Measuring non-transactional websites - Part 2

Last time I took an initial look at the differing needs of transactional sites and non-transactional sites when it comes to tracking and measuring success. The absence of strongly defined conversion points makes it harder for owners of predominantly informational sites (like a lot of company portals) to understand the effectiveness of their activities and whether they are getting a return on their investment. This time round I’ll share some thoughts about ways to measure non-transactional sites.

I think that when it comes to measuring non-transactional sites, context is really important. What I mean by that is that it’s difficult to measure things in a vacuum, you need to have something on which to hang the metrics or the analysis. In a transactional site the context is provided by the transaction. All the focus is around the path to purchase.

In non-transactional sites that key end point may not be there but there still needs to be some context. At a macro level the context will come from the roles and objectives of the site. At a micro level the context may come from the specific page on the site and what it is there to do. So in my view there are two level of measurement needed:

  • The macro level – understanding the effectiveness of the site overall
  • The micro level – understanding the effectiveness of individual elements of the site

In many conversations I have with organisations with non-transactional websites they have a one size fits all approach to measuring their sites and it’s usually with a web analytics tool. However, they are frustrated because they feel unable to get any insight into what’s working or not working on their site. Often they are using bland metrics such as “Average visit duration” to measure “visitor engagement” but the only context they have for this metric is how it changes over time and quite often it doesn’t. The problem with metrics such as Average Visit Duration and Average Pages per Visit is that they are measuring across different groups of people trying to different things on the site. As a result they are often meaningless and dangerous.

At the macro level what we are concerned about it whether the visitor interaction was of value to the visitor and whether it delivered in a way that was of value to the organisation. There is a key role for surveying your visitors or customers on a regular if not frequent basis. Visitor satisfaction is a key metric for non-transactional sites. Other key metrics will include their “Likelihood to Return” and their “Propensity to Recommend” the site to others. If the visitor is satisfied with their visit, they are likely to return and would be happy to recommend it to others, then the site must be doing a good job for them. You can support these metrics by understanding their satisfaction with different aspects of their experience or the site such as:

  • The breadth of the content
  • The quality and usefulness of the content
  • The ease of use of the site (navigation, search etc)

So on the one hand, the visitor may be happy but what about the organisation? Is it serving up this value efficiently and effectively? At the macro level, transactional sites would look at metrics like revenue or profit. On non-transactional sites there isn’t any revenue, only costs. So understanding the cost to the organisation relative to the value served is going to be important. Revenue tends to be relative simple to measure, whereas costs can be quite tricky. There might be direct costs and indirect costs, fixed costs and variable costs, all sorts of costs. Quite often the challenge can be determining what the true and appropriate costs of running the website are. They may include:

  • Marketing costs
  • Content costs (the costs of the people generating the content)
  • Overhead costs (the cost of the rest of the team)
  • Technology costs (hardware, software etc)

The ability to collect and track these costs will vary from organisation to organisation but even if the full costs can’t be easily be allocated and pulled together, then a consistent approach over time is needed. Cost data can then be combined with other data to understand the value relative to the costs. For example you may track Cost per Visit or Cost per Page Served to see if the site can scale in an affordable way. You could even combine your cost data with your satisfaction data to understand the Cost per Satisfied Visitor over time.

You may have noticed that there hasn’t been much mention of metrics such as visits and page views when I’ve been discussing these macro-level measures of success. That’s because I think that web analytics metrics tend to work best at the micro-level for non-transactional sites. These metrics need context and that context may from comparing different parts of the site or comparing different visitor segments and how they behave. This is something that I will look at in more detail next time. Till then…

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