1. Acquisition Metrics
Nearly every web site shares three fundamental web analytics objectives: acquire more qualified visitors
for the lowest cost, convert these visitors into customers, and retain these customers for repeat business.
• Acquire more qualified visitors
From online marketing to offline marketing, the first step in winning new customers today is driving new
traffic to your web site. But all traffic is not equal. You need to drive the most qualified visitors for the
lowest cost. With WebTrends you can get a complete picture of campaign response, campaign conversion
and overall return on investment (ROI). As a result, you can pinpoint exactly which campaigns are working
and which aren’t.
This chapter discusses acquisition in more detail.
• Convert more visitors by analyzing click-by-click behavior
Whether your web site goal is for visitors to register, make a purchase, or get technical support, conversion
rate is a critical measure of your site’s success. WebTrends provides the most comprehensive navigation
analysis in the industry, allowing you to track visitors click-by-click, identify confusing navigation and
minimize abandonment. Isolating problem areas in your site and experimenting with improvements can
have a big payoff.
For more information about conversion, see .
• Retain more visitors by segmenting those most likely to return
Once you have persuaded visitors to become customers, you need to retain them as loyal, returning
customers. It typically costs 5-10 times more to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one.
WebTrends allows you to evaluate the effectiveness of your loyalty campaigns such as customer
newsletters by how recently and how frequently visitors are coming back and engaging in repeat business.
Now you can measure whether or not you are increasing the average lifetime value of your visitors.
For more information about retention, see .
What the Business Person Wants to See
Business people need to optimize the effectiveness of their marketing expenditures. They need to run
campaigns that drive qualified traffic to their web sites. They make decisions regarding spending more
money on tactics that work and reducing the amount on less-efficient areas. The decisions regarding the
acquisition of visitors are some of the most important decisions that business people make because the
process of acquiring visitors (such as creating ad campaigns, using marketing resources, outsourcing some
areas) is expensive.
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2. What the Business Person Wants to See Acquisition Metrics
Acquisition data can help you determine if your marketing tactics are successful. With WebTrends you can
easily get reports on valuable metrics that reveal how many visitors came to your web site, whether they
converted to registering or paying customers and how much value they brought to your organization.
Acquisition data can also tell you how comparisons perform over time and which customers have the
highest lifetime value.
Performance Dashboards
WebTrends provides performance dashboards that lets you benchmark your acquisition campaigns, as is
shown in the following graphic.
The Campaign Performance Dashboard allows campaign managers to view how every level of their
campaign performs across their acquisition and revenue KPIs. Campaign managers can easily see if
customers are responding to specific offers better than others and can make instant decisions based upon
their agreed-upon goals for that particular campaign.
Entry/Landing Page
The first page that a visitor sees on your web site is called the entry or landing page. This is the most
important page in your web site, because it provides the initial impression for your visitors and influences
whether they will continue to look at other pages of your site.
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3. Acquisition Metrics What the Business Person Wants to See
Entry pages can tell you whether people more often start at your home page or jump to a specific page on
your site—usually from a bookmark or link. Consider also that at the entry point to your site, visitors have
not yet begun to navigate the pages of your site. This is an opportune time to guide them in the direction
you want them to go. From these pages, you can promote areas of your site that you want them to see by
putting noticeable links to those areas. In addition, entry pages usually provide good advertising real estate
if you sell ad space on your site or promote your own products or services.
Basic Entry Page Usage
The Entry Pages report is the lowest-level report, because you don’t know exactly how visitors got there.
That is, your visitors could have used an ad campaign, a search engine, or some other mechanism to get to
your page. Yet this page may help you to pinpoint the pages on your site to improve. Based on this report,
you can find your leading entry pages and improve them in order to represent your company in the best
way possible and direct visitors to other pertinent pages of your web site.
The following graphic shows a sample report that identifies the first page view of a visitor at a site.
In this sample report, “Pages” refers to any document, dynamic page, or form. Different types of profiles
have different default settings for which file extensions qualify a file as a page. “Visits” refers to the
number of visits where the specified page was the entry page. A visit is a series of actions that begins when
a visitor views the first page from the server, and ends when the visitor leaves the site or remains idle
beyond the idle-time limit.
