At the start of this book, we looked at the many metrics you can track in order to understand your online presence. Those metrics you track and how you weigh them is your monitoring mix. Recall that there are four site archetypes: media, transaction, collaboration, and SaaS. The one that you’re running dictates which metrics and KPIs matter most to you. Table A-1 shows how important each element of the monitoring mix is to each type of site.
Table A-1. The monitoring mixes for the four major site types[3]
| Media | Transaction | Collaboration | SaaS | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| How well did visitors benefit my business? | ||||
| Conversion and abandonment | 1 | 4 | 1 | 3 |
| Click-outs | 4 | 1 | 3 | 1 |
| Offline activity | 1 | 3 | 1 | 3 |
| Subscriptions | 4 | 1 | 2 | 1 |
| Billing and account use | 1 | 1 | 1 | 4 |
| Where is my traffic coming from? | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Referring URLs | 3 | 4 | 3 | 1 |
| Inbound links from social tools | 4 | 3 | 3 | 1 |
| Visitor motivation | 2 | 4 | 3 | 1 |
| What's working best (and worst)? | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Site effectiveness | 2 | 4 | 2 | 1 |
| Ad and campaign effectiveness | 1 | 4 | 1 | 1 |
| Findability and search effectiveness | 4 | 3 | 3 | 1 |
| Trouble-ticketing and escalation | 1 | 1 | 2 | 4 |
| Content popularity | 4 | 2 | 4 | 1 |
| Usability | 2 | 4 | 4 | 3 |
| User productivity | 1 | 1 | 3 | 4 |
| Community rankings and rewards | 3 | 2 | 4 | 1 |
| How good is my relationship with my users? | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Loyalty | 4 | 3 | 3 | 1 |
| Enrollment | 4 | 2 | 2 | 1 |
| Reach | 3 | 4 | 4 | 1 |
| How healthy is my infrastructure? | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Availability and performance | 2 | 3 | 3 | 4 |
| SLA compliance | 1 | 1 | 1 | 4 |
| Content delivery | 4 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| Capacity and flash traffic | 4 | 3 | 2 | 1 |
| Impact of performance on outcomes | 2 | 4 | 1 | 1 |
| Traffic spikes from marketing efforts | 3 | 4 | 1 | 1 |
| Seasonal usage patterns | 4 | 4 | 2 | 1 |
| How am I doing against the competition? | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Site popularity and ranking | 4 | 2 | 3 | 2 |
| How people are finding my competiitors | 3 | 4 | 2 | 1 |
| Relative site performance | 4 | 3 | 2 | 4 |
| Competitor activity | 1 | 3 | 1 | 3 |
| Where are my risks? | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Trolling and spamming | 3 | 3 | 4 | 1 |
| Copyright and legal liability | 1 | 1 | 3 | 1 |
| Fraud, privacy, and account sharing | 1 | 3 | 1 | 4 |
| What are people saying about me? | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Site reputation | 4 | 1 | 4 | 1 |
| Trends | 4 | 3 | 1 | 1 |
| Social network activity | 4 | 1 | 3 | 1 |
| How is my site and content being used elsewhere? | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| API access and usage | 4 | 3 | 4 | 2 | ||||
| Mashups, stolen content, and illegal syndication | 4 | 2 | 3 | 1 | ||||
| Integration with legacy systems | 1 | 3 | 1 | 4 | ||||
|
[3] Key:
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Media organizations care about the volume, loyalty, and interests of their visiting population, as well as the rates of click-through for advertising and their ability to cost-effectively handle traffic during peak load. They also watch the rest of the Internet for plagiarism and content theft, as well as incoming links from news aggregators that can foreshadow traffic spikes. Finally, they need to monitor comment threads for abusive behavior.
Primary metrics: click-outs; subscriptions
A visitor helps a media site by clicking on advertising, which generates revenue. If you have a premium subscription model, this is a second source of income, although you should treat the part of your site that converts users from “free” to “subscription” models as a transactional site.
This is especially important when comparing your own web analytics with those of advertisers or sponsors who owe you money.
Primary metric: inbound links from social sites and search engines
Secondary metrics: referring URLs; visitor motivation
Since the site’s job is to deliver content to others, it’s important to reconcile where someone came from, her demographics, and where she went. This allows you to identify segments of visitors who are more likely to click on ads, so you can focus on attracting those segments.
On media sites, traffic will spike when news breaks or when content becomes popular. When this happens, it’s important to identify the referring organization or social network that started the traffic and to encourage additional upvoting by the members of that network to make the most of your short-lived visibility. You also need to look at what was on visitors’ minds that caused them to visit, which you can collect through VOC surveys.
Since many visitors to media sites arrive in search of some content—a recent TV clip, an interview with a celebrity—the search systems by which they find that content are important to track.
