Volume 5 Number 5 July 2006

digital edge report

Web Site Analytics: Key Performance Indicators

digital edge report

Web Site Analytics: Key Performance Indicators

By Eric T. Peterson
Author, Web Analytics Demystified, Web Measurement Hacks and The Big Book of Key Performance Indicators
For more information about this Digital Edge Report, contact: Randy Bennett, Vice President, Audidence and New Business Development Newspaper Association of America 1921 Gallows Road, Suite 600, Vienna, VA 22182-3900 703.902.1770 fax: 703.902.1745 email: randy.bennett@naa.org www.digitaledge.org Formatted by: Sally Clarke, Project Coordinator, Audience and New Business Development

2006 the Newspaper Association of America. All rights reserved. No part of this document may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior, written permission of the Newspaper Association of America.

Web Site Analytics: Key Performance Indicators

Table of Contents
1
1 2 4 4 4

Introduction
About the Metrics About the Spreadsheet Frequency of Report Generation Data Comparisons About the Author

5
5 6 7 8 8 9 10 11 12 13

General Indicators
Page Views Unique Visitors Percent New and Returning Visitors Ratio of New to Returning Visitors Average Page Views per Visit Average Revenue per Visitor Percent High, Medium and Low Frequency Visitors Percent Visitors Using Search Average Searches per Visit Online Ad Revenue as a Percent of Print Ad Revenue

14
14 15 15 16 16 17

Audience/Market Indicators
Percent Audience in DMA Registered Users in DMA Ratio of Local Audience to National Audience Monthly Market Share Last Seven Day Reach Percentage off High, Medium and Low Click Depth Visits

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19 19 20 21 22 23 23

Loyalty/Engagement Indicators
Unique Visits Average Visits per Visitor Average Time Spent on Site Percent High, Medium and Low Time Spent Visitors Percent High, Medium and Low Recency Visitors Percent Registered Visitors Percent Active Registered Visitors

Introduction
What content on your site is driving the most loyalty? What percentage of in-market users is active on your site? How has a re-design impacted the way users navigate the site? The answers to these and other questions about site usage are critical in planning for site improvements or new content development. To help online newspaper executives better understand how to measure and analyze their online audience, the NAA New Media Federation Board Audience Development Committee has compiled a set of core indicators for tracking audience performance. The goal here is to provide a concise, yet meaningful, set of audience metrics, beyond just page views and unique visitors, which will allow newspaper Web sites of almost any size to track and gauge the viability, reach and growth of their audience. Data for indicators discussed in this report can be obtained through Web analytics software provided by companies such as WebSideStory, Omniture, WebTrends and ClickTracks. Google offers a free analytics program at Google Analytics. To present these metrics in a way that will be relevant to sites of almost any size, the report provides three categories of data: General Indicators, Audience/Market Indicators and Loyalty/Engagement Indicators. While we understand that not every newspaper Web site will be able to gain access to all three categories of data, presenting the indicators this way will allow publishers track the information they do have and also show them the kinds of data they should be striving to get in the future. There are many other metrics that a site may use in addition to the ones on this list, but this set of indicators can be considered a baseline that all sites with the ability to do so are trying to track and measure.

About The Metrics

Some of the metrics presented in this document are simple measurements calculated and reported by even the most basic traffic analysis application. Others are more complicated calculations, based on measurements or distributions. Some numbers presented in this document are only available in more complicated analytics packages. To account for this, the author indicates whether each metric is of high, medium or low complexity of calculation at the beginning of each measurements description. Visual examples for some of the metrics presented in this document have been provided from Googles Google Analytics application, a freely available Web measurement package of moderate sophistication. The use of this application for examples sake is in no way an endorsement of Google Analytics. In addition, some of the numbers presented in this document are very easy to interpret and use, others are very valuable to a newspaper site but complicated. The author has included a complexity-of-use indicator at the beginning of each measurements description. In general, any site can use the low complexity metrics, many sites should strive to use the medium complexity metrics and sites with either extremely high online readership or access to a sophisticated analytics application should strive to use the high complexity metrics. Some of the numbers used for calculations in this document are strongly dependent on browser cookies and may suffer from inaccuracies based on cookie blocking and deletion. While the discussion about risks to cookies is outside the scope of this document, a great deal of information on the subject exists on the Internet. To account for this potential inaccuracy, each measurement has a section describing risks. In order to reduce redundancy in this document, the two most likely risks are described here only and will be referenced throughout the document, but not repeated: Cookie blocking happens when visitors instruct their Web browsers or firewall applications to not allow cookies to be set. Usually only third-party cookies are blocked. Third-party cookies are those cookies being set
2006 Newspaper Association of America. All rights reserved.

by a domain other than your own. Third-party cookies are commonly used by hosted analytics vendors. Cookie blocking introduces inaccuracy in short-term metrics like visit and visitor counts because some applications simply drop visitor sessions that do not allow cookies to be set.

Cookie deletion happens when visitors instruct their anti-spyware applications to remove third-party tracking cookies or when they manually delete all cookies from their Web browser for whatever reason. While some antispyware programs do not treat third-party cookies as spyware, JupiterResearch estimates that some 48 million Internet users in the United States are using anti-spyware applications that delete at least some tracking cookies and nearly 38 million people are using aggressive anti-spyware applications likely to remove the majority of these cookies. Cookie deletion introduces inaccuracy in long-term metrics like visitor status and visitor retention simply because, once the tracking cookie is deleted, in most instances the visitor is simply forgotten.

The goal is to provide a concise yet meaningful set of metrics beyond just page views and unique visitors ... so newspaper Web sites of any size can track and gauge viability, reach and growth.

