What WebTrends stats matter most to management?

[gempdx]

Hi all,

I've been asked to create a brief monthly executive summary of our WebTrends stats. Our monthly WebTrends stats are very informative, but are over 60 pages!

I want to pull out the most important stats for management and present them in a 1 or 2 page document, but I have no clue where to start.

Any advice? What do you consider to be the most relevant statistics?

Gem

[Emma McCreary]

'stickiness' is a buzzword nowadays - how many pages a visitor looks at, how long they stay at the site before leaving.

[grahamstewart]

Stickiness can also used to refer to how likely a visitor is to return at a future date.

Of course these stats can be interpreted in different ways. Just because a user spends a long time on your site and looks through a lot of pages doesn't mean they enjoyed the experience.

They could have just spent the past hour searching through the site for a piece of information that they couldn't find.

The stats will look good - but they won't be back :)

[Emma McCreary]

that's true...but i think web users are more apt to just leave and try google again before going through a website trying to find an answer...unless it's really a specialized topic and the don't expect to be able to find the information somewhere else.

as a webmaster, i'm most interested in
a) what keywords people use to find my site and
b) which referrers, keywords, etc actually lead to sales or contact.

[aspdaddy]

Theres some great reading on the subject
[emetrics.org...]

From the Crane article

During the dot-com explosion, several e-metrics buzzwords infiltrated the analyst vernacular: page leakage, stickiness, slipperiness, velocity, shopping cart abandonment, convergence, and perhaps the most seductive of them all, path analysis (the ability to find the "magic path to purchase").

[benihana]

id say the following stats would be a good starting point:
(based on my experience with pure info sites, if its e-commerce you obviously need to repriortise)

Average Unique Visitors per day.

Average Page views per visit.

Most Popular Pages/areas of the site.

Least popular areas of the site.

Search terms used to find the site.

Top refferers, both SE's and other sites.

If you have any downlaodable files (lots of pdfs in my example) then the most popular and number of downloads.

The spread of site usage (in terms of uniques) on a weekly basis, e.g. if i plot this stat on a graph it gives quite a smooth curve peaking on midweek and flattening off at weekends.

If youve got the logs/information it may be worth doing a comparison of 6 months worth of logs - showing (hopefully) any growth in users etc across the time period.

I think if your using webtrends you should just be able to cut and paste some of the report graphs directly into a word document, which can look good.

hth
ben

[rharri]

Anyone care to suggest what would be a good pageview/visitor ratio for an "information" site?

[gempdx]

Hi everyone,

Thanks so much for your answers! The site is primarily brochureware, but we do use it for lead generation.

I'll start with the suggested categories and if people want more or less, I'm sure they'll tell me! :)

Thanks again,
Gem