Understanding User Metrics Analysis

Having a website is essential, but if a company is not using its website to its full potential to engage its customers, that website is practically useless. If a company’s website doesn’t catch the customer’s attention, doesn’t give the customer something they can do, isn’t even being visited by the customer, what’s the point?

That’s where knowledge of user metrics comes into play. If you know what your website is being used to do, you can better cater to the customer’s whims. This is especially important if you offer Software as a Service (better known by the initialism SaaS)

This article will attempt to help you understand user metrics analysis basics and see how that understanding can help.

What is user metrics analysis?

User metrics are the interactions that customers have with your website. Everything, from how many unique visits to your website occur in a day to how many subscriptions you gain or lose in

a day qualifies as user metrics.

While the most crucial number may seem to be the number of pure visitors, other data points that don’t get considered as often can prove to be better signs of what may be wrong with your business website.

User metric analysis is the aggregation of data in an attempt to determine trends. A good study considers various data points and determines the best course of action to ensure your website is working efficiently, and that customer satisfaction stays as high as possible.

Why is user metrics analysis critical to your business?

There’s a difference between having information and understanding information. To simply have, for example, the raw number of visitors that came to your website is an excellent thing to have. Still, it is meaningless without the understanding of which parts of your website people visited the most, or the amount of time spent on the website, or how many clicks to your website resulted in actual business and not just internet tourism.

The analysis allows for an understanding of what those numbers mean so that you can not only take some pride in knowing exactly how many people are visiting, but you can understand what is inspiring them to stay and what you should emphasize with your website going forward.

Having an aggregate of user metrics together in one place can help you to see correlations that you might not see otherwise. For example, suppose you know how many people visit your ‘subscribe’ page and how many people subscribe.

Why should I be willing to outsource user metrics analysis?

While the temptation may be to simply trust your judgment as far as website traffic goes, having somebody outside of your company review can help in many ways.

First of all, not having to have a specific person in your company review the accounts will free up their time, allowing for more productivity within your company.

Having a company review your user metrics also allows for a faster, more efficient distilling of the information gleaned from said metrics. A company that focuses on understanding how metrics show evidence of customer trends will have such experience identifying many common issues that websites have rapidly.

Outsourcing is also less expensive, allowing a company to spend less money for the same amount of work that an employee focusing on user metrics would perform.

And, because an outsourced company has no sentimental attachment to your own company, they will be willing to address uncomfortable truths. Suppose a particular part of your website simply isn’t working. In that case, a company specializing in user metrics analysis will tell you point-blank what isn’t working instead of trying to defend a lousy website practice.

While it may seem expensive to pay a company to focus on analyzing your website traffic, the benefits of catering your website to consumers’ needs and desires can far outweigh those costs.