One measurement that is highly affected by cookie deletion is the definition of new and returning visitors. New visitors are usually defined as visitors who do not possess the analytics applications identifying cookie; returning visitors are usually defined as having those cookies and are often also bounded by time (e.g., monthly returning visitors.) Cookie deletion results in an artificial increase in the number of new visitors that appear to be coming to the sitethe identifying cookie has been deleted and so the application believes it to not have existed and thusly will identify the visitor as new. Regarding the metrics described in this document, if youre not sure whether your specific analytics application contains a necessary calculation, ask your analytics vendor. Most reputable vendors are well-versed in the use of key performance indicators and should be more than happy to help you find necessary measurements and make the calculations found in this document. Some are able to even automate data reporting directly into the spreadsheet that comes with this document, making your job even easier. When in doubt, consult your vendor.

About the Spreadsheet

The spreadsheet that accompanies this document contains all of the metrics described and will calculate each of these metrics for you in a format suitable for presentation. To use the spreadsheet, follow these four steps: 1. Populate the spreadsheet with data. Under the Data tab youll see three groups of data: Traffic and Visitor Metrics, Revenue Metrics and Marketing and Page Metrics. Each of the data elements (for example, Page Views) in these groups are necessary components of the indicators described in this document. Each data element has a column for This Week and Last Week (Figure 1, p. 3) that needs to be populated with data from the appropriate source (most from your Web analytics application; some from your market reach measurement service.) PLEASE NOTE: It is a good idea to contact your web analytics vendor to see if they can assist you in automating the population of data into the Data tab. Most vendors have this capability.

2006 Newspaper Association of America. All rights reserved.

Figure 1: Data elements and columns for This Week and Last Week that need to be populated for the spreadsheet to properly function.

2. Establish reasonable target values for each measurement. To keep the organization focused on using these metrics to drive action, set a target value for each indicator (Figure 2). Keep in mind that you can change these targets over time, in fact you should, but using targets will help you generate meaningful alerts.

Figure 2: Set reasonable targets for each indicator to communicate what senior management would like these values to be.

3. Set your thresholds and messages. Each of the indicators in this spreadsheet have change thresholds and target thresholds that correspond to the Change and Target columns (Figure 3). For each indicator that youre tracking youll want to decide how much percentage-wise change can occur before you show an alert message, as well as what the minimum percentage of target is acceptable before showing an alert. If you only want your page views to decline by 10% before you show a message that says Greater than 10% decline! you would set the change

Figure 3: Change thresholds and messages; Target thresholds and messages. Each can be set individually to reflect different levels of importance.

2006 Newspaper Association of America. All rights reserved.

threshold to 0.10 and the change message to Greater than 10% decline! for the page views indicator. Same holds true if you want to show a warning until an indicator is within 25% of the target set your target threshold to 0.75 (meaning if the value is less than 75% of the target, show the alert). 4. Assign an internal owner. Its a good idea to assign an owner to each of the metrics so that when change and target messages start to appear, people know who to call for more information. PLEASE NOTE: Not all web analytics vendors and applications support every metric described in this document and in the associated spreadsheets. In cases where the spreadsheet is asking for returning visitors and your application only provides returning visits you can often simply substitute. In other cases, where metrics are simply not available, you might not be able to use those metrics. Consult with your analytics vendor about the data described in this document and ask them for assistance in getting that data.

Frequency of Report Generation

Key performance indicators are designed to increase the organizations overall awareness of web traffic. One of the primary components of awareness is familiarity. The greater the frequency at which these reports are distributed, the higher the likelihood that the reader will become familiar and comfortable with the metrics. We recommend that you generate and distribute the metrics in this document on a weekly basis if possible, but no less than monthly.

Data Comparisons
For analysis, its best to compare the most recent week to the week prior. While it might be tempting to try and compare these indicators to the same week in the previous quarter, year, etc., experience has shown that Web sites are malleable enough that more often than not those comparisons yield very little useful information. By making week-over-week comparisons youll always stay attuned to how the business is performing right now and thusly be prepared to make changes and accurately measure their effect.

About the Author

Eric T. Peterson is a well-known author of books on Web analytics. His books, Web Analytics Demystified (Celilo) and Web Site Measurement Hacks (OReilly) are consistently cited as two of the most helpful works on the subject and have sold more than 10,000 copies worldwide. Mr. Peterson supports the analytics community by moderating the worlds only open analytics discussionthe Web Analytics Forumat Yahoo! Groups. Mr. Peterson holds a MSc. from Oregon State University and currently resides in Portland, Oregon.

2006 Newspaper Association of America. All rights reserved.

General Indicators
The General Indicator category is made up of the basic metrics that almost any Web site should be able to gather about its audience. Page views, unique visitors and online revenue as a percentage of total revenue are all areas that most papers are looking at already or can access relatively easily when necessary. These indicators are fairly universal across all sites and provide a basic view of how much traffic is coming to your site and how much money you are able to earn from that traffic.

Page Views
Page views are the fundamental currency of newspaper sites.

Complexity to Calculate: Low Complexity to Use: Low Definition

Page views are a very simple metric reported by all Web analytics applications. Defined by the act of a page successfully loading in a visitors Web browser, page views are the primary revenue vehicle for CPM-based Web sites.

Action
You should monitor your page view traffic looking for sudden and unexpected increases in volume, perhaps indicators of tremendous interest in a story, a new online referring source or a generalized increase in the market awareness of the site. Any unexpected increase should prompt the site owner to examine the referring sources report found in all analytics applications, looking for new sites and URLs referring visitors to the site (Figure 4). While the columns in Figure 4 are irrelevant, notice the green and red arrows highlighting an increase in page views per visit (P/Visit) from a variety of referring sources.

