A Metric is the Measure of all Visits

For me, one of the most exciting aspects of marketing is that building successful campaigns involves investigation and research. It’s really amazing how much you can learn examining data, numbers, and trends. The fact that marketers are always learning and always asking questions is what I love most about marketing.

To make researching and investigating more fun, there are really cool tools available to work with! One of the tools I’ve started to use is Google Analytics. Google Analytics (http://www.google.com/analytics/) is a web analytics program that allows site owners to view how people found and used their site. This information becomes extremely valuable when the site owner looks into the metrics and dimensions of the data collected.

A metric is a measurement of activity on a website. A metric can be a measurement of how many visits there are to your website, a measurement of number of pages viewed while visiting, average time spent viewing a page on your website, and a measure of many other useful things.

Dimensions describe attributes of visitors to a site. These dimensions can tell us what city the website’s visitors are from, what browser they are using while visiting the page, and what language they speak. If I was concerned about how engaging my website’s content is, I could track the metrics and dimensions of my visitors to see what my visitors like, what they don’t like, and where they are viewing from. Based on this information, I could alter my content to fit the needs and preferences of my visitors.  

With all the things that can be measured on a webpage, for a beginner it can be a little overwhelming. It’s also easy to get lost in perusing information that is interesting rather than focusing on the useful information. Rob Petersen’s recently complied list of 9 Google Analytics Metrics Every Marketer Should Know (http://www.biznology.com/2012/09/9-google-analytics-metrics-every-marketer-should-know/) is great for initially determining which metrics will provide marketers with important (and useful) information.

Google Analytics is not the only tool that will measure activity on your website. Good marketers should always be aware of the advantages and disadvantages of many web analytics programs and other research tools available. In his blog, Jonathon Balogh compared Google Analytics to Mixpanel (http://jonathonbalogh.com/2012/07/07/how-does-mixpanel-compare-to-google-analytics/) and had a good argument for using Mixpanel. However, he writes to start with Google Analytics, and then bring in more web analytics tools if you need it.

From Clenton Farquharson's website.