Google Analytics and the “Per Visit Value” Metric

While there are many different pieces of software out there for analyzing web traffic, Google Analytics reins king (partially because it is free). With the myriad of stock reports and statistics in Analytics, even the novice Webmaster can find useful information on the following:

1. Top traffic sources

2. Top keywords sending traffic

3. Top landing pages

4. Most viewed pages

5. User behavior

1. Pages/Visit

2. Time Spent on site

3. Bounce rate

This list goes on for quite a while… but I’ll stop there. Point is – Out of the box, Google Analytics is an integral part of your intelligence gathering when examining your website and/or marketing campaign.

To get a little more advanced, we are going to examine the pages on our site that have the highest value in relation to our “goals”. For ecommerce sites with ecommerce tracking enabled – this will be revenue generated by your products. In other scenarios, you may specify a value for your Goal completion (i.e. you sell an e-book worth $100).

This bring us to the little metric know as $index. You can’t get anymore than “money index”! Here is Google’s definition of $index:

“$Index is a metric designed to apply the value from goals and ecommerce revenue to contributing pages in your site. You can use $Index to rank the value of those website pages that contribute to a goal conversions. In this way, you can identify the most valuable pages on your site.”

Now it’s time to bring the idea behind this little metric into a custom report to find:

1. The most important landing pages on our site in terms of revenue

2. The least important landing pages on our site in terms of revenue.

Step one – Let’s “create a custom report” from the left sidebar. Once we are in the custom report dashboard, we need to add some “metrics” and “dimensions” in order to correlate the data we are looking to find. Luckily, this is quite simple, as we only need 2 Metrics and 1 dimension to find the most important and least important pages.

Metrics:

1. Under the “Site Usage” tab – drag “entrances” over to our metrics area of the custom report.

2. Under the “Ecommerce” tab – drag “per visit value” over to our metrics area of the custom report.

Dimensions:

1. Under the “content” tab – drag “Landing Page” over to our dimensions area of the custom report.

That’s it for building our report! Now that we’ve got this ready to go, lets move to filtering our data slightly to find the most powerful and least powerful landing pages.

Most powerful landing pages:


The simplest way to do this is by ordering our “per visit value” column in a descending fashion. This will order our pages by the highest per visit value. The downside to this ordering is that you may run into a ton of pages with high values, but only 1 entrance. While important, it’s time consuming and may hurt your brain when trying to grasp optimizing your site for these types of pages.

Lets create a filter to remove these pages. Click “advanced filter” and set the “visits” metric to greater than or equal to something like “20”. Now this report will have a little more useful data as these pages are consistently bringing in good traffic and also have a high “per visit value”.

Least powerful landing pages:

Just as we did with the first option, we can simply order the “per visit value” column to an ascending order to find pages with little or no “per visit value”. Again we run into the problem of too many low traffic pages skewing our data.

There are two options:

1. Set our “advanced filter” to only show visits greater than or equal to “20” as we did in the previous report.

2. Set our “advanced filter” to show only a “per visit value” of “zero” or something very low. Once we have constricted the results to only low value visits, we can order the “visits” column to descending to find our pages that bring in the most traffic, yet don’t help convert sales.

In conclusion, these custom reports allow you to gauge areas of your site in which you should focus attention. With high “per visit value” traffic, these pages are very important and should receive prominent position in your internal link architecture. Low “per visit value” landing pages should either be de-valued in your internal link architecture (subsequently empowering your other pages at the same time) or if you feel as if they should be converting sales – you may want to address some conversion aspects on these pages (Copy, usability, calls-to-action, etc..).