Figure 4: Referring sources report shows percent change from one week to the next. This type of report is very useful in identifying new traffic sources.

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Similarly, a sudden and unexpected decrease in the number of page views served by the site should be examined carefully. Start by looking a the Average Page Views per Visit and Unique Visitors measurements to see if you have roughly the same number of people coming to the site but for whatever reason theyre viewing fewer pages. If this is the case, perhaps some recent change to your site or navigation is confusing them. If not, consider whether youre doing less to advertise the site or whether a new competitor has recently appeared in market. Additionally, sites should determine the value of a page view by looking at the average CPM garnered by an average page on the site and calculating metrics such as Average Revenue per Visitor (p. 9). Regardless of the direction of change in your page views measurement, any sudden and unexpected change should be carefully reviewed to determine the cause. While you expect traffic to increase and decrease throughout the day and week, any substantial deviation from standard patterns can be an indicator of a problem or opportunity.

Risk
The major risk to the measurement of page views is the tendency for log file-based analytics applications to count non-human traffic in page view counts. Failure to exclude content-indexing applications (e.g. search-engine spiders) can artificially increase page view counts, often dramatically, confounding the analysis. Because indexing applications have a natural affinity for sites that generate original content, the general recommendation is for newspaper sites to consider a JavaScript page tag based analytics application like Omnitures SiteCatalyst and WebSideStorys HBX designed to ignore traffic from non-human visitors, thus improving the overall accuracy of page view counting.

Unique Visitors
Unique visitors are the number of online visitors who are coming to your site and reading your content.

Complexity to Calculate: Low Complexity to Use: Low Definition

Unique visitors, often simply referred to as visitors, are counted and reported by all Web analytics applications. Most applications use browser cookies to define the uniqueness of a visitor, a practice not without risk (see Risk below). It is useful to track the absolute number of unique visitors coming to your site and whether those visitors are new or returning (see Percent New and Returning Visitors [p. 7] and Figure 5).
Figure 5: Graph shows the total number of new visitors and the percent new visitors.

Action
Because unique visitors are a raw count, not a ratio, it can be more difficult to know how to respond to changes in this measurement. If the number of unique visitors to your site suddenly decreases you should determine whether or not you recently stopped some online marketing effort or perhaps if some site that had been referring you traffic has

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ceased doing so (Figure 4, p. 5). In general, if you want to increase the number of unique visitors coming to your site, increase your advertising spend or improve the visibility and value proposition associated with the site in your offline channel.

Risk
Because most Web analytics applications use browser cookies to determine the uniqueness of a visitor, this measurement is subject to the risks resulting from cookie blocking and cookie deletion.

Percent New and Returning Visitors

Percent new and returning visitors is a key marketing indicator and provides a top-line indicator of your overall business health.

Complexity to Calculate: Low Complexity to Use: Low Definition

The percent new and returning visitors is almost always calculated by your Web analytics application. The calculation the application is making is as follows: Total New Visitors / All Visitors = Percent New Visitors
Figure 6: Pie chart displays the percent new and returning visitors.

Total Returning Visitors / All Visitors = Percent Returning Visitors Also, the sum of new and returning visitors should equal your total visitors count: (Total Returning Visitors + Total New Visitors) / All Visitors = 1.00 That said, the numbers reported by your analytics application should suffice (see Figure 6).

Action
Because newspaper sites depend so heavily on visitor retention, site owners should pay close attention to the percent returning visitors coming to the site. A sudden and unexpected decrease in the percent returning visitors coming to the site can mean that fewer visitors are returning, more new visitors are arriving, or, potentially, returning visitors have been actively deleting browser cookies and thusly appearing new (see Risk below.) If your percent returning visitors drops, the best place to start examining the problem is at a returning visitors report, looking for an unexpected downward trend. In general, your percent visitors new will grow with an increase in acquisition marketing efforts. If this is not the case, you should carefully examine those efforts to make sure that theyre driving traffic at the rate you expect, perhaps using your analytics applications campaign analysis functionality.

Risk
Same risk ascribed to cookie deletion regarding new and returning visitors.

2006 Newspaper Association of America. All rights reserved.

Ratio of New to Returning Visitors

Similar to your percentage of new and repeat visitors, the ratio of the two gives you a single metric that effectively describes the particular acquisition mode exhibited by your Web site.

Complexity to Calculate: Medium Complexity to Use: Medium Definition

Assuming you can get an accurate count of new and repeat visitors to your site: Total New Visitors / Total Returning Visitors = Ration of New to Repeat Visitors This number will always be greater than zero. The smaller the number, the more return visitors youre attracting to your site relative to your total audience; the larger the number, the more new visitors. Generally speaking, anything under 1.00 means youre in the business of retaining the visitors you already havesomething common at newspaper sites. Numbers above 1.00 mean youre acquiring more new visitors than returning visitors. A calculated value of 1.00 means that for every new visitor who visits, one visitor returns.

Action
Most newspaper sites and media properties are in the business of retaining the visitors they have already attracted in their target market. In this case, the ratio of new to returning visitors will be low (perhaps between 0.35 and 0.60) However, depending on how new your site is and how aggressively youve been advertising the site, your ratio may be over 1.00, perhaps as high as 2.00 or 2.50. The critical action with this ratio is to watch for sudden changes, especially a sudden increase indicating that youre attracting far more new visitors than returning. Much like the percent new and returning visitors, sudden changes like this can mean that your acquisition efforts are paying off or that for some reason visitors have stopped returning to the site. In any case, changes in this metric should be carefully examined. New and return visitor reports, campaign analysis and referring traffic reports and loyalty, frequency and recency reports are the first places you should look when attempting to diagnose issues with visitor acquisition and retention.

