The Chatterbox

Most Important / Least Important Stats

Another question I am often asked is which stats are the most important to pay attention to. Implied in this question is which stats are the least important.

First, let me make it clear that with one exception I do not consider any particular stat to be The Most Important. The reason being that these most important statistics are going to be different for each site.

As a for instance, let's compare some of the more important stats for an e-commerce site versus a non-commerce information-only site. So say something like Walmart.com vs. CNN.com.

For Walmart.com, where the main goal is to urge someone to purchase products, the more important statistics are going to be the Entry Page, Path Taken and Conversion To Sale.

For CNN.com it is probably going to be more important to pay particular attention to the Length of Visit and Customer Loyalty, or return visits by the same person.

The difference being Walmart.com wants people to buy things. While it may be of some use to track Customer Loyalty, the main goal is to help customer get from the entry page to the checkout as quickly and easily as possible. Whereas for CNN.com, they'd be better served by encouraging users to stay longer and come back more often.

Make sense?

Now, let's move back to the real question and take the second part first. What is the least important or useful statistic.

In this case it's not so much that the stat isn't important, but that the type of stat can introduce some major confusion into the data analysis process. And thus can lead you to making some wrong decisions.

My personal vote for the least important/most useless stat is anything that is shown in Percentages. The reason being that if you stop at the Percentage (as too many do) without drilling down any further, you stand a high likelihood of making some really bad decision that are being based upon dubious data.

Let's take an example from my previous post about how you You Have No Home Page. If you viewed your general Entry Page stats you might see that 40-50% of your traffic first lands on your home page. So you think this has to be the most important page on your site, hands down.

However if you bothered to dig more deeply in your stats you might also find that 80% of your sales came from people who were first landing on a page that was not your home page. Either because those users were conducting a search with a better focus that matched up well with what you offer, or because your home page simply wasn't constructed well to convert visitors, or even because your home page wasn't focused well enough so was pulling a lot of unqualified traffic that stood no chance of converting and quickly bounced.

Hopefully the above quick example illustrates why it is incredibly dangerous to use percentages and only percentages when making decisions about your web site. You simply cannot do it and still make the most of your traffic. It's business suicide to do so.

Don't rely on percentages. Glance at them, make note of them, but make sure you drill down to the real data.

The Most Important Stat is an easy one actually. It's the Bounce Rate for your site overall, and especially the Bounce Rate for individual pages.

For the uninitiated I'll give you a quick definition of what Bounce Rate means. It's simply a measurement of how many people come to a page of your site via one means or another, then immediately leave. As some aptly describe it, "I came. I puked. I left."

The reason this is the most important stat is very simple.

If visitors come and then immediately leave they never have a chance of converting. Period, end of story.

Now the reasons for high bounce rates can by myriad. It could be the layout of your site. It could be that you're popping up boxes at them, or showing them ads instead of real content. It could be that your copy simply doesn't hook readers right off the bat. It could be that the visual layout of the page doesn't match the personality type of the audience arriving at the page. It could be that you're simply getting statistically large amounts UNtargeted, UNqualified traffic because your site is ranking in the search engines for some phrase(s) that don't really relate to what you do.

The whole trick is to limit your bounce rate. So you need to drill down past the percentages, look at all of the possible factors, make appropriate changes and give those bouncers a chance to convert. In the real world the more you can decrease your bounce rate, the greater the chance that more people will convert into customers.

Which brings up another question or two. What is the average bounce rate, or what is an acceptable bounce rate.

It's tough to give a general answer because again each site and each market is so different. However as a very general rule the overall site bounce rate for a typically web site will range somewhere between 40% and 60%. (Damn Percentages!) If your bounce rate is 60% or above you really need to make some changes. If you're below 40% you're doing a really good job.

An Aside : It always astonishes me when I talk to a webmaster who doesn't know what their bounce rate is. It's that important to know, because it's THE starting point to increasing conversion rates. But I have to admit most webmasters don't know, so don't feel bad if you don't. I'd hazard to guess 80% or more of the webmasters I talk to didn't know what their Bounce Rate was until I pointed out why it's an important metric to know.

The real trick (see my percentages rant) is to drill down below the overall percentages so that you can figure out what's going on, why and how to fix it. For instance, if you drill down and find out that a page with an 80% bounce rate is getting a lot of traffic for keyword terms that don't directly relate to what you do, you'll want to tweak your copy so that it doesn't. After all traffic that immediately bounces is useless.

The real truth is you're never going to have a 0% bounce rate, just like you're never going to have a 100% conversion rate. However these are both worthy goals, and ones you want to strive to get close to.