Posted by: Matt Shanahan
Publishers spend lots of time and money on complex web analytics, but they’re reporting the wrong thing – unique visitors, visits, and page views. What should be reported is visitor loyalty and what contributes to increasing loyalty.
Visitor loyalty is the basis for a business model on the web. Whether the business model is based on ad revenue, pay-per-view, or subscription revenue, the real foundation for success is a large and loyal set of visitors (a.k.a., large and loyal audience). To constantly improve revenues, a publisher need to understand who are the loyal visitors and what makes them loyal. Unfortunately, the Visitor Loyalty reports in web analytics packages don’t help answer those questions, but rather report how many visits were nth visits to the site (e.g., Description of GA Visitor Loyalty Report).
The long-tail problem of visitor loyalty makes visits and page views less valuable. Drive-bys make up the largest set of unique visitors, visits, and page views, especially if you are good at SEO, but skew all the information about your most loyal visitors. Using web analytics reports, a publisher might decide to scrap editorial or content used by loyal visitors only because it’s not the most popular. I am writing a more detailed article about how to report on visitor loyalty for eMedia Vitals on the topic right now.
About Scout by ServiceSource
Contact
