The Real Web Analytics Measures People, Not Pageviews

Penn Olson features start-ups. Find out more here.

A typical web business would rely on Google Analytics’s funnel analysis to understand user behavior. Usually a goal is achieved when someone signs up as a user or completes a form. It’s a good analytics to start with, but there is one major problem: it measures pageviews, not people.

Think about it. People pay you, not pageviews. The same user can visit your site multiple times a day and this often inflates your pageviews count. Whatever analyses you have concluded are probably flawed. Business decisions are made and executed based on your conclusions and you wonder why they don’t work out right. It’s a common problem, but with a solution:

KISSmetrics is a person-based web analytics, which has already helped web brands like Etsy, SlideShare and Zappos to understand their business better. Besides collecting data via cookies, the team runs the extra mile to consolidate customer behavior whether they’re browsing on their laptop or iPad.

“While no system is perfect, we use a variety of advanced technologies to maintain persistent identities beyond just cookies. An identity could be any unique identifier, like an ID number or email address,” said Sean Work, KISSmetrics media officer when asked on person-based web analytics.

For your information, KISS stands for ‘Keep It Simple Stupid’. Analyzing your web data is as easy as understanding this chart:

Keeping Your Business Lean

It’s all about keeping your business lean. With proper analytics tools, you get to validate hypotheses and assumptions you might have about your business with customers quickly. The goal is to avoid wasting effort on products that people don’t want. On top of that, KISSmetrics helps to answer crucial questions, which are directly linked to your bottom line. For example:

– ‘Where are your highest-converting customers coming from?’

– “Where are you losing visitors?’

– ‘Where should you focus your development attention next?