Measuring online behaviour – statistics to indicators

I’ve written previously about measuring online behaviour and how it can be linked to overall PR evaluation. I found of interest the recent news from Nielsen that they will now rank websites by time spent on sites rather than number of pages viewed. Interesting, as this is a recognition that an indirect indication of “interest” or “engagement” is the amount of time spent on a website, e.g. watching a video, clicking through a slide presentation, reading a text, etc.

When looking at measuring online behaviour, I’ve seen quite some organisations simply drowning in data from web metric software packages and are unable to pull out a real analysis of what they have achieved – or not through the web.

Ultimately indicators should be set to measure success by. These could be:

• “engagement” (average time spent on website),
• “interest” (number of podcast downloaded),
• “conversion” (number of sign-ups for a sales offer),
• “preferences” (growth in visits to a new language version) ,
• etc., etc .

On a related note, when thinking about how to measure online social networking, the Measurement Standard blog provides an interesting list of suggested indicators to measure.

Glenn