3Cs of Online Measurement: Clickstream

Before charting a course to a more prosperous 2021, you may want to step back and take a look at the past. After all, you can’t know where you’re going, if you don’t know where you’ve been.

Did this year deliver the results you expected? Do you know which online channels were most/least valuable? Are you generating the type of outcomes from your website that you expected? Are visitors interacting with your key pages in a positive way?

Fortunately, in the digital, data-rich environment in which we live, performance gaps are becoming increasingly transparent.

The accessibility of data and ability to connect the dots between marketing spend and business value is one of the most important assets in today’s marketing ecosystem. However, knowing specifically where to focus in the sea of Web analytics can be daunting.

So to help demystify some of the basics of web analytics and get you started down the path of a more data-driven marketing journey, we’re engaging in a three-post series on “The Three “Cs” of Online Measurement” (Clickstream, Conversions and Customer feedback). The first “C” (Clickstream) will focus on the bedrock web metrics that measure how your website and traffic generation campaigns are performing. Keep in mind, this will not be a deep dive into the world of analytics but an overview of the key data to evaluate.

Clickstream

Clickstream data is the foundation of Web analytics. It provides a basic framework for how your site is performing by answering key questions such as how many visitors are finding your site, where are they coming from and what are they doing when they get there.

The focus of clickstream is the quantitative, “what” data. It’s somewhat limited on “why” visitors act as they do. While inferences can often be drawn from click data, making too many assumptions on visitor intent based solely on quantitative data can be dangerous. Fortunately, there are fairly easy ways to capture qualitative insight (covered in Part III – Consumer feedback) to overlay on quantitative-based hypotheses.

Clickstream data can be tracked and viewed through a multitude of tools, both paid and free. Google Analytics (GA) is free and robust enough for most small to mid-sized business websites.

You’ll find there are seemingly infinite ways to slice and dice clickstream data, and dozens of macro and micro-level reports available. I would suggest focusing on the building block metrics first, before diving into more complex segmentation and dimensions.

1. How many visitors is your site generating?

Generating enough qualified traffic to your website to meet your business objectives is core to your online success. It’s highly unlikely you will convert 30, or even 10, percent of your traffic to leads/customers. So if you want to acquire 50 new leads/customers from your site every month, you’ll likely need to generate 2,500 or more visits a month. Conversion rates will vary based on many factors, traffic quality chiefly among them, but two percent to five percent is a realistic range for most businesses.

Visits and Absolute Unique Visitors are two of the most basic web analytics metrics. Both are generally good proxies for quantifying total traffic (Visits) to your site and the number of unique individuals (Absolute Unique Visitors) that visit your site within a given time period. But be aware that AUV can be influenced slightly by the small percent of browsers that don’t accept tracking cookies (cookies are small text files with an anonymous unique identifier that connect visits to a website by the same person or browser). Fortunately, almost all analytics providers now use first-party cookies and the number of browsers that don’t accept first-party cookies is negligible.

Visit and unique visitor data should be reviewed on a year-over-year and month-to-month basis to determine seasonal patterns as well as longer-term trends. Also keep an eye on the mix of New vs. Returning Visitors to gauge how many new prospects (the lifeblood of most businesses) your site and acquisition activities are generating each month and how compelled those visitors are to return to your site.

2. Where are visitors coming from?

After looking at traffic data from a 10,000-foot-view, it’s time to drill down into specific channels, or sources, that are driving traffic to your site. Channel data is far more actionable and vital to gauging the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.

To view user interactions by the different sources or channels that are referring traffic to your site, go to All Traffic/Channels under the Acquisition tab. The Channels report will provide a snapshot of the quantity and quality of the traffic from various channels through the lens of the acquisition, behavior and conversion (ABC) cycle.

Channel Groupings

Here is some insight into each of the channel grouping.

Direct – traffic entering the site by typing a URL directly into a browser or by bookmarking a page on your site. While traffic mix will vary by business type, generally 20 percent is considered a strong number for direct traffic. A low number of direct visitors could signify an issue with retention (repeat visits) or overall awareness of the site or brand.

