55 Things to Track on Your Website

[Digg This]Noah wrote about measuring and testing, and I’ve been running a list of things that should be measured on a website and wanted to share it. Some of things might not be relevant to all websites. Some numbers/stats take a little bit more to explain. Many of these numbers can be tracked by stats programs or site (such as Google Analytics), but many will require custom reporting, which usually can be quickly scripted.  Please comment and leave feedback or add if I missed something obvious.

X = hour/day/week/month/quarter/year

Basics

  1. Unique visitors per X
  2. # of visits per X
  3. Visits per visitor 1 is not good, 5 is better, 100 is crack
  4. Pageviews per X
  5. Pageviews per visit
  6. % increase from month to month
  7. #s increase from month to month
  8. Year running: uniques, pageviews, increases
  9. Visitor time duration
  10. Visitor lifetime


Geographics

  1. Visitors from Top 10 countries
  2. % of visitors from each top 10 countries
  3. Revenue per country
  4. Profit per country
  5. Cost per country

Media Specific

  1. Bandwidth usage per X
  2. Bandwidth per unique visitor
  3. Images per visitor
  4. images per visit
  5. Videos per per unique
  6. Videos per per visit

Business

  1. Total revenue
  2. Revenue per unique visitor
  3. Revenue per member
  4. Revenue per country
  5. Lifetime value of customer
  6. Revenue per customer
  7. Profit per customer
  8. Profit per unique visitor
  9. Cost per user
  10. Cost per visit
  11. Cost per marketing/advertising campaign
  12. Revenue per marketing/ad campaign
  13. Profit per marketing/ad campaign
  14. Conversion rates for all marketing/ad campaigns

Blog Related

  1. Visitors per post
  2. Revenue per post
  3. Comments per post
  4. Revenue per post per month
  5. Posts per day/week/month/year

Search Engines & Referers

  1. Revenue per search engine
  2. # of visitors per search engine per X
  3. Top keywords from searches
  4. Revenue/profit per keyword search
  5. Revenue/profit per referring site

Ads

  1. Ad impressions per unique/visit/member
  2. Ad clickthru rate per unique/visit/member
  3. Ad impressions per X
  4. Ad clickthru per X

Specific site: Facebook

  1. Users per school/city/state/country
  2. Revenue/cost/profit per school
  3. Friends per member
  4. Invites per member
  5. Revenue/Cost/Profit per M/F
  6. Revenue/cost/profit per

Other specialized areas with specific stats:

  1. Affiliate programs
  2. Paid membership sites
  3. Social sites
  4. Directories
  5. Forums

I learned a lot about numbers, statistics and utilizing them in every minute decisions when I worked at Wells Fargo. Usually after watching a lot of the numbers from your website/business, you’ll find that there’s two or three numbers that will give you the best representation of how you are doing at any given time. But that’s another post.

This post written by Andre Nosalsky.

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19 Responses to “55 Things to Track on Your Website”

  • Dreyer Media
    March 17th, 2007
    6:04 am

    Actually a pretty funny list! I learned some new things i gotta start tracking :b

  • Jackson Dermitt
    March 18th, 2007
    1:11 pm

    Here I was thinking I was special by tracking 23. There are several in here that will help me out.

  • Jason H.
    March 18th, 2007
    3:06 pm

    Wow, Andre, excellent, excellent post! Thank you so much for sharing :)

  • Andre
    March 18th, 2007
    3:31 pm

    Jason, thanks for the feedback! Keep it here for more to come.

  • Andre
    March 19th, 2007
    12:13 pm

    @Jackson - There are more numbers to track or figure out depending on the specific business that you’re in. Good luck! :)

  • Brian Breslin
    March 20th, 2007
    10:17 am

    would work well as a PDF i could print and keep in my project folders

  • Dave McClure
    March 20th, 2007
    10:36 am

    great list.

    one other important area to track is clicks coming from internally-generated emails.

    altho not all blogs/websites do a lot of email, for those that do a significant # of web visits can be driven by regular weekly/monthly emails that provide a summary of recent activity or news roundups or other notable info.

    however, it’s a common oversight to not embed tracking information in your email clickthrus that enable you to determine that those visits came from email traffic (so remember to do that).

    if you use it properly (and don’t spam the hell out of your users), email can be a very simple & effective way to drive repeat visit behavior to your website. trick is to make it:
    1) useful & interesting to open, read, & click
    2) measurable so that you know how it impacts your site
    3) not spam, so that sending too much lowers your deliverability

    i think way too many people these days forget about email as a basic useful device to communicate & engage users in a (regular) conversation…

    - dmc
    properly-used

  • 55 Things to Track on Your Website/Blog at Tycoons Row
    March 20th, 2007
    11:25 am

    [...] Here is a list of 55 things that should be measured on a website or blog. Some of things might not be relevant to all websites. Some numbers/stats take a little bit more to explain. How many of these are you currently tracking on your website or blog?read more | digg story Share This Tags: No Tags. Category: General. | Who’s Tracking Us? >> [...]

  • Marshall Middle
    March 20th, 2007
    1:26 pm

    what tracking tool would you recommend?

  • Andre
    March 20th, 2007
    1:47 pm

    @Dave, you make good points. I think anything that can have an impact on the bottom line, public opinion or customer sentiment should be tracked and studied.

    @Brian, I think you can to a Print-to-PDF and go that way.

    @Marshall, Google Analytics is pretty good at tracking the general webstats, but to get good numbers, you’ll need custom type of solution that is focused on a specific business. BTW, I think I should be reading your site more for advice :)

  • Brian Breslin
    March 20th, 2007
    1:56 pm

    Andre,
    I meant something pretty like http://daveseah.com ’s printable CEO.

  • Brian Breslin
    March 20th, 2007
    1:57 pm

    next thought, lets make an excel spreadsheet for this!

  • Jason
    March 20th, 2007
    4:29 pm

    Great article. The follow up should include what tools you can use to track these numbers. E.G. CrazyEgg.com, Adwatcher.com, w3counter.com, statcounter.com, ect ect.

  • Andre
    March 20th, 2007
    5:19 pm

    Jason, thanks, I’ll add that to the list. :)

  • Chris M.
    March 21st, 2007
    11:34 am

    http://www.google.com/analytics covers the bulk of the list…

  • Damon Billian
    March 21st, 2007
    12:31 pm

    # of accounts opened daily, weekly & monthly
    # of times accounts login
    # of unconfirmed accounts (if you have email confirmation)
    # of accounts that confirm
    # of times a specific product/product tab is utilized
    # of times the faqs are accessed
    # top 5-10 of which faqs are accessed

  • Andre Nosalsky
    March 21st, 2007
    1:05 pm

    Damon, good additions!! In the expanded version, we’ll need to include an entire SALES section.

  • links for 2007-03-22 « Uno se Blog
    March 22nd, 2007
    5:22 am

    [...] 55 Things to Track on Your Website » (tags: marketing analytics website webtool stats siteanalytics) [...]

  • What I bookmarked today « Joi Podgorny
    July 16th, 2008
    12:02 am

    [...] 55 Things to Track on Your Website - Noah Kagan’s Okdork.com [...]

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