That being said, Brian Clifton, who commented earlier in this post, has a fantastic white paper about web analytics in general and also wrote a great post on this subject.

Hope that helps.

Shelby

Thanks
Marcelo

I am surprised at the Omniture trainer’ response, as Matt Belkin has blogged along the same lines as my post some years ago. I guess trainers are feature experts/sales evangelists i.e. don’t consult directly with clients and therefore lack that crucial experience you have.

Anyhow, I see my friend Stephane has responded with some good points – he is always around the same hang-outs as me these days Point 2 is valid, but I do strongly believe EVERY visit is an opportunity to convert.

Of course, when reporting to senior management, removing bounces (single page visits or visits less than X seconds) is key to communicating your ‘effective conversion rate’. That is, “removing the noise, our conversion rate is…”

My point is that the conversion goal for each visit, same visitor is not going to be the same i.e. a conversion for a ‘info researcher’ can be the download of a PDF prospectus, whereas when the visitor is in ‘sales’ mode the conversion is the enrolment.

The key is that visitors have different mind sets and therefore different conversion goals during the sales life cycle. Its the opposite to the Persuasion Architecture (or persona) approach pioneered by Future Now. But that’s for another post/article…

Brian

@Stéphane – I think you hit the nail on the head when you said, “Web analytics is excellent to assess the behavior of a population segment, not to account for 1-1 relationship with what should be handled by core corporate systems.”

Your insight into using visits is excellent. Point definitely taken.

We are often pressured to come up with a 1-1 relation with web traffic and, unless your site forces authentication, that’s virtually impossible. Therein lies the problem.

@Ted S – Brian hits home your point about access points on his blog. He has a specific scenario that is very common.

Thanks all for your comments. I appreciate it.

Don’t get me wrong. Those that know me know I am a web analytics evangelist. Especially in higher education, it is so needed and so under-utilized. We need to use the tool for what it *can* do, though, not try to force it to be used for things that can be so misleading.

Wouldn’t it be great if all sites forced people to log in? I kid. I kid.

But even forgetting cookie deletion and blocking, the issue of multiple access points alone erodes the metric. For most sites people are already using multiple access points — home PCs, work machines, mobile devices and that’s only going to go up.

While it’s not 90% of visits I think it does have a major impact. In web analytics we often measure for goals of 2-4% thus if just 10% of people clear cookies over a month span and 10% use multiple browsers your 3% conversion rate is really 3.75% of distinct people – a significant difference.

Of course trying to explain the fault in the metric always raises the question “well just how wrong is the number” and “how do we get a better picture”. I’m not sure there’s an answer yet to either question but seeing as how the issue is only going to grow it’s one that does have to be addressed… Visits don’t look at enough time span and uniques don’t account for the true nature of an individual anymore.

My 2 cents
Stéphane