Analytics for non-eCommerce websites

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A quick Google search about Analytics yields an abundance of articles on how to use analytics to gain insight into how visitors use your website. This insight is vital to optimizing conversion rates. Often, this is in the context of lead capturing, dropping that lead into some variation of a sales funnel with the goal of a hard conversion or sale. Do a similar search for “Analytics for non-ecommerce websites” reveals a void of useful information. The goal of this article is to help fill that void.

You’re doing Analytics wrong
This topic became of particular interest to me when I landed a Government client last year. This client, who will remain nameless for privacy issues, hired me as an SEO expert to help bring structure and direction to their communications strategies. Research into the organization’s web presence and how they use analytics revealed they were doing it wrong.

Fundamentally, the practice of gathering Analytics data is a way to measure success. It’s how you use this data that will transform your organization into a data driven business. Traditionally, analytics data is used to:

1. gain insight into how visitors are using your website
2. give you information you can use to make business decisions that grow your business
3. optimize conversion rates like leads and sales

However, as traditional conversion rate measurement does not apply to non-ecommerce websites that are strictly informational, one must define what success means to them or to their organization. If you find yourself using data to just generate reports you do nothing with, you have to get creative and define what success means to you.

The organization from my example fits perfectly into this category. They had:

1. No products to sell
2. And no services to sell

So how do you measure the success using analytics for non-ecommerce websites where visitors come to your website, consume content and leave?

Analytics for Non-Ecommerce websites

1. Loyalty
2. Recency
3. Length of Visit
4. Depth of Visit

Visitor loyalty
Visitor loyalty is defined as: During the reporting time period how often do "people" ("visitors") visit my website?

To measure the loyalty of your visitors you need to know how many times, within they date range you are measuring, they visit your site.

Recency
Recency is simply How long has it been since a visitor last visited your website?

Length of visit
How much time are visitors on your site consume content before they leave

Depth of visit
How many pages do they consume in each visit.


There are just a few examples. You can setup a newsletter and use the number of registrations as a measure of success. Get creative, and define what success means to you!



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