Risk
Same risk ascribed to cookie deletion regarding new and returning visitors.

Average Page Views per Visit

Average page views per visit is an excellent indicator of readers interest in your content and their ability to navigate the site.

Complexity to Calculate: Low Complexity to Use: Low Definition

Average page views per visit is a critical metric for newspaper sites that describes the number of actual pages the average visitor will see when he or she comes to the site. Often calculated by your analytics application (Figure 7, p. 9), this metric is defined as the total number of page views divided by the total number of visits during the same timeframe:
2006 Newspaper Association of America. All rights reserved.

Page Views / Visits = Average Page Views per Visit Sophisticated users may also want to calculate average page views per visit for different visitor segments including designated market area (DMA) and registered users. If you know your average CPM on a per-page basis, you may want to calculate Average Revenue per Visit by multiplying the number of average page views by the average CPM (see also Average Revenue per Visitor, below).
Figure 7: A page view and visit report shows the average number of page views per visit (4.04 P/V in this example).

Action
When the average number of page views per visit trends against expectations, examine a handful of common site components that affect page views: Navigational elements: If it is difficult for visitors to navigate your site they will often be forced to view more pages as they hunt. Conversely, if your site is difficult to navigate, visitors may leave your site prematurely out of frustration. Content: If your content is poorly written and doesnt follow best practices for writing for the Web, visitors may leave your site prematurely. Conversely, if your content is well written, visitors may be inspired to keep reading and drive up the average number of page views. Search technology: If your search functionality is poor, visitors may be forced to click to look for information. Conversely, if your search functionality is successful, visitors may be leveraging search, thusly reducing the number of pages viewed. Marketing efforts: If your marketing efforts are poorly targeted, visitors are less likely to view many pages. Conversely, if your marketing efforts are good, visitors may view a large number of pages.

Risk
Risks ascribed to cookie blocking can affect this calculation by skewing the visits measurement.

Average Revenue per Visitor

Average revenue per visitor is a critical metric for advertising-supported sites.

Complexity to Calculate: Medium to High Complexity to Use: Medium Definition

To calculate average revenue per visitor, divide total online revenue by number of visitors: Sum of Online Revenue Generated / Visitors = Average Revenue per Visitor Newspaper sites with CPM-based revenues can use the sum of advertising and sponsorship revenues generated or a calculation of average CPM times impressions served to generate a revenue estimate. If your analytics application

2006 Newspaper Association of America. All rights reserved.

provides visitor segmentation capabilities, you may want to consider making this calculation for both the site-wide average as well as on a per-channel or per-vertical basis (for example, classifieds, shopping, travel, entertainment, etc.) using this similar calculation: Sum of Online Revenue Generated by Channel / Segmented Visitors in Channel = Average Revenue per Visitor by Channel The most likely strategy for assigning visitors to the channel segment is an inclusion model; if the visitor looks at one or more pages in the channel theyre segmented into that channel. You can make this requirement more rigorous if your application supports complex segmentation. Keep in mind that visitors will likely be assigned to multiple segments and, therefore, you cannot add the number of segment visitors to get a valid total.

Action
If this number drops off suddenly or precipitously the first call you should make is to your marketing department and the next is to your operations group. Often times either a large group of unqualified visitors has been attracted to the site or something has gone wrong with site performance and delivery. Occasionally, in the latter case, the average revenue per visitor will stay relatively same but the total number of Unique Visitors coming to the site will decrease. Marketing campaigns that attract unqualified visitors--usually out-of-market visitors who may be looking for a single piece of information but who are unlikely to ever return to the site--are a fact of life in the online world. Online classifieds, weather information or compelling original content will inevitably get visitors from out-of-market. These low-page view, low-frequency visitors will drive down your average revenue per visitor.

Risk
Same risks ascribed to visitor counting due to cookie blocking and cookie deletion. Also, some sites may not have easy access to revenue figures. Again, consider using an average CPM multiplied by your average page views per visit to estimate revenue.

Percent High, Medium and Low Frequency Visitors

If visitor retention is important to your site, tracking how frequently your audience visits in broad categories can provide an early warning system for visitor churn.

Complexity to Calculate: Medium Complexity to Use: Medium Definition

If your analytics application provides a breakdown of visits or visitors on a number of visits during the timeframe basis, you can calculate frequency as follows: Total Number of Low Frequency Visitors / All Visitors = Percent Low Frequency Visitors Total Number of Medium Frequency Visitors / All Visitors = Percent Medium Frequency Visitors Total Number of High Frequency Visitors / All Visitors = Percent High Frequency Visitors Examine the frequency of visitor engagement on a monthly basis, meaning that low frequency visitors would be those visitors who return to the site fewer than three times a month, medium frequency visitors are those who return between four and eight times a month and high frequency are those visiting more than nine times a month (Figure 8, p. 11). Timeframe is very important when youre considering frequency of visit: A visitor who returns many times a day is likely significantly more engaged than a visitor returning many times a month.

2006 Newspaper Association of America. All rights reserved.

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Figure 8: Visitor loyalty (frequency of visit), broken down into low, medium and high frequency of visit categories. The red box on the left is low frequency of visit, the box on the right, high frequency of visit and the unboxed area medium frequency of visit.

Action
Frequency metrics are relatively easy to calculate and very difficult to change. Suffice to say, if your percentage of medium and high frequency visitors is in decline, visitors are churning and something has gone wrong. In most instances it is unclear how to combat this problem: perhaps you have a new competitor in-market and perhaps an existing competitor has overhauled its site. In general, newspaper sites should be working to generate a more loyal audience and thusly a higher percentage of high frequency visitors, something easier said than done. Consider leveraging newsletters and RSS summary feeds to provide breaking news to your audience as a strategy to increase the frequency of visitation. Segment newsletter and RSS users if possible to compare their frequency distribution with your larger audience.

