When renewing an online service, two challenges are often encountered: the current need to measure site results and the incomplete implementation of analytics in the old online service. 

In practice, this means that there may not necessarily be a good benchmark for new metrics, and the business objectives of the new service must be set bravely based on intuition. Ambitious goals should not be feared, as long as it is accepted that achieving them may require time and continuous development.

Good and Bad Metrics

Although the old online service may not have advanced analytics, there are some basic things you can examine yourself even before choosing a design partner.

The most commonly examined metrics are the bounce rate, number of pages viewed per user (Pages/Session) and time spent on site (Avg. Session Duration). However, these are incomplete and easily misleading metrics for many reasons.

Simplified, the bounce rate includes those user sessions (i.e. sessions) where no interaction has occurred after entering the site. Interaction here means moving from one page to another or functionalities occurring on the page, such as using the search function.

Time spent on site measures the time between arriving on the site and the last interaction of the session. In practice, if a user comes via a search engine to the content page they are looking for and leaves after reading the entire page from start to finish, in Google's eyes, this is counted as a bounce, and the time spent on the site is zero seconds.

Bounce rate is also such a crude metric that you can't practically draw any reasonable conclusions from changes of a percentage or two. The same applies to the other two metrics mentioned above. Of course, if the bounce rate is well over 50, it is worth considering the reasons.

Moreover, these metrics do not take into account at all what kind of users the service's traffic consists of. An example from real life: the address of a company's website targeting a narrow B2B audience was mistaken for the service of a large international concert ticket provider. Such a situation easily leads to a disproportionately high bounce rate, even if the service serves its actual target audience very well.

Analytics Reveal What Works

For the renewal of the service, more essential information is what content works well in the old service and whether there are pages or functions that users cannot find. In Google Analytics, you can find this information most easily under Behavior > Site Content > Content Drilldown. In this view, you see which main sections of the site have the most traffic, and you can correspondingly examine the traffic amounts on the lower levels of the main sections.

In the same Site Content section, you will find the most common entry and exit pages. From the entry pages list, you can see which pages receive direct traffic from referring (i.e., sites that provide a direct link to your service) sites, search engines, or by users typing the address directly into the browser. From the exit pages, you can deduce where the user's path breaks, i.e., at which point users are not offered easy and meaningful routes to continue using the service.

Just as important as the usability of the service is its discoverability. You can examine the shares of different traffic channels (direct traffic, referring sites, social media, search engines) from the Acquisition > Overview in Google Analytics. Plan how you can increase the share of search engines, social media, and referring sites compared to direct traffic in the future.

The examples in this writing strongly focus on the use of Google's tools. It is good to remember that there are also other strong alternatives available in their own way. As a quick example, different heat mapping tools such as Hotjar and Crazy Egg. If you want a quick understanding on a page by page basis of what links are most clicked in the current service, install or have one of these installed at the start of the renewal project.

How to Get Started?

Do some light groundwork:

1. Determine which are the most used pages and functions on the site.

2. Identify which key content you fail to direct users to.

3. Conduct a light keyword analysis of those terms most important to your company and check if you could reach more traffic with some synonyms. Simple tools for this are Google Trends and Google Keyword Planner.

4. Consider what metrics demonstrate the effective operation of your service and how the renewal of the service can pay for its cost.

This way you are in a better position when starting discussions with potential suppliers. SEO optimisation from the perspective of content and naming should also be done well in advance of the actual interface design.

Consider choosing a separate SEO partner at the start of the project or select a design partner who understands the value of analytics and metrics. Both the SEO partner and the service designer benefit from the use of analytics, albeit in slightly different ways. It is also worth asking if the supplier has certified their staff in the use of analytics tools.