Also, in this sample Entry Pages report, the home page or “Welcome Information” page is the top entry
page. However, many visitors entered first through the products and store pages. Perhaps many of these
visitors entered because of an ad campaign. If so, this ad campaign may deserve more scrutiny, because the
company may have spent quite a bit of money on attracting customers via that campaign.
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4. Collecting the Right Data Acquisition Metrics
The information in the Entry Pages report can indicate how you might want to optimize the architecture of
your web site based on where your visitors are entering. It can also help you determine which external
links are most effective. You may want to consider updating META tags and links.
Advanced Entry Page Usage
You can make your entry pages useful by creating specific landing pages for each campaign and making
sure that each landing page is not linked to anything except the specified campaign. That is, only the
intended campaign should link to the landing page—nothing else on your web site should link to it. Then
the landing page redirects the visitor to the page that you want them to view.
By themselves, entry pages are not that interesting, but if you can design them into your web site for
analysis, then you can determine who came to your web site because of a particular campaign.
Collecting the Right Data
Web sites can employ a variety of mechanisms to drive traffic to a specific web site and track its success. In
general, visitors will find your site through:
• Ads (banner, email, traditional media)
• Searches
• Links
• Directly through bookmarks
The following subsections discuss the mechanisms that help visitors find your site. These mechanisms are
referrers, ad campaigns, search engines, and email marketing efforts (such as newsletters).
Referrers
Just as a doctor receives new patients from a referring source—such as another doctor or a current
patient—a referrer, or referring URL, is the page on another web site that linked visitors to your site.
Referring URLs tell you where your visitors came from to get to your site. You can use this information to
determine which external sites are the best ones to place links on, or ads for, your site. This information can
also convince you to develop or maintain positive relationships with these sites so that they will continue
to offer a link to your site.
How do you determine what the referrer is? The record in the data file contains the page that was visited
before the page represented by a particular entry. So you can ascertain the referrer for each page from the
record in the data file. But more interesting is what initiated a visit to the site. How do you determine the
referrer for the visit? This is done by taking the first hit in the visit, looking at that hit’s referrer, and calling
that the visit’s referrer. Therefore, all of the referrer’s URLs come from the first hit of the visit.
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5. Acquisition Metrics Collecting the Right Data
The following graphic shows the domain names of sites that refer visitors to your site.
From this sample report, you can get basic information. However, if you have several different ad
campaigns on Yahoo, this report doesn’t reveal which one is working best. Consequently, the referrer
reports provide general, low-level feedback on your efforts. For more specific information, you will need
reports on ad campaigns, search engines and email marketing.
Referring Site, Domain, or URL
Some web sites may have multiple links to your site. If you only want to know what site referred the
visitor—not the individual pages on the site that contained a link to your site—you would need to strip out
all parts of the URL except the site or domain name. Doing so allows you to discover which sites or
domains refer visitors to your web site the most.
For example, a site, such as www.referrer.com may have several domains, such as
search.referrer.com, your-referrer.com, my_referrer.com, ourreferrer.com, and referrer.com.
All of these domains are referring work for the main site www.referrer.com.
Each domain name may have several IP address. For example, 217.194.141.67, 205.186.88.66,
66.67.2.10, 66.231.3.73, 199.221.98.4, 65.56.41.37 might all be used by the www.referrer.com
domain.
So your reports can give you the site name, the domain name, or the URL information. It depends on the
level of information that you want.
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The Self-Referrer Issue
Using the referring URL to determine how your visitors came to your site has one major drawback: your
own site can appear to be the referring URL. This self-referring circumstance occurs when a visitor begins
a visit, leaves your site open in the browser window, stays inactive beyond the 30-minute visitor session
window, and then becomes active again. Once the 30-minute threshold is crossed, WebTrends considers
this to be a new session; however, this new session will register your site as being the referrer. For this
reason, instead of using the referrer page or URL, you may be better off using other means of tracking how
visitors come to your site. One useful method is by tracking visits from ad campaigns.