Risk
Standard risks ascribed to cookie blocking and cookie deletion.

Percent Visitors Using Search

Keeping track of the percentage of your visitors who use these tools can help you monitor changes in visitor understanding and expectation.

Complexity to Calculate: Medium Complexity to Use: Medium Definition

If you have a site or commerce search solution deployed on your site (for example, WebSideStory Search, Mercado, the Google Search Appliance, Endeca, etc.) you should measure how many of your visitors are searching. The most common way to do this is to make sure the search results page is tagged or identified in your log file analysis. Assuming youre doing this, the calculation is as follows: Total Number of Visitors Who See at Least One Search Results Page / All Visitors = Percent Visitors Using Search
2006 Newspaper Association of America. All rights reserved.

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You may want to make this calculation using the visits metric as well to help you understand whether your visitors are searching during some visits and not others. If this is the case, youll observe differences in the two calculations.

Action
Because this metric is relatively static, any dramatic changes are likely describing some problem caused by recent changes to the site. If this number suddenly plummets you might ask, Did we just bury the search box? Alternatively, if youve invested significantly in search technology and this percentage seems low, you should consider experimenting with how you present your search box and monitoring this metric for marked improvement. Measuring search usage is increasingly important for site publishers as they develop integrated search that aggregates listings from news, classifieds and shopping sections of the site. Additionally, search-related measurements will help salespeople who are offering premium search results page placement in advertising packages or ad renewals in such categories as real estate classifieds when the success of a campaign may be measured by search incidence.

Risk
The major risk with this measurement comes from being unable to track the number of visitors who see at least one search results page. Consult your Web analytics vendor if youre unsure how to gather this data.

Average Searches per Visit

Because search is of tremendous importance to newspaper sites, you should keep track of how frequently your visitors are using any available search technology.

Complexity to Calculate: Medium Complexity to Use: Medium Definition

Assuming you have site search technology and youre tracking your search results page, this indicator is calculated as follows: Total Number of Searches (Page Views) / Total Visits = Average Searches per Visit Note that the total number of searches is measured in page viewsunique searches executed by the visitors. This metric is designed to examine the frequency of which your visitors use your search technology.

Action
This indicator is typically used when deploying or optimizing search technology, helping site operators understand whether visitors are using search enough relative to the investment. On an ongoing basis, this key performance indicator rarely changes without some other change affecting the prominence of the sites search box. Any significant but unexpected changes should prompt an examination of the audience makeup as well as a review of the quality of search results provided; in situations where search results dramatically worsen, this measurement will provide a leading indicator of problems that may not otherwise be obvious. Consider the case where your audience can reasonably expect that youll have certain informationperhaps about local politicians or an upcoming event. If your search engine has not properly indexed this information and is not returning the expected results, many visitors will continue searching, looking for variations on the same search until they either find what they are looking for or give up. In any case, a change in average searches per visit should prompt a close examination of the search logs looking for unexpected behavior.

2006 Newspaper Association of America. All rights reserved.

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Risk
Risks ascribed to cookie-blocking can affect this calculation by skewing the visits measurement.

Online Ad Revenue as a Percent of Print Ad Revenue

An excellent top-line metric to keep an eye on, even if the percentage calculated is very, very small.

Complexity to Calculate: High Complexity to Use: High Definition

Assuming you have easy access to both your online and print advertising revenue, the calculation is simply: Total Online Ad Revenue / Total Print Ad Revenue = Online Ad Revenue as a Percent of Print Ad Revenue

Action
Online ad revenue as a percentage of print ad revenue is an important metric to help the Internet-based business show the value of their online product. Given predictions that online advertising spend is about to increase over the next three-to-five years, newspapers should keep a close eye on this ratio, using it to justify further investment. While this metric is unlikely to change much week-over-week, site owners are advised to keep an eye on how this metric is trending as an overall gauge of site health.

Risk
The major risk with this metric is the complexity associated with making the calculation. Any failure to be diligent in accounting for all online advertising revenues prior to making the calculation will skew the results and degrade the indicators utility. Pay special attention to how online revenue is accounted for and how the numbers are reported before attempting to make this calculation.

2006 Newspaper Association of America. All rights reserved.

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Audience/Market Indicators
The Audience/Market Indicators take audience a level deeper, looking not only at the traffic to our sites, but also the number of people our sites reach in the local market. Looking at the audience in terms of local market share is crucial because national portals like Google and Yahoo! are capturing large portions of available revenue. Th e local newspapers, however, are still in the strongest position to capture local revenue. One of the best ways to show local advertisers the advantages of buying into newspapers online is to detail the sites ability to influence local shoppers. In addition, online market reach can help to bolster the reach of the print product. Being able to show that print reach combined with online reach can provide a local advertiser with larger overall penetration is a big benefit to newspapers.

Percent Audience in DMA

Measuring and tracking the percentage of online visitors coming from your DMA will help you keep track of how well you serve your local audience.

Complexity to Calculate: Medium Complexity to Use: Low Definition

Assuming your Web analytics application provides the ability to break down your visiting traffic by DMA, the calculation is simply: Total Visits from within DMA / Total Visits = Percent Audience in DMA If your analytics application does not explicitly break down audience into defined DMA zones (many do not) then you can attempt to aggregate traffic using visitor geographic data (Figure 9).

Figure 9: Geographic breakdown of visitors by visit, shown by country, state and city.

Using the example shown in Figure 9, if your DMA is San Francisco, you would simply add up the number of visits from San Francisco and surrounding communities to use as the numerator in the calculation. Alternatively, services like comScore Networks and Nielsen//NetRatings provide in-market versus out-of-market assessments that can be substituted for the calculation above.

