Metrics that don’t mean as much as you think

By
Angie Herrera

In the past couple of years I've become a bit of a stats junkie. I have a love-hate relationship with Google Analytics; both for my own sites and client sites we track. It's real easy to get caught up in the peaks and valleys and pretty pie charts, and even the percentages and number counts. But like with most analytics packages, some metrics, while fun to review, just don't matter as much as others. Here are a few. #### Overall traffic This is one that newbies to the analytics world go straight for. Even though I've been using analytics for well over 6 years, I *still* find myself looking at overall traffic stats. The problem isn't the metric itself. It's just that it can be incredibly misleading. Why? Because not all traffic is equal. If your site is getting 50,000 visitors but none of them become a customer it doesn't really matter much. And if that's the case, it's time for you to focus on conversion. #### Time on site / average page views This is one that I recently learned about. In general, how much time someone spent on your site isn't a bad indicator. It can be good, but you also have to know your site pretty well and be aware of the changes you may have made. For example, if you're recently redesigned your navigation to make it *easier* to find your products or services, it's quite possible that a visitor's time spent on your site may decrease since they were able to find things and check out quicker. That's not a bad thing at all. #### Hits This may be the most useless of all. Hits measure the number of *objects* that get pulled from a web page when it's loaded in the browser. That means, the HTML page itself, the graphics and other elements. You can quickly increase your hits just by adding images to your site or webpage. If you're still using this to measure your site's success you're being mislead by your own stats software. And be wary of any site that claims to have a bazillion hits.