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Chapter 4. Measuring Visit Quality

In This Chapter

• What makes a good visit

• Tracking repeat visitors

• Using pageviews and time on site

Measuring visit quality involves tracking what's typical for your site and using what you know to set benchmarks. You might notice that I mention nothing about absolute measures of quality visits.

Measuring visit quality is not a science. What you find in this chapter is simply a process for setting some benchmarks that you can try to improve upon. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to

• Build traffic, but not at the expense of these benchmarks.

• Increase time on site and pageviews per visit.

• Keep these benchmarks in mind as you look at other statistics.

Note that this chapter assumes you're familiar with the basic measures discussed in Chapters 2 and 3 of this minibook. If you're looking for information on tracking some form of conversion like a sale or a lead, you won't find that here; flip to Chapter 5 in this minibook, instead.

Setting Quality Targets

Take a look at Figure 4-1. How can you tell which referrers are generating good or bad visits? Argh: It's nothing a bunch of numbers — but, it's not as hard to decipher as it might look.

Note

To make these numbers mean something, you have to set parameters for good and bad. If you're looking for hard-and-fast ways to do this, I'll warn you now that you're in the wrong place. Because every Web site is different, every business has a different profile of a "quality" visit.

You need to set target numbers ...