The first step of the analytics process is to define your business metrics, which are typically called key performance indicators (KPIs). In doing this, remember that KPIs go well beyond your website. Site-centric statistics, such as hits, number of visitors, or average visit length, aren’t business metrics. They’re merely ways of measuring activity on your website, and in most cases they can’t tell you anything meaningful about your performance.
To get real business metrics, you need to look at your website in the context of your overall business strategy. Your business is the foundation for everything you end up doing with web-analytics data. And so, you need to determine how the behavior of users on your website relates to your overall business goals.
This isn’t as difficult as it may sound. The easiest way to think about user ehavior is to ask yourself what you want people to do on your site. In web analytics, we refer to these actions as desired behaviors. They include such things as the paths
you want users to take, the marketing initiatives you want them to come into contact ith, and the products you want them to buy. Desired behaviors may be as simple the ovement of customers from your home page to a specific initiative. Or, they may be omplex. For example, a content site may want its users to explore particular site areas hat have higher ad-conversion rates than others. There are as many possible desired ehaviors as there are business objectives; the important thing is to isolate what you ant users to do.
The second step is to monetize these desired behaviors. In other words, you hould figure out the value of each behavior to your business. For example, if you’re rying to drive customers to a particular offer, you should be able to define the likelihood that each new prospect will take you up on it and how much each conversion is worth to your company.
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