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Visitor / Customer Metrics and Reporting

What are actionable metrics?  When you read a report containing actionable metrics, you call somebody and say "Do this and we will make more money" or "Stop this because we are losing money on it".  You have a daily or weekly meeting to run through the reports with key decision makers  - and people want to come to the meeting because they can make profit generating decisions and track the results of these decisions.

Here's what you need to know to 
create actionable customer metrics:

• Which data is meaningful and important
  to collect and which data can be ignored
  
• How to aggregate data without losing the 
  most important action-oriented details
  
• How to create simple but powerful metrics
  that really mean something to the profitability
  of your business - without bringing in a 
  Ph.D. statistician
  
• How to turn these metrics into a "where we
  are now" benchmarking report to measure
  future performance and quantify your 
  contribution to increased profitability

Here are some of the metrics we will use,
if analyzing web site performance:

Visitor Quality: Audience / Content match

Visitor Engagement: Design / Navigation

Here are some of the metrics we will use, 
if analyzing purchase or service behavior:

Recency
Frequency
Latency
Transaction Value or Cost
Category or Type
Initial Source
Initial Context
Payment Type
Return or Defect Rate

Here's how you use the metrics:

• Measure the performance of your "front-end" - visitor / prospect to buyer conversion - and use these metrics to both improve average visitor conversion and attract new prospects who are more likely to convert in the first place
  
• Measure the performance of your "back-end" - converting first time buyers to repeat buyers - and use these metrics to both increase average repeat rate and attract buyers who are more likely to repeat in the first place
  
• Create the single most powerful metric - ranking visitors or customers by likelihood to visit or buy again
  
• Use these rankings as the cornerstone of a continuous improvement process for maximizing the profitability of a web site or business - check the impact of design changes, advertising campaigns, strategy changes, product and content decisions

What would you like to do now?

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