Measuring non-transactional websites - Part 3

During this series I have been taking a look at approaches to measuring the effectiveness on non-transactional websites or websites where the primary purpose is to provide information. When the site doesn’t have a defined conversion point such as a sale, a subscription or a registration, it can be often difficult to determine how well the site is doing without that lack of focus. Quite often site centric measures such as visits, average visit duration and so on are a blunt instrument in the measurement of the success of these types of site as these measures lack context and so you are left not knowing whether the value of these metrics is good or bad.

When it comes to measuring the success on non-transactional websites more emphasis needs to be placed on listening to the voice of the customer and last time I talked about the importance of putting a visitor satisfaction programme in place as part of the framework to measure the overall performance of the website. This doesn’t mean that web analytics data doesn’t have a role to play in this framework; it is just that these types of metrics need some context for them to become meaningful. If you look at a report that says “people who come to my website spend an average of 6 minutes there”, you’re left wondering “so what?”. Is that good or is it bad? Should I be trying to decrease this number, or increase it? It is difficult to answer these questions without any context.

Many transactional websites such as corporate portals are designed to serve a number of different audiences such as consumers, customers, job seekers, media and investors. Each of these different audiences are going to have a different way of interacting with the site, they are going to have different motivations and different journeys. So an average time on site of 6 minutes for one group may be good as it suggests that they consuming and engaging with the con tent. Other the other hand, 6 minutes for another group may suggest that they are struggling with a particular process or aren’t able to find the content they are looking for. So, it’s key to provide the context for the metrics by segmenting the visitors into different groups. Your ability to do this will of course depend on the web analytics tool that you are using.

Context can also be provided by looking at the content or pages in the site in more detail. There can be a tendency by property owner to great all the content on the site in the same way. However, different pages have different jobs to do and at the simplest level you can categorise content into three different types:

  • Inspirational
  • Navigational
  • Informational

Inspirational pages

Inspirational pages are mainly landing pages where the visitor starts their visit. The role of these pages is to inspire the visitor enough to make the next click. So one of the key metrics when looking at these pages is the “bounce rate”. The bounce rate is the proportion of all visitors who land on that page who then exit the site without looking at any other pages on the site. The lower the bounce rate the more effective the page is in getting visitors to take the next step in the journey. The bounce rate is not always provided as a metric in web analytic tools so you may have to calculate it yourself by looking at the number of times that page was a “single access page” and dividing that by the number of times that page was an entry page on the site.

Navigational pages
Navigational pages are pages that direct the visitor to the relevant content in the site. They may be category heading pages such as “news” or “sport” for example. On these types of pages you are looking to direct people to the content they are looking for. Useful metrics here include the click through rate, ie the proportion of visitors who click through onto another page. Data visualisation such as click overlays, offered by many of the leading web analytics tools, is also useful here to see which links are being clicked on.

Informational pages
Informational pages are there to provide the information or content that the visited is looking for. Here you are probably looking for evidence that the content is being consumed for example by looking at the amount of time those visitors spend on this page or whether they download a document.

So the measurement of non-transactional websites using web analytics tools is about context. The context will either come from an understanding of what the different types of visitors are doing on the site or from the role of the page itself. Broad brush measures such as “average visit duration” do not give you the insight necessary to truly understand the effectiveness of non-transactional websites.

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