Primary metrics: findability and search effectiveness; content popularity
Secondary metrics: site effectiveness; community rankings and rewards
Media sites are all about content. To maximize visits, it’s important to show visitors content that will grab their interest or is related to what they initially came for, so that they stay on the site longer and see more ads. To lower your bounce rate, it’s essential to track which content is most popular and display it prominently on landing pages.
A lesser but still important concern is community ranking. In many cases, you will allow your visitors to rate and rank content. This is vital not only for identifying popular media and encouraging people to enroll in order to vote, but also for harnessing the wisdom of the crowds in flagging inappropriate material.
Primary metrics: loyalty; enrollment
Secondary metric: reach
The Web is increasingly dependent on permission-based marketing. Occasional visitors benefit you when they become loyal, returning subscribers or enroll via a mailing list or RSS feed, as this makes the site more attractive to advertisers. The number of people who have given you permission to communicate with them is a critical metric for media sites.
However, you can’t just measure how many people have enrolled in your mailing list or subscribed to your RSS feed. You need to track your reach—the number of subscribers who act on what you send them by clicking on a link or returning to your site
Primary metrics: content delivery; capacity and flash traffic; seasonal usage patterns
Secondary metrics: availability and performance; impact of performance on outcomes; traffic spikes from marketing efforts
While all web operators need to know their sites are working properly, media site operators care about specific aspects of availability and performance.
Your site will often be a reference that’s cited by others. If your site’s content is updated often, you need to be sure caching is properly configured and data isn’t stale, so that news gets out to returning visitors. You also need to keep archives available if you continue to be an authoritative source for other sites that link to your content.
Your site needs to load quickly, particularly for new visitors who aren’t sure you have what they want. Returning users might tolerate occasional latency, particularly if they know they’re going to get what they’re looking for, but a first-time visitor won’t. This is where internal service level targets and comparative synthetic test results are useful.
Performance and availability aren’t just about delivering your pages to users. They’re also about making sure ads and rich media reach visitors. Many ad networks do this for you by embedding one-pixel images before and after ads to confirm that they were properly displayed. For rich media such as video or interactive advertising, you may need to track other metrics, such as rollover and playback progress.
Primary metrics: site popularity and ranking; relative site performance
Secondary metrics: how people are finding competitors; visitor motivations; brand recognition in surveys
Web users can get their news from many places. Knowing how you’re doing against other sites that cover your news or offer similar media is an essential business metric, but one that only shows you how you’re doing—not the cause of differences in popularity between your site and your competitors’.
This difference might be due to site performance—faster sites can lead to more active visitors. It may be because of your relative ranking in search engines. Or it may be that your competitors’ brand awareness and engagement are leading potential visitors to them instead of you (or vice versa).
You also need to look at how people are finding your competitors. Certain keywords may be useful for you to start bidding on as well, in order to take a share of their market. You can also gauge the effectiveness of your brand.
Secondary metric: trolling and spamming
Media sites publish content they create. When reusing content, however, they need to be sure copyrights and terms of use are respected. Since most of the content is their own, copyright is less of an issue than it is for collaborative websites.
But the modern media site is a dialogue between visitors and content creators. These sites give visitors places to comment and respond. As a result, many popular media sites are plagued by comment spammers and trolls looking for a fight. If you’re running such a website, you need to track problem users and quickly remove offensive content (or let the community do it for you) even as you strive to make it easy for your visitors to join the conversation.
Primary metrics: site reputation; trends
Media sites get visitors based on their reputations, which includes how well search engines trust their content and how well-known their brands are. If your media site is particularly topical, knowing which trends and topics are on the rise is also important if you want to stay relevant to your audience and adjust your coverage accordingly.
Primary metrics: API access and usage; mashups, stolen content, and illegal syndication; traffic volume in bytes sent; top URLs in logfiles
If you’re seeing huge amounts of outbound traffic but relatively few site visits, it’s a clear sign that someone is embedding your media into a web page without your approval. This is a common form of illegal content syndication; it’s bad for your media site because you don’t get to show (and get paid for) the accompanying advertising.
If you’re running a media site, you need to watch traffic levels to see who’s putting your content elsewhere on the Net. When content becomes popular on a social network site, it’s common for spammers to submit a second copy of the story, which links through to their sites first so that they can benefit from some of the traffic—a practice known as linkjacking (see Figure A-1).
Sometimes this second submission can even outstrip the original one. If you watch social news aggregators when your content first becomes popular, you can often detect this and report it to the site’s operators—though the best defense is to make it easy for people to upvote your authentic copy of the content through better site design so your original story rises to the top.
You should also search the Web for strings of text within your popular articles to see if others are reprinting them as their own.