2006 Newspaper Association of America. All rights reserved.

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Action
This measurement, much like many of the audience and market indicators, is really designed to highlight for potential advertisers your local reach.

Risk
There are few standards associated with the way analytics applications report visitor geographic information. Some report DMA, others only states, some cities and states, some to the level of the ZIP code. All geographic reporting is done based on the visitors Internet Protocol (IP) address and is subject to inaccuracies due to IP pools and proxy servers.

Registered Users in DMA

Breaking down your DMA visitors by registered and unregistered status can further help explain the relationship you have with your site visitors to potential advertisers.

Complexity to Calculate: High Complexity to Use: Low Definition

Same as the Percent Audience in DMA (p. 14) calculation, except you must be able to segment your visiting audience by registered/unregistered status. Youll need to be able to generate your DMA or geographic location report but only examine the registered visitors segment. Because of the complexity of doing so, I strongly recommend consulting with your analytics vendor when attempting to make this calculation. Total Visits from Registered User within DMA / Total Visits = Percent Registered Users in DMA

Action
See Percent Audience in DMA.

Risk
See Percent Audience in DMA.

Ratio of Local Audience to National Audience

Keeping track of the ratio of your local to national audience will help you better understand the opportunity for different types of advertisers on your site.

Complexity to Calculate: Medium Complexity to Use: Low Definition

This ratio is calculated much the same way you would calculate Percent Audience in DMA, except youll calculate the number of non-local visitors as well: Total Visits from Local Audience / Total Visits from National Audience = Ratio of Local Audience to National Audience

2006 Newspaper Association of America. All rights reserved.

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Perhaps the easiest way to determine the numerator in this calculation is to subtract the total number of visits from your local audience from the total number of visits to the site: Total Visits - Total Visits from Local Audience = Total Visits from National Audience Depending on how your analytics application helps you determine your local audience, this calculation will be more or less accurate. Consult with your analytics vendor prior to using this metric. Similar to Percent Audience in DMA, services like comScore and Nielsen//NetRatings provide in-market versus out-of-market assessments that can be substituted for the calculation above. The distinction between local market and your DMA is decidedly vague: many sites will treat these as the same audience set.

Action
See Percent Audience in DMA.

Risk
See Percent Audience in DMA.

Monthly Market Share

Market share provides a comparative to local and national competition.

Complexity to Calculate: Low Complexity to Use: High Definition

Market share reports are generally provided by comScore, Nielsen//NetRatings or Scarborough Research. As with other metrics described in this document, the greatest value associated with measuring market share is reporting on percent change from reporting period to reporting period and attempting to diagnose any decline.

Action
Sites can use monthly market share as a key part of the planning and allocation process and to gauge your success relative to that of your competition. Examine market share closely looking for downward trends across different parts of the site and be prepared to react accordingly. If properly used, monthly market share can be a top-line metric, one used to plan long-term site development and even to predict future success.

Risk
Risks associated with market share measurements arise from the particular methodology used to determine share. Consult with your particular vendor to better understand risks arising from data collection and reporting.

Last Seven Day Reach (Seven Day Market Share)

Last seven day reach is a rolling measurement of market share. When examined in the context of your monthly market share, it can provide insight into the frequency with which your readers return to the site.

Complexity to Calculate: Low Complexity to Use: Medium

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Definition
Market share reports are generally provided by comScore, Nielsen or Scarborough. As with other metrics described in this document, the greatest value associated with measuring market share is reporting on percent change from reporting period to reporting period and attempting to diagnose any decline.

Action
You can derive the frequency with which your visitors return to your site by comparing your last seven day reach to your monthly market share. Assuming your seven day reach and monthly share are equal, all of your visitors are returning at least once a week. Anything less than this indicates less frequent visitation.

Risk
See Monthly Market Share (p.16).

Percentage of High, Medium and Low Click-Depth Visits

An excellent indicator of audience interest is click depth, a measurement of how many pages visitors are seeing when they visit your site.

Complexity to Calculate: Low Complexity to Use: Low Definition

This indicator depends on your applications ability to provide visit or visitor counts associated with the number of pages viewed during a given visit to the site (Figure 10). Some analytics applications provide this data in a click depth or depth of visit report, others in a pages viewed per visit report. Both reports are describing how many clicks a visitor used to view a number of pages on your Web site. Assuming you have access to that report, all you need to do is assign a range of clicks to your low, medium and high categories.

Figure 10: Depth of visit reporting needed to calculate the percentage of high, medium and low click depth visits.

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For most sites, good ranges are as follows: Low: Two clicks or less Medium: Three to five clicks High: More than five clicks With these categories, you would define these key performance indicators as: Total Number of Visits of Two Clicks or Less / All Visits = Percent Low Click-Depth Visits Total Number of Visits of Three to Five Clicks / All Visits = Percent Medium Click-Depth Visits Total Number of Visits of More Than Five Clicks / All Visits = Percent High Click-Depth Visits Keep in mind, these numbers of clicks may not work in all situations. Especially for retail sites and media properties, you may want to increase those numbers to three to 10 clicks for the medium category and more than 10 clicks for the high category. A good way to determine where these lines should be drawn is to determine the average click depth per visit and then break the medium and high categories at the average. For example, if your average clickdepth is seven clicks, medium depth would become two to seven clicks and high seven or more clicks.

