Customer Loyalty and Time Online
How popular is your Web site? How do visitors use it? If a user returns regularly, what is their motivation?
Many traditional Web analysis techniques can answer these questions for you but only to a certain point. Basic session and hit counts, for instance, can outline how popular your site is in aggregate terms.
Detailed study of client clickstream analysis and mean path reports can divulge how your site is used on a page-by-page basis. However, neither report can reveal if a visitor actually liked your site, whether they found it useful or if it is fulfilling its intended objectives.
Perhaps the most important (and least quantifiable) criterion site owners should use to measure their site's success is how well they are satisfying the "human-level" needs and wants of their users. Different types of sites should use different types of "measuring rods" when assessing their overall human-level value.
Some sites present vast archives of information. For these sites, having users spend a lot of time browsing means they are meeting their goal. It means visitors are finding the information valuable enough to spend time reading and digesting it.
These types of sites (especially those which serve specialty markets) aren't concerned if users don't return on a regular basis, as the data they provide isn't the type of information a user needs to access on a regular basis. For them, the most important factor is how long people stay.
Other sites,however, deliver small quantities of information to be accessed quickly. For example, if your site provides stock quotes, you won't be overly concerned with how long users stay when they visit. The measure of success for sites like these is how often users are returning.
In addition to its many powerful conventional analysis capabilities, Funnel Web also includes a "Circulation Frequency" report that reveals, based on the total number of user sessions your site received during the analysis period, how often people are returning to your site.
For instance, you may find that the majority of users visit only once and never return. Others come back once a week, others once a day and some are visiting several times a day.
Funnel Web's "Time Online" report will balance out this view of your site by documenting the time users spend browsing during each user session. From this report, you'll find a majority of users linger for less than a minute before leaving your site while others spend significantly longer periods of time online (even hours) looking at the information on your site.
The last and most telling report to consider when summing up your site's human-level value is the "Loyalty" report, which shows how many requests users are making during an average session.
Sites with large amounts of archived data should be comfortable with users spending long periods of time on the site while making very few requests. This means users are finding what they want quickly without wasting time browsing through irrelevant pages.
Sites delivering more specific types of information, however, will want their users to be making a large number of requests during a given session, since this means their audience is exploring the full measure of what their site has to offer.
When building a site and analyzing its success, successful developers must keep the "human element" at the forefront of their design and marketing strategies.
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