Most Underrated Web Metrics

Zach Heller — November 23, 2016 Follow @zheller

The problem with data used to be that we didn’t have enough of it. The problem with data today is that there is just way too much of it.

Of course if you know what you’re looking for, you can get it. And everything else will fall aside.

But if you don’t know what you’re looking for, you will likely fall into the familiar trap of spending too much time on things that don’t matter. Last week, we looked at the most overrated web metrics.

Today I’d like to reverse that. Let’s have a look at those metrics that are underappreciated and underused, but very useful for many businesses to measure and improve:

1. Page Value – Google Analytics allows you to set up your ecommerce metrics, so that when someone checks out on your website, you know how much they spent. Even if they aren’t checking out, you can assign a value to any action they might take, like submitting a lead form, etc. Then you can measure how each page on your site impacts those actions and sales. Pages with the highest value contribute the most to results and pages at the lower end might not be helping you as much as you hope.
   
2. Conversion Rate by Device – while you should be measuring everything by device, conversion rate gets right to the important stuff. Assuming you are tracking sales and other actions, you should always pay attention to the relative likelihood of conversion on different devices. As more of your traffic comes from mobile, are you putting your design and development resources in the right place?
   
3. Attribution – I’ll grant you that this is not a metric but a category of metrics, but since Google Analytics gives you the tools you need to figure this out, I feel okay including it on this list. For marketers, this is perhaps one of the most important things to know. What traffic sources and activities add value and which do not? A full attribution analysis will tell you the path that most often leads to a successful conversion. It will rank the things you do by their relative impact on results.

Remember, now that we have access to boat loads of data doesn’t mean we’re any better off than we were before. Only those marketers or companies that pay attention to the right metrics will come out ahead.

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