Action
If you dont feel that a high-enough percentage of visits are deep enough into your site you should compare these key performance indicators with Percent High, Medium and Low Time-Spent Visitors (p. 21). Sometimes your visitors are not clicking deeply but spending a great deal of time reading each page they do view. (More details about time spent appear later in the report.) For example, if you have a high percentage of low click depth visits but a high percentage of high time spent visits youre probably doing okay. If, however, you have a high percentage of low-click depth and time spent visits, something is clearly wrong. Again, when click depth is a problem you should examine your site search logs to look for popular search terms and concepts that arent adequately represented in the sites navigational structure. Also, look for high abandonment points in the site that arent natural exit pages; these problem pages should be addressed immediately in an effort to lower the visitors barrier to making the next click.

Risk
Risks ascribed to cookie blocking can affect this calculation by skewing the visits measurement.

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Loyalty/Engagement Indicators
The Loyalty/Engagement Indicators take your audience metrics even deeper. Visitors to the site who come, read one article and never return are of very little value to a newspaper site in the long term. You must begin to focus on the quality of your audience and finding ways not only to get people to the site, but how to engage them enough to keep them reading articles, searching classifieds databases, accessing shopping research and coming back more frequently. Loyal readers who are highly engaged on the site create behavioral patterns that can be tracked allowing you to find better ways to deliver editorial and advertising content that they will find useful. (See also Percent New and Returning Visitors, p. 7).

Unique Visits
Much like the measurement of unique visitors, keeping track of unique visits will help you better understand your visiting audience.

Complexity to Calculate: Low Complexity to Use: Low Definition

Unique visits, sometimes called sessions, are calculated by all Web analytics applications. In Web Analytics Demystified, a visit is defined as: A visit is counted when a unique visitor creates activity on a Web pagewhich are being measured via page view statisticsregardless of the duration of this activity as long as the period of inactivity between page views does not extend beyond thirty minutes. Some analytics applications may let you change the 30-minute requirement but this should not be done! The 30minute timeout is as close as the analytics industry has to a standard and should be adhered to closely.

Action
Similar to your Unique Visitors (p. 6) count, visits is more of a basic indicator and becomes more interesting in the context of calculated metrics like Average Visits per Visitor (below).

Risk
Risks ascribed to cookie blocking can affect this calculation by skewing the visits measurement.

Average Visits per Visitor

Average visits per visitor over a finite timeframe can help you understand how much interest or momentum the average visitor has and how interesting they find your site or content.

Complexity to Calculate: Low Complexity to Use: Low

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Definition
Essentially describing the frequency with which a visitor returns to the site over a set amount of time, the calculation is simple: Total Visits / Total Unique Visitors = Average Visits per Visitor Sophisticated users may also want to calculate average visits per visitor for different visitor segments, such as registered users. As with Registered Users in DMA (p. 15), it is a good idea to contact your analytics vendor when using visitor segmentation functionality. It is difficult to evaluate how many visits per visitor are good but here are a few guidelines to keep in mind: The more regularly you publish new content, the higher the average should be. If you only update your content weekly, visitors have no incentive to come back more than once a week; if you publish new content daily, visitors have incentive to return daily. Well-written, original content will drive repeat visits more frequently than re-published work. If you have content that visitors can only get from your print or online publication, the average visitor is more likely to return to you to get that content. The more features your site has, the more likely visitors will at least return to see if you can help them in their local search for information. If you have classifieds, personals, forums, Web logs, etc. then visitors are more likely to consider your site as a definitive source and check there first when looking for local information.

Action
Sites that have a very loyal audience usually report very high average visits per visitor measurements, especially sites that, for example, present unique local information, sports information or local calendar functionality. In general, the more compelling and unique your content, the higher this average will be. Your average visits per visitor should be relatively stable providing your site has been available for at least six months and youve not made any major changes to the site or your retention marketing strategy. Therein lies the opportunity: If you change your retention marketing strategy or the content or design of your site, you should expect to see a change (albeit slight) in this key performance indicator in the following weeks and months. If none appears, what went wrong? If this key performance indicator suddenly gets worse, figure out why. Common culprits include site changes breaking bookmarked links, the emergence of a new competitor or shifts in the user perceptions about your site. Be sure to allocate a long-enough timeframe between visits when using this indicator.

Risk
Risks ascribed to both cookie blocking and cookie deletion can affect this calculation by skewing the visits and visitors measurements.

Average Time Spent on the Site

Tracking visit duration using average time spent on the site will help refine the picture of how your visitors are interacting with your content.

Complexity to Calculate: Medium Complexity to Use: Low

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Definition
Average time spent on a site is a metric usually provided by your analytics application. Essentially, it is the total number of minutes visitors spent browsing your content divided by the total number of visits to the site. Some applications dont provide the average length of visit but rather a distribution of length of visits (Figure 11). While arguably better than a potentially misleading average, this kind of reporting does little to provide a single number to report and may force the site owner to look at Percent High, Medium and Low Time Spent Visitors (below).

Figure 11: Example of length of visit reporting that does not support the calculation or reporting of average length of visit.

Action
While interesting to know, your visitors average time spent browsing is a very difficult measurement to positively impact. It is difficult to drive visitors to spend any more time on your site than they require to scan headlines and read a few stories unless they have a specific task in mind (find a car/apartment/job, etc.) Certainly if you dont have a search engine already in place, or if the one you have provides poor results, making content more accessible does seem to promote longer visits. Also, suggesting similar stories or related topics will often promote longer visits.

Risk
One risk associated with any average time spent is the fact that averages can be influenced by large outliers, occasionally skewing the average. Usually this is not a problem when examining the average time spent on the entire site but be cautious if youre looking at the average time visitors spend on individual pages; smaller samples can return misleading results. Also, because average time spent is based on the length of the visit, cookie blocking can affect this calculation if the cookieless are dropped from the analysis.

Percent High, Medium and Low Time-Spent Visitors

Categorizing your visitors in terms of the average time they spend interacting with your site will help you better understand the activities of different interest segments.

