Jim Does Analytics

What’s a good visit to a website?   Knowing how users spend time on your site is of the utmost importance for marketers. This is, broadly speaking, what is known as “engagement.” As Avinash Kaushik notes, “we should all try to create website experiences that draw favorable attention or interest” (Kaushik 2010). However, there is an open question how, exactly, one can or should measure such a thing. Ultimately, it becomes a question of attempting to measure how individuals interact with your site. Are they clicking links? Are they downloading materials? Are they commenting?   To put it in real terms, consider the case of Visit Alexandria, which is Alexandria, Virginia’s tourism bureau. The bureau’s website, visitalexandriava.com receives nearly 2 million visits a year which is, certainly, nothing to sneeze at. However, there’s an open question of what constitutes an “engaged” visitor. Therefore, the bureau’s marketers had to make up a definition for positive engage...

First, a story. After watching the news about the Hurricane barreling down on Houston, Texas, I became obsessed with helping out in one way or another. I regularly give blood, so that seemed like a simple way to help people in need in this time of crisis. I opened up my Red Cross app and started to schedule an appointment. As I was scheduling the appointment, however, I got a phone call. After finishing the phone call, I went back to something else, forgetting that I was in the middle of scheduling an appointment. Luckily, a few minutes later, my phone buzzed. All of a sudden, a reminder popped up, asking me if I still wanted to give blood.   What’s the point of this story? To talk about the concept of conversion rates. As the Kaushik text argues, this is perhaps the most important web metric that one can measure. After all, “We are investing in our websites, so we should measure what comes of them” (Kaushik 2010).   So this leads me back to my initial discussion o...