No Referrer - Direct Traffic
“No Referrer” or “Direct Traffic” represents direct traffic to the web site as the result of one of the
following:
• Visitors who type the domain name directly into the browser
• Visitors who bookmark the site
• Visistors who have the page set as their home page
• Visitors who click on an email link, shortcut, or other direct link
Ad Campaigns
Advertisements can come in many forms, including ads on other sites, popup ads that are triggered, and
links embedded in email campaigns.
Here are some broad definitions of ads that are frequently used:
Web-based ads
These ads include “banner ads” that appear on the web pages of sites that your best prospects are likely
to visit. Web-based ads have many forms such as text, moving graphics, a call to action (“Click here to
download …”), Flash or streaming banners, pop-ups, and pop-unders.
Newsletter-based ads
These ads are directed at publications that your prospects are most likely to be reading. With newsletter
ads, you can often choose from among sponsoring the newsletter, sponsoring a column or feature in the
newsletter, or placing an ad that will appear among other ads, usually as a text ad.
Campaign IDs and Translation Tables
You can manage your campaigns by using campaign IDs and translation tables to convert the campaign ID
into meaningful information. For example, you may see a campaign ID in your data files such as
campaign=721.
WebTrends allows you to have a text file that (at analysis time) can translate all of your campaign IDs into
their corresponding campaign names.
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Redirect Pages
Many ads are designed to initially route the user through a redirect page before they can view the ad
content. This redirect page quickly and imperceptibly bounces the visitor to the actual page with the ad
content, recording the redirect page as the entry page for the session because it was selected first. (Here,
the first hit recognized as an ad campaign in the visitor session is counted.) If each redirect page for each
placement is distinct from the others, you can track which version of the ad most often took the visitor to
the ad’s content.
Let’s say you have two online ads for your product, one on Yahoo, and one on AOL. In addition, you sent
an email to potential customers with a link that takes them to the content. If you wish to track them all
separately, you would create a separate redirect page for each one. In this scenario, you might have the
following pages:
Yahoo Ad: /redirect/yahoo_ad.htm
AOL Ad: /redirect/aol_ad.htm
Email Ad: /redirect/email_ad.htm
By tracking visits to each of these redirect pages in the top entry pages, you can see which ad placements
most effectively bring people to your site. The following graphic illustrates the redirect process for
WebTrends using the web server data collection method. Remember that client-side tagging will not give
you this information unless the redirect page has the proper script. For more information, see .
Using this illustration, if you looked in the web data activity file you will see a two-step process:
The first web data activity file entry:
GET YahooAd.htm - 302 - yahoo.com
This took the visitor from the Yahoo.com to the Yahoo redirect page (YahooAd.htm). Status code 302
means that you were redirected.
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The second web data activity file entry:
GET PromoAd.htm - 200 - YahooAd.htm
This took the visitor from the Yahoo redirect page (YahooAd.htm) to the promotion ad (PromoAd.htm).
Status code 200 means that you were successful.
The following graphic shows a sample report showing the top referring pages.
In this sample report, “Page” refers to any document, dynamic page, or form. Keep in mind that different
types of profiles have different default settings for which file extensions qualify a file as a page. Any URL
containing a question mark is considered a dynamic page.
If “Direct Traffic” is 100% of all your traffic, then your web server is probably not logging the “referrer”
field in your data files.
You can use WebTrends to create a campaign profile and track either entry or referring pages. However,
some ads have several possible referring pages with long, complicated URLs. As a result, it can be more
difficult to look up and define a referrer when you set up a campaign profile.
Tracking Multiple Campaigns
Re-direct pages are great for handling a handful of campaigns, but if you’re doing hundreds or thousands
of campaigns, this method is impractical. Instead you should use a parameter field containing a parameter
ID. The ID can be used to identify all of the attributes that make up the campaign, such as site name (for
example, MSN, Yahoo), program (3rd quarter ProductName upgrade), offer (25% off), creative type
(120x120 GIF banner), creative (race car image), and so forth. You can then use a translation file (via
WebTrends script or custom table lookups) to create reports on which attributes are most effective (for
example, did the race car image do better than the Flash movie of a tornado, or was the 25% off offer more
effective then the free year of support).
