What Should Our Web Site Measure?

With 8 million customers around the globe ordering business cards, letterhead and other printed materials from its online venue, VistaPrint executives understand the power of Web analytics for uncovering customer trends. Getting the most of out their data was a matter of measuring -- and acting on -- the right metrics.

It took Nick Ruotolo, VistaPrint's vice president of analytics, several months to realize that general site metrics, such as the conversion rate, drop out rates, and average order value, weren't truly actionable. These metrics were merely outcomes, not the means to the outcome. Ruotolo now has a new analytics strategy: measuring the performance of very specific critical site paths.

"We use conversion funnels to track users' step by step success rates as they traverse these paths," he explains. Conversion funnels demonstrate each step of the conversion process, and pinpoint where visitors dropped out of the conversion process. By applying this technique, Ruotolo says he has identified very specific site improvements that have made positive impacts on VistaPrint's bottom line.

Keeping an Eye on the Prize

Focusing on key, actionable metrics led VistaPrint to test a redesigned version of its file upload path that aimed to streamline the process. When the conversion rate didn't change, Ruotolo didn't stop testing. Instead, he continued drilling down into the metrics. He hit the analytics jackpot when he compared the dropout rates of each step of the navigational paths and discovered that the redesigned version had a much higher dropout rate on one of the steps.

"We were then able to focus our attention and subsequently fix that one page of the path, resulting in a significantly higher conversion rate -- about 5 percent -- for the redesigned version," Ruotolo says. "Had we only relied on the high-level conversion rate as a metric, we never would have...