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Complexity to Calculate: Medium Complexity to Use: Medium Definition

This metric is slightly more complex because, similar to Average Time Spent on Site (p. 20), it depends on your analytics application providing the right granularity of data, e.g. distribution of times spent on the site per visit or per visitor. Assuming you have granular data, all you need to do then is determine how youll define high, medium and low time spent on the site during any given visit. For most sites, a low amount of time spent is 30 seconds or less, a medium amount of time spent is between 30 seconds and five minutes and a high amount of time spent is more than five minutes. If you use these times, the calculations are as follows: Total Number of Visits Spending Less Than 30 Seconds on the Site / Total Visits = Percent Low Time Spent Visits Total Number of Visits Spending between 30 Seconds and Five Minutes on the Site / Total Visits = Percent Medium Time Spent Visits Total Number of Visits Spending More Than 5 Minutes on the Site / Total Visits = Percent High Time Spent Visits If your analytics application only provides the necessary data on a per visitor basis simply change the name of the key performance indicator accordingly.

Action
The most common strategies for increasing the time a visitor spends on your site are to improve the overall usability of the site and to better target visitors during the reach and acquisition process. If youre experiencing a relatively high volume of low time-spent visits (for example, more than half of your visits) it is likely that youre poorly targeting visitors. In these instances, consider reevaluating your marketing strategy and look for ways to reach more qualified visitors or examine your top entry pages and make sure that the content youre presenting on those pages is consistent with the marketing message you use to bring people to the site. If you believe your marketing to be well targeted, or if you dont have any better acquisition avenues to pursue, consider your sites information architecture and usability. Often times, when visitors dont understand navigation systems or cannot determine where the information theyre looking for resides they abandon their visit. In these cases, its a good idea to look at your site search logs, looking for commonly searched-for terms that may highlight visitor interests not clearly represented in the sites navigational structure. Regardless, if youve carefully established your low, medium and high time-spent categories, these indicators can help you identify dramatic and unexpected changes in the composition of your audience.

Risk
Risks ascribed to cookie blocking can affect this calculation by skewing the visits measurement.

Percent of High, Medium and Low Recency Visitors

According to Jim Novo, an interactive customer retention, defection and loyalty expert, one of the best predictors of future success is the amount of time that passes between visits and purchases.

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Complexity to Calculate: Medium Complexity to Use: Low

Definition
Recency is the amount of time that passes between subsequent visits. Thought its not a metric that all analytics applications calculate, it can be used to categorize your visiting audience (Figure 12). Similar to other high, medium, low categories, youll need to make a decision about how much time can pass for membership in each group.

Figure 12: Graph displays recency of visits in days ago.

Assuming youre able to generate a report of the number of days between visits by visitor: Total Number of Low-Recency Visitors / Total Visitors = Percent Low-Recency Visitors Total Number of Medium-Recency Visitors / Total Visitors = Percent Medium-Recency Visitors Total Number of High-Recency Visitors / Total Visitors = Percent High-Recency Visitors For most sites, the most reasonable way to break high, medium and low is to examine the average recency per visitor. If youre less conservative, break low and medium at the average value; if youre more conservative, break medium and high at the average. If youre neither, center medium on the average and create a reasonable span based on the distribution observed.

Action
As with all good key performance indicators, if youve stumbled upon what seems to be the optimal mix of visitor loyalty, any sudden change should be addressed quickly. One reason that low-recency visitors stop coming as frequently is that some better alternative has emerged.

Risk
Risks ascribed to cookie deletion can affect this calculation by skewing the visitors measurement.

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Percent Registered Visitors

If you have the ability to segment your visitors, it is a good idea to track the percentage of your audience that has registered with the site.

Complexity to Calculate: High Complexity to Use: Medium Definition

Assuming youre able to segment visitors who register with your site at either the time they register or when they return to your site and log in, your percent registered users is: Total Visitors in the Registered-Visitor Segment / Total Visitors = Percent Registered Visitors If you have any questions about how to segment registered visitors, contact your analytics vendor.

Action
If this percentage is low or lower than you like, the most obvious action you can take is to improve the value proposition associated with site registration. If youre not charging for your content and you are asking visitors to voluntarily register with your site, explore the language you use to drive registrations (See Call to Action by Bryan and Jeffery Eisenberg as excellent reading for those site owners interested in improving how language used on the site persuades visitors to take action.)

Risk
Risks ascribed to cookie deletion can affect this calculation by skewing the visitors measurement and affecting visitor segmentation functionality of your analytics application. Since nearly all analytics applications use cookies to track visitors in segments, if those cookies are deleted the segmentation information is lost until it can be reestablished.

Percent Active Registered Visitors

Keeping track of your active registered visitors takes visitor segmentation to a new level, combining Percent Registered Visitors with Percent High Time Spent Visitors.

Complexity to Calculate: High Complexity to Use: High Definition

Assuming you have the ability to segment visitors and generate a time-spent distribution for the segment, the calculation you would make is: Total Visitors in the Registered-Visitor Segment Spending More Than 5 Minutes on the Site / Total Visitors = Percent Active-Registered Visitors Unfortunately, few Web analytics applications currently support this level of visitor segmentation.

Action
Assuming youre able to make this calculation, and aside from simply being able to report this percentage to your advertisers, the most obvious action you might take is attempting to influence your non-active registered visitors to
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spend more time on the site. Whether you use re-engagement e-mail or some type of site personalization, knowing which of your registered visitors are more passive users of your site is half the battle. Still, you should be cautious when taking any direct action because it is more likely that visitors are already using your site in a manner most beneficial to their needs; any action on your part may aggravate a good relationship.

Risk
See Percent Registered Visitors (p. 24).

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