I was asked recently asked to contribute to a discussion on the most important metrics for marketers to watch.  Since a lot of my work involves tracking website usage and helping clients optimize their websites to meet their goals, I chose to focus on important site usage metrics for marketers to watch.  To follow the rest of the discussion, and to learn about some important metrics to watch in E-mail marketing, check out this post by Lisa Cramer.

Google Analytics offers a lot of helpful information, but sometimes you want to answer a specific question that it doesn’t have a preset section for.  This is where the Custom Reporting feature can help.  Many people never use this feature, but once you get the knack of it, your custom reports can help you get the most helpful information about your website traffic.  The Google Help center has a great video to get you started with the basic how-to of putting a custom report together.

Web analytics programs provide a LOT of data, which can be an overwhelming experience.  It’s good to know which metrics are relevant to your site and what they mean so that you can act on the information you get.  One of the most frequently useful metrics for marketing analytics is the bounce rate.  The idea behind this is that a “bounce” visitor is one who comes to your site and leaves right away without really taking anything in.

One useful aspect of Google Analytics that I often forget about is the “compare to site average” feature.  It’s all well and good to look at how individual metrics change over time, but it can be very helpful to know how one particular page, traffic source, or other variable is performing in comparison to the rest of your site.  This feature can be used when looking at almost any metric, as there will be a site average listed underneath most.