Inside the Metrics – Site Visits

The metricFor July, we’re looking at site visits. Site visits, in its most basic form tells you how many visitors came to the site over the course of any given period. This type of metric shows you what your community traffic looks like and can help you identify what might cause a swing or dip in that traffic.What We ReportOn community dashboards, this metric shows up as the number of times people visit your community site. This number will also include staff visits or repeat visitors unless you are able to tell your analytics tool not to include that population or account for unique visitors, as well.The OpportunityThe raw number of site visits can be a little tricky. It doesn’t consider the number of times you are entering the community for moderation throughout the day. It doesn’t account for staff visiting the site looking for something. It doesn’t account for someone who was looking for Eggsforall.com and accidentally clicked your community site, Eggsforyall.com.This metric is a baseline indicator of overall site traffic, but only to an extent. Site visits only tells you how many people came to your page, but it doesn’t tell you much else about their behaviors, needs, or whether what they found was useful. For that, you’ll have to dig a little deeper.Instead of just looking at site visits, compare that number unique site visits. What does that show, you ask? For starters, it helps to show how many people visited your site overall in comparison to those that were unique to one visitor. Now, unless you have super progressive analytics that can drill down and give you additional information about those users, that’s about all you’re going to get out of that. However, it’s important to know, also, what your repeat visitor numbers look like. If, over a 30-day period, you’re seeing that 10,000 people visited the site but 9,500 were unique, you can see that at least 500 of those users came back for something. Whether to re-read an article or respond to someone who commented on their discussion thread, it can be an indicator of engagement that will lead you to then identify additional behaviors of your repeat visitors. This will help you improve your user experience and start to look at why the others may not have returned during that time. It could simply be that they found what they were looking for and that was it. But there’s an opportunity for you to find out.Armed with that information, it might not be a bad idea to start to map out a customer journey if you’re not already doing so. Follow the breadcrumbs when someone visits your site. Do they come and stay on the homepage and then leave? Do they stick around to read an article or register for an upcoming event and then logoff? Look at your bounce rates and see if that shows you anything. Look at your average time spent on site and see if you can find a correlation between the number of unique visitors to your site and what they seem to be spending their time on. You may uncover a flaw in your community design if people keep coming back to the same page and bouncing out after spending 3 minutes there. You may find that your users are really enjoying the member spotlights that you’ve started within the community. It’s worth a look, if you have the capability to do so.Is there an easy way to do this? In my experience, not really. However, if the analytics that you use to pull your community site metrics can be customized or queried, it might be a good idea to dig a little deeper into what a visit to your community site entails and what prompts someone to come back versus visiting only once. This can help you identify ways to, not only provide programming that your regular visitors are looking for but create opportunities for others to engage more when it makes sense.Inside the Metrics is a monthly post that focuses on common metrics that online community managers report against and takes a closer look at how more meaningful data can be pulled from them.