Most people have slowly come to terms with the concept that ‘hits’ is meaningless as a value, due to the fact it refers to every item downloaded from a page, and can therefore easily be rigged.

So unique users and page impressions are the most common metrics. Unique Users refer to visits from an individual IP address, whereas page impressions are the number for a full page to be downloaded – including ads and any modules you may have included.

But are these the full story?

I’ve worked on site which have had huge jumps and then huge falls. And the people in charge can’t figure out why, because there’s no qualitative measurement of the site. If we spend the time, we can go and see that a number of people viewed a section or individual story, but we have no idea whether it was what they were looking for, or whether they enjoyed their visit…

That’s why it’s important to listen to your community. Generally they may only be the most vocal 5 per cent of your users (Unless you’re running a solus forum), but they’ll give you clues to whether people are finding error pages, or are bored of certain content.

The other idea would be to provide a simple “Did you enjoy your visit”, or “Was this what you wanted” option. I’d recommend not setting it as a pop-up due to blockers, and the fact pop-ups are likely to annoy your users anyway…but you should be able to find somewhere relevant on the page to slot a simple measurement of enjoyment….

So was this post helpful? Did you enjoy it?