Referral – traffic entering the site from other sites that link to yours. Referral site traffic is one of the more commonly missed opportunities. If visits from other referring websites comprise less than 10 percent of your overall mix, you probably need to spend more time developing and sharing content and evaluating link share opportunities with other Web properties that align with your audience.

Organic Search – traffic entering from a search engine such as Google, Yahoo or Bing (non-paid listing). Given the predominance of search engines among users, Organic Search can be the source of half or more of your traffic. So it’s an area to which you should dedicate some time. With many businesses, anything less than 30 percent is a cause for concern and may signal that it’s time to ramp up your SEO activities.

Keywords used to be the key dimension and first place you’d go for actionable organic search insight. But since Google recently decided to encrypt the majority of keywords used to find your site (why they did this is a whole other post), the SEO analysis game has changed. Now, 80 percent or more of your keyword data is “not provided.” While secure search has caused angst in the SEO and Web Analytics communities, some workarounds to the lost keyword data do exist (one possible clue as to why: keywords from paid search are exempt from encryption).

Paid Search – traffic generated via Google AdWords and other paid search campaigns.
While clicks generated via paid ads is generally lower quality than clicks generated organically, paid search campaigns can be highly effective at providing an immediate presence for the more competitive keywords for which it will be difficult to achieve visibility organically. However, you also want to mindful of overreliance on paid search. After all, you are paying directly for these visits, instead of leveraging free traffic sources like direct, referral and organic.

Other – traffic entering from sources not automatically tagged by Google, such as Email and Display advertising campaigns.

The “other” channel in Google Analytics captures traffic from custom campaigns that you set up. For example, you might want to know how many users click a “download this app” link from your website, or how many visitors came to your site from a link within a monthly email newsletter, or which specific URLs from social media platforms are referring the most traffic to your site.

Custom campaigns provide detail about your traffic that would not be automatically captured otherwise. Fortunately, manually tagging links embedded in an email or social media post and setting up custom campaign tracking is relatively easy with Google’s URL Builder.

Keep in mind, custom tagging isn’t necessary, or even possible, with most channel types (direct, referral and organic search for example). But if you want to know at a glance which email links are generating the most engaged traffic, or which banner ad types are most effective, creating custom campaigns is the way to go.

3. How are visitors interacting with the site?

While website behavior data is valuable and actionable, in some cases it can be misleading.

Some of the key metrics within the site behavior set include: Bounce Rate, Average Visit Duration (both site and page), and Average Page Depth. These so-called engagement metrics measure how captivated a visitor is with your site. But since clickstream data measures “the what” more than “the why,” they are not always the best proxy for visitor experience.

For example, visitors who navigate deep into your site and view a high number of pages could either be frustrated because they can’t find the information they are looking for, or they are highly engaged with a desire to learn more. The degree of engagement is high under both scenarios, but the experience (positive or negative) would be opinion-based, which is less than optimal in the data analysis world. But before you give up on generating an accurate picture of user experience, there are some fairly simple ways to add qualitative insight to the quantitative data (which will be covered in Part III – Consumer feedback).

One of the least ambiguous and directly actionable engagement metrics is bounce rate. The bounce rate tells you the number of visitors who landed on a page and left immediately, or those visitors who took zero action – not a good thing! A high bounce rate is usually indicative of generating the wrong traffic, a poor page experience, or a combination of the two. Rarely is there room for misinterpretation (an exception might be a blog). You should measure the bounce rate on at least two levels: the aggregate, or site level and the page level. For good intel on which pages require the most immediate action, look at the bounce rate data in the Landing Pages report. The last thing you want to deliver is a poor experience on the pages that are the most frequently used doors to your site.

Conclusion

Given the abundance of click data, you’re probably better off focus on the critical few metrics that are most important to your business and ignoring the insignificant many.

Which acquisition strategies are paying the biggest dividends? Which channels are lacking? Which pages are visitors telling you aren’t working?

Answering those key questions will shed enormous light on your past performance and should set some new strategies in motion. Remember, while clickstream provides the foundational data, the key to success usually lies in conversions, or outcomes, which will be the focus of Part II. So stay tuned.