the top of the list. I do from time to time get some strange ones like Stu Leonards which is a small grocery chain up north but I have mentioned them in an article I wrote back in 2003. Still about every other month that search phrase shows up.
Referrers: Where do people come from to locate my site? Above and beyond search engines and URL typing, what other web sites link to my site? For me, my monthly column, publications, interviews, and blogging effort generates most of my referrers.
Page Popularity: When people actually get to your site, where do they go? Those pages or documents need to be moved to the home page and you should pay special attention to these artifacts and ensure they are updated frequently.
Metrics provide a sense of score and motivation. Recently, my Unique Visitors, Page Views, and Visits doubled which I thought was a result of a couple of keynotes and tutorials I was giving within the same time period. However, in the following month the metrics did not return to their normal trend; they have held steady. I believe they increase is due to the linkages of this blog and a few kind words from IASlash.org. Either way, steady progress is being made to spread the metadata gospel.
Posted by Todd at July 1, 2005 11:57 AM