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Offline Acquisition Techniques
Entry and redirect pages are handy for off-line acquisition techniques. For instance, if you place an ad in a
newspaper or magazine telling people to go to your site, you might get them to type
www.YourCompany.com/UpgradeOffer, but you are unlikely to get them to type
www.YourCompany.com?CID=C42-61AF.
Search Engines
Search engines play a large role in acquiring visitors. Whenever someone uses a search engine, there is the
chance that they will use a keyword that triggers links to your web site.
Search engines typically come in two flavors:
Paid Search Engine
You pay a fee for every person who clicks through to your site, and you have to monitor which keyword
phrases are bringing you the best visitors. With Paid Search Engines, you need to evaluate the
effectiveness of money spent.
Organic Search Engine
You pay nothing for visitors who come to your site. You monitor which keyword phrases are bringing
you the best visitors. With Organic Search Engines, you evaluate the effectiveness of time spent.
People use search engines when they don’t know the name of your site or have no other direct link to click
or distinct URL to type in their address box. Web site designers go to great pains to figure out how to get
recognized by these search engines and appear in the “top 10” list that appears when a search is performed.
Research consistently shows that more than 80% of web visitors use search engines to find what they need.
The longer users are online, the more likely they will use search engines and make purchases. Since most
web users believe that those sites that show up in the top of the listings are the most important sites, you
must take every reasonable measure to make sure your site ranks highly with search engines for the search
keywords and phrases that your most valuable prospects use. If you can’t get good rankings by optimizing,
you can always try pay-per-click advertising options, which most of the search engines offer.
But search engine technology constantly changes. What you did to get a search engine to effectively
recognize your site or page today can have marginal results only a few months later. And each search
engine has its own proprietary method of creating a result list based on the search phrases or keywords a
web user enters. These lists use the search keywords and phrases to create a list of what they interpret as
being the most relevant sites. Search engines also use a host of other factors, including how often visitors
click on the link to your site from within their list, and how many of the more popular sites containing
related content have hyperlinks to your site. Most search engines also let you register with them, and by
paying them to place your site in their index, you can get more exposure than if you’d left it up to chance to
get noticed.
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The element that you have direct control over in this mix is making sure that the keywords you planned for
visitors to use to get to your site actually make your site appear in the search results. By reviewing the top
keywords or search phrases entered by visitors, you can find out if those keywords are driving people to
your site. If not, you can modify your web page content to promote your site with search engines—based
on those keywords. Some common ways to modify that content involve including the keyword or phrase in
the description and keyword meta tags, and increasing the frequency with which you use the word or
phrase in the HTML title, a headline, and first few paragraphs of the page. These methods will improve
your chances of being found and promoted by a search engine.
Note
Search engine optimization is not the focus of this guide. Please consider WebPosition
(www.webposition.com) for a complete discussion of this constantly changing topic.
You can use WebTrends to find the search engines that are used most often by visitors to arrive at your site.
You might want to register with search engines if you find that your site is not being noticed.
With WebTrends you can generate reports on organic search engines (non-paid search engines) and paid
search engines. The following graphic shows a sample report about most recent search engines.
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WebTrends allows you to compare this information with information from a report on the most popular
phrases for your site. The following graphic shows a Most Recent Search Phrases (All) report.
Using the information from this report and the previous report you can compare search engine rankings
with the popularity and competitiveness of phrases to get a complete picture of how the web site is
performing. Search engine rankings allow you to understand where your site shows up in the list of search
results for certain phrases; for example, if you have a phrase that performs particularly well in terms of
conversion, but your search engine ranking is low, you may want to try for more highly qualified traffic by
boosting your ranking.
WebTrends can also analyze paid and organic search engine usage and generate reports that show the total
effectiveness of your search engine marketing and optimization strategies based on activity, depth and
duration of visit. You can receive separate reports on paid search engine, or organic search engine, or both.
