Measuring online behaviour – statistics to indicators
July 17, 2007 at 7:48 pm 2 comments
I’ve written previously about measuring online behaviour and how it can be linked to overall PR evaluation. I found of interest the recent news from Nielsen that they will now rank websites by time spent on sites rather than number of pages viewed. Interesting, as this is a recognition that an indirect indication of “interest” or “engagement” is the amount of time spent on a website, e.g. watching a video, clicking through a slide presentation, reading a text, etc.
When looking at measuring online behaviour, I’ve seen quite some organisations simply drowning in data from web metric software packages and are unable to pull out a real analysis of what they have achieved – or not through the web.
Ultimately indicators should be set to measure success by. These could be:
- “engagement” (average time spent on website),
- “interest” (number of podcast downloaded),
- “conversion” (number of sign-ups for a sales offer),
- “preferences” (growth in visits to a new language version) ,
- etc., etc .
On a related note, when thinking about how to measure online social networking, the Measurement Standard blog provides an interesting list of suggested indicators to measure.
Glenn
Entry filed under: Communication evaluation, PR evaluation, Social media monitoring, Web metrics.
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intelligent measurement 
1.
Akash | July 18, 2007 at 8:33 am
I have been using GoStats.com , they have the right reporting system to extract intelligence.
My team just doesnt agree to work with any other web stat tool.
2.
Glenn | July 18, 2007 at 8:42 pm
Thanks Akash, I’m not familiar with Gostats – most of the web metric systems can provide good “intelligence” – it’s just deciding what is important is key and sometimes difficult for organisations.
Glenn