Measuring Stickiness with Basic Google Analytics' Key Performance Indicators

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By “Stickiness” we mean:

• Someone visits your site for the first time
• Stays there to explore the content
• Returns later to look for more.

For most web sites, attracting quality traffic is the major goal. Stickiness provides information about visitors’ interest in your site and quality of your site’s content.

Measuring stickiness is important to a website with online advertising, as visitors are exposed to ads if they navigate through the site. For an ecommerce site, stickiness indicates that visitors navigate through the pages of the site and are more likely to purchase. The stickiness of a blog is a measure of the quality of its articles. But for a lead generation site, where the aim is to get the visitors to fill in a contact form, download a white paper or register, the measurement of stickiness is not as important as conversion data.

So, in order to know the quality of your site, the measurement of its stickiness is important. Google Analytics helps in measuring the stickiness of your site with the help of some Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

KPIs play a significant role in web analytics. Analytics throw up a bunch of data, some of which may not be relevant for your site. To get the best out of any analytics tool, the first step is to define a set of KPIs for your site. Without proper KPI definition it is easy to get lost in a lot of irrelevant data. Once you define what you want to measure, finding the data relevant to your work becomes easy.

On the basis of the defined KPIs, it is possible to conduct a historical analysis of existing data to establish baseline measures. These baseline measures can be used to evaluate the future success of the website, business goals and marketing campaigns.

Listed here are some basic but important KPIs to measure the stickiness of your web site:

1. Average Pageviews per Visit
2. Percentage of New vs. Returning Visitors
3. Visitor Loyalty
4. Bounce Rate

1. Average pageviews per visit (Pageviews/Total visits):

This is a good indicator of site navigation as a visitor usually leaves your site early on if it’s difficult to navigate. It also indicates the quality of your content as a visitor reads more and visits more pages if it is well written. For a site with a CPM business model, high average pageviews per visit means an increase in the average value of each visit. Conversely some sites like support sites that want users to find information quickly would like this value to be lower.

For sites based on new technologies like AJAX and Ruby a low value of Average Pageviews per visits does not indicate poor quality of content because interaction on them can occur without any change in the URL. For a product site a high value of this KPI may indicate difficulty in navigating it.

This metric can be extracted from Visitors Overview report under Average Pageviews.

2. Percentage of new vs. returning visitors (New visitors/Total visitors):

This is a good indicator of your web site’s stickiness, as a high percentage of returning visitors means that your content is relevant and interesting to them. A high percentage of new visitors shows that you are successful in driving traffic to your site (through PPC, SEO, and referrals). For an e- commerce site returning visitors are important – they may have come back after some research and are now ready to buy, or they liked what they bought previously. This metric can be used to further explore the source of your visitors, as well as the keywords with most visits.

This metric is available in the Visitors report under New vs. Returning.

3. Visitor Loyalty:

For a pure content site like a blog or a site that features whitepapers, visitor loyalty gives an indication of stickiness of your site. This is measured by numbers for the following::

• Loyalty
• Recency
• Length of visit
• Depth of visit

Loyalty is how often visitors visit your web site within a given period of time. If this number is high, it means a large number of visitors are visiting your site repeatedly, and proves strong site engagement.

Recency is the time gap between two subsequent visits of a visitor to your site. For a content rich site, repeat visitors on the same day indicate quality, and relevance of your site’s content to their needs.

Length of visit is the time spent by a visitor in one session in your site, during a given period of time. It indicates the quality of a visit to your site in terms of time spent; how long visitors spend exploring your content. If the length of a visit is long, it means your content is engaging them.

Depth of visit is the number of pages navigated by a visitor on your web site, in one session in a given period of time.

Visitor’s loyalty data is provided in absolute numbers instead of averages. This helps you set a benchmark for your web site’s ‘stickiness’ goals.

This metric is available in the Visitors Overview under Visitors Loyalty.

4. Bounce Rate:

The bounce rate is the percentage of instances where visitors left your site right at the landing page – people that exited the web site soon as they entered it. It is the percentage of single page visits, or of visitors that stay on a site for a very short duration. A high bounce rate means your site’s content is not of relevance to visitors, or that it does not engage them.

This metric can be used to measure traffic quality , and can be analyzed across different data segments and across landing pages to identify poor performers. The definition of a high or low bounce rate depends on the purpose and type of web site. In an e-commerce site, a bounce rate of over 60% may indicate low interest in items for sale. However, a high bounce rate for a blog likely means visitors read the latest post and leave; they still find the content engaging.

This metric can be found in the Visitors Trending report of Visitors under Bounce Rate.

Contributed by Sasthi Sarma, Analytics Team, Position²

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Tags: Basic Web Analytics Tips, Google Analytics, Key Performance Indicators, KPI