The 5 Metrics You Ought to be Tracking - Neil Patel at FOWA Miami

Posted on Feb 24, 2010

The third speaker at FOWA Miami was Neil Patel of KISSmetrics who discussed analytics which Ryan Carson described as a thing he views as particularly challenging. Neil's session is about the five metrics you ought to be tracking.

  1. Revenue per user - Everyone tracks conversions but its important to know how much revenue was coming from each user.  For instance, raising the price might cause a decrease in conversions but an increase in revenue. You can track this by turning ecommerce on in Google Analytics. You need to be tracking this in addition to conversion rates.
  2. Engagement - if your users are more engaged they are more likely to continue to pay and invite friends. Look at how far people are getting, how often they come back (and why) and what they are doing.
  3. Event tracking - Google Analytics (and other packages) allow you to track events on your site. This is best way to see if users care about a particular feature set on your site. You can find out if certain features are worth keeping and/or worth investing more time into. For instance, if you are a video site, you can track if someone clicked play on a video, or downloaded it or clicked pause.
  4. Real conversion rate - Free users can convert into paid users, so you need to track where users originally came from. Someone may come to the site many times before converting but you need to track where they originally came from. You generally have to build this type of analytics internally as there is no package that does this.
  5. Test, test test - Don't base your companies decisions only on what you read other places are doing. What works for other companies may not work for you. Do testing to see what works on your site. You can do A/B tests using Google optimizer to gauge how things work.

With analytics, there are so many pages and so much data, that you can get overwhelmed. Neil recommends taking "baby steps" and focusing on one thing at a time.

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About

My name is Brian Rinaldi and I am the Web Community Manager for Flash Platform at Adobe. I am a regular blogger, speaker and author. I also founded RIA Unleashed conference in Boston. The views expressed on this site are my own & not those of my employer.