Email Marketing
When you want to reach prospects directly, consider using direct email and either your own customer
database or a purchase marketing list. You can also email to your in-house list of registered visitors, who
have opted-in to receive communications.
By using email marketing, the recipient can click on a link to your web site, and this visit is automatically
recorded and catalogued by WebTrends.
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You can use WebTrends to track email campaign results using entry/landing pages as a primary or
complimentary metric to the other measures produced by email solutions. WebTrends can help you to
determine how far recipients get into the conversion process, as well as what they do once they’ve
completed the process and on subsequent visits.
Advanced email solutions will track clickthroughs to the site, campaign conversions and revenue—and in
some cases visitors’ clickstreams/paths—but this is where the overlap with web analytics solutions ends.
Unless the visitor’s activities are tied directly to the campaign, meaning the visitor entered your site
through the link contained in your email, viewed campaign details/pages, and converted on the campaign
offer, most email solutions will not measure it.
You can make your entry pages useful by creating specific landing pages for each email marketing
campaign and make sure that each landing page is not linked to anything except the specified campaign.
That is, only the intended email marketing campaign should link to the page—nothing else on your web
site should link to it. Then the landing page redirects the visitor to the page that you want them to view.
To analyze the detailed interactions your email visitors have with your site beyond summary campaign
information such as the number of responses and conversions, you will need a WebTrends solution. If
visitors left campaign-centric pages, where did they go? What content groups or products (beyond the one
featured) most interested them? Did email recipients purchase products that weren’t featured in the
campaign? All of these questions can be answered by using WebTrends.
The following graphic shows a report that provides information about all types of campaigns, including
email marketing.
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13. Acquisition Metrics Summary
This report lets you compare different kinds of campaign types to see which are the most effective. Of
course, the effectiveness is related to how much money you are spending on each campaign.
Tracking Multiple Email Campaigns
You can use re-direct pages for handling a handful of email campaigns, but if you’re doing hundreds or
thousands of campaigns, this method is impractical. Instead you should use a parameter field containing a
parameter ID. The ID can be used to identify all of the attributes that make up the campaign, such as site
name (for example, MSN, Yahoo), program (3rd quarter ProductName upgrade), offer (25% off), creative
type (120x120 GIF banner), creative (race car image), and so forth. You can then use a translation file (via
WebTrends script or custom table lookups) to create reports on which attributes are most effective (for
example, did the race car image do better than the Flash movie of a tornado, or was the 25% off offer more
effective then the free year of support).
Summary
Acquisition is the most expensive step in getting visitors to your web site. Monetary expenditures on
advertising, search engines, newsletters, and similar campaign efforts often make up the largest share of a
company’s budget. But without visitors—especially qualified visitors—your web site is meaningless. Once
you have customers, you can work on converting and retaining them. Fortunately, conversion and retention
are far less expensive.
Finding the Features in WebTrends Products
The following paths will help you to find the topics discussed in this chapter in WebTrends.
Entry Pages and Referrers
Click Web Analysis > Report Configuration > Campaigns > New Campaign
Ad Campaigns
Click Web Analysis > Report Configuration > Campaigns
To create a report about ad campaigns, Edit a sample profile and click Visitor History. Make sure that
Campaign History is checked.
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14. Acquisition Metrics Worksheet Acquisition Metrics
Search Engines
Click Web Analysis > Report Configuration > Custom Reports > Reports or Dimensions
To create a report about search engines, Edit a sample profile and click Visitor History. Be sure to
check Search Engine History.
Acquisition Metrics Worksheet
Use the following worksheet to help understand how you want to acquire visitors.
Consideration Yes No Comments
Will you be using ad campaigns to
drive traffic to your site?
How many of these
campaigns do you need to track?
Do you complete test campaigns
before you begin the real ones?
Note: Test campaigns can help you
understand which campaigns work
the best.
Will you use redirect pages?
Do you intend to outsource the
creation of your ads and the serving
of your ads?
Will you track referrers?
Are you relying on statistics from
organic search engines?
Are you using paid search engines?
Will you use a email newsletter
campaign?
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