If you are not familiar with the classic arcade game, Frogger is a game featuring a loveable frog that you must safely navigate across a busy highway so that he may feast on the tasty bugs on the other side. It is simple enough, but I was thinking aboutthe topic of web analytics and metrics, and realized that the frog in the game has many of the same issues to consider that we do in measuring the success of our websites.
In order to get a handle on the performance of your site there are some key metrics that you should always be aware of: Traffic, Bounce, Overlay, and Conversion. These are not the be all end all, but generally these few simple metrics can give you a really good picture of how your site is performing.
Traffic is obviously a key to the frog trying to get to the other side, same goes for your site, if no one visits you need to work on your SEO and content production.
Bounce rate is a measurement of the type of traffic that is hitting your page, a high bounce rate means people are visiting and clicking away quickly. The lower your bounce rate, the better your site.
Conversion is simple; it is how many times you get the frog to the other side, it is the percentage of visitors that complete a task on your site. (Sales, email address entry, etc.)
Lastly, overlay. Overlay is a tool that you can use to see where people are most often clicking. Examining the success of those areas can help you craft the rest of the page to match. If you are continually having success on a particular path across the Frogger highway, it makes sense to stick with that formula and the same goes with your website.
These metrics are available to you free through tools like Google Analytics and they can help you guide and tweak your site into a sales powerhouse so take advantage!
Ride Like A Penguin Chapter 13: Measure It Again
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okm0VtF2gH8[/youtube]