Welcome to Inside Metrics!  In these Metric Guides I’ll show you the key performance indicators you need to track, but more importantly, I’ll show you how to use them to improve your business and make better decisions.

In this Inside Metrics Guide, Site Overview Reports, we will talk about two high-level reports which are the radar scope which enable you to benchmark high-level business performance across revenue sources and identify areas where you need to do closer research.

There are two basic reports you need to consider.  They’re both designed to tell you the “what” (your performance); and on a macro level, the “why” (what’s driving that performance). But they’re only designed to do this on a macro level, as you’ll see in a minute.  They’ll tell you where you need to look next in greater detail to understand and adjust your marketing practices.

Let’s drill down into two key site-wide reports:

1. Site Behavior – Visitors and Content Use
2. Site Performance – “The Compass Report”

1) Site Behavior – Visitors and Content Use

This report is pretty simple so I won’t dive deeply into it here. Basically you want to track:

1. Total Visitors
2. Unique Visitors (UV)
3. Visitors by Channel (SEM, Direct, etc.)
4. Return Visits Per UV
5. Page Views Per UV
6. Minutes Per UV

 The first two tell you your traffic volume, the third (Channel) tells you why that number is changing. The remaining metrics all indicate the quality of your content, the quality of your visitors and whether they found what they were expecting when they got there.  Compare these over time and the changes will tell you where you may need to changes to improve user engagement.

2) Site Performance – “The Compass Report”.

This is designed to be the first report you go to in order to assess what’s happening with your business and where you need to look more closely to explain it. 

It’s designed to attribute results to one of only three high-level answers: volume, rate and mix.  For example, if your renewals volume is up, it might be due to volume (more names available to be renewed this month vs. last month).  Or it could be due to rate (your retention rate increased vs. last month).  Or it could be due to mix (you have more multiple-year customers to be renewed this month vs. new customers, and the former group has a higher renewal rate, so it pulls the average rate upward.)

Let’s take a look at an example which shows revenue only.  Your report should also have a similar section for Unit volume. If you have ad sales, you can add it in as a row.  Here’s the table we’ll discuss:

This report shows us a simple picture of total revenue so that we can see macro-level results and decide where to look next.  If everything’s flat, then there’s no urgent need to look anywhere and if you’re busy with other things you need go no further than this report, right?

Not the case this month.  The key place to look first is the blue section at the bottom and then work your way up.  On the one hand, revenue is slightly up from Q1 to Q2 (row 5). But we see that there’s actually an alarming drop in volume of Unique Visitors (row 6) which is offset by a huge jump of over 50% in revenue per visitor (row 11).

So the report is telling us that, while on the surface it appears your business performance is up slightly, you actually have some significant opportunities to optimize performance.   You now need to look at visitor volume by channel to track down the traffic problem and fix it, and look at your conversion marketing to figure out what you’re doing right so that you can do more of it, especially in Subscription Sales where you’re seeing the most growth.

In the next Guide we will talk about a hybrid summary report which tells you the big picture and the smaller picture, all in one place.  That way you can skip the process of jumping around from report to report.

Bill Baird, our INSIDER Guide to Inside Metrics, is a leading Internet subscription marketing advisor, specializing in insightful metrics and marketing practices to help subscription-driven online properties convert and retain more visitors and customers. His clients have included AmericanGreetings.com, Consumer Reports Online, Socrates.com, Edweek.org, Merriam-Webster.com, The Motley Fool and numerous others.  He is a contributor to numerous industry trade magazines and websites, as well as a popular speaker for a variety of web marketing trade organizations. (Read Bill’s full Bio)

.