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What's really important when it comes to measuring what the 'online audience' is doing? According to a report in the Financial Times (July 16th 2007), the focus is shifting away from counting just 'traffic' - the amount of visitors going to web pages - and moving towards understanding what those visitors do once they are there, and how long they spend on a particular site or web page.
Of course, currently it is easy to track whether a person has clicked on a particular advertisement. But it is much harder to understand what content on a page has been read or glanced at.
It turns out that specialist audience measurement companies such as Neilsen Netratings and Comscore, who produce statistics on page views and other online stats, actually use panels of web users. Although it isn't absolutely clear what methods are used, we assume that some kind of statistical magic is applied to that sample of internet users, so that their behaviour comes to represent the behaviour of web users as a whole.
Why is all this important? Well, it's important to traditional advertisers on the internet, because any special knowledge they can gain about audience behaviour is potentially worth billions of dollars to the industry as a whole. But more specifically, what's the relevance for E-Commerce sites, the online businesses who sell goods directly to consumers or other businesses?
The good new is that there is one very simple measure that summarises all of the relevant activity on an E-Commerce web site. It's known as 'the bottom line'. If your sales are poor, and you are trying to grow your online business, do you really care about 'page views' and time spent on pages? What is of real interest is how many customers are going to your site, ready to buy, and who then complete their purchase. And then of course, the next step is to increase those numbers.
This is why when Parallel Thinking Europe work with clients, the first thing we do is baseline their sales. Yes, we are also interested in the more esoteric aspects of web site usage, but the important figure for us is how much are you selling? That's really the only figure that we need to set about increasing for our clients. All the rest is interesting, but is it essential?
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