I first spotted a link to the following article on the Google Analytics blog. The article is entitled “Bounce Rate: Sexiest Web Metric Ever?” and is on the Marketing Profs Daily Fix blog. The article, by Avinash Kaushik, outlines one of the many statistics provided by the Google Analytics service. The bounce rate:
… measures the percentage of people who come to your website and leave “instantly”.
Thought about from a customer perspective rather than I came, I saw, I conquered, the action is I came, I saw, Yuck, I am out of here.
Bounce rate measure quality of traffic you are acquiring, and if it is the right traffic then it helps you hone in on where/how your website is failing your website visitors.
I find this interesting because it is a metric that can be applied to any type of website. All too often, at least in my experience, web metrics is a tool that is described as something you use to determine why conversion rates are not meeting the goals set by the organisation.
Recently I completed an assignment where I needed to look at three tools that would be of use to an information architect. I chose Google Analytics as one of them because I felt that web metrics, also known as web analytics, could be more than just information used for marketing decisions, or checking on the performance of advertising such as AdWords.
I believe this is the case because any website needs to have a purpose, and at the most fundamental level the purpose of a website is to provide value to its users. I believe web metrics can be valuable in assisting in designing, maintaining, and managing a website to meet this goal.
It is my hope that in future web development projects that I undertake I will be able to integrate web metrics into it. Because I feel this type of information will assist in me producing a better website.
All too often I’ve seen projects, both in private enterprise and in libraries, for websites where it is assumed by those managing the project that they know what the users want without actually asking the users. Web metrics, I think, can feed into the development process to give a picture about who the users of the site are, and what they’re trying to achieve.
If I do get to use web metrics, I’ll write more about it here.
