When updating an online service, two challenges are often encountered: the modern requirement to measure website performance and the insufficient implementation of analytics in the old online service. 

This essentially means that there may not necessarily be a good benchmark for new metrics, and the business goals of the new service must be boldly set based on intuition. One should not fear ambitious targets, as long as it is accepted that achieving these goals may require time and continuous development.

Good and Bad Metrics

Even if the old online service does not have advanced analytics, there are certain basics that can be examined independently even before choosing a design partner.

The most commonly focused metrics are bounce rate, pages per session, and average session duration. However, these are incomplete and can be easily misleading for various reasons.

Simplified, bounce rate includes those user sessions where no interaction occurs after arriving at the site. Interaction here means navigating from one page to another or engaging in functionality within the page, such as using search features.

Time spent on site measures the time between arriving at a site and the last interaction of a session. Practically, if a user arrives via a search engine to the exact content page they are looking for and leaves after reading the entire page from top to bottom, this is considered a bounce by Google, and the time spent on the site is recorded as zero seconds.

Bounce rate is also such a crude metric that fluctuations of a percentage point or two do not provide any sensible conclusions. The same applies to the other two metrics mentioned above. Naturally, if the bounce rate is well over 50, then it's worth considering the reasons behind this.

Moreover, these metrics do not consider which types of users constitute the service traffic. An example from real life: a company's website targeting a narrow B2B audience was confused with 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 well.

Analytics Reveals What Works

For the redesign of a service, it is more crucial to know which content performs well in the old service and whether there are any pages or features users cannot find. This information can be most easily found in Google Analytics under Behavior > Site Content > Content Drilldown. Here, you can see which main sections of the site receive the most traffic and examine the traffic levels of lower tiers within the main sections.

From the same Site Content section, you can find the most common entrance and exit pages. From the list of entrance pages, you can see which pages receive direct traffic from referring sites (i.e., sites providing direct links to your service), search engines, or through direct typing of the address into the browser. Exit pages help determine where a user's path ends, meaning where users are not provided easy and meaningful routes to continue using the service.

Service discoverability is just as important as its usability. You can evaluate the share of different traffic channels (direct traffic, referring sites, social media, search engines) in Google Analytics under Acquisition > Overview. 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 article concentrate heavily on using Google's tools. It's worth remembering that there are other strong alternatives available in their ways. A quick example includes various heat mapping tools like Hotjar and Crazy Egg. If you want a quick insight into what links are most clicked on in the current service page by page, install or have one of these installed at the start of the refresh project.

How to Get Started?

Do some light groundwork:

1. Identify the most frequently used pages and features on the site.

2. Determine which key content areas you're not directing users to.

3. Conduct a basic keyword analysis on the terms most important to your business and check if using some synonyms could attract more traffic. Simple tools for this are Google Trends and Google Keyword Planner.

4. Consider what metrics indicate successful service performance and how the service redesign can pay for itself.
   
   
   

This way, you are better positioned to start discussions with potential suppliers. It's also beneficial to engage in SEO optimization from the perspective of content and naming well before beginning actual user interface design.

Consider selecting a separate SEO partner at the start of the project, or choose a design partner that understands the value of analytics and metrics. Both an SEO partner and the service designer benefit from using analytics, albeit in slightly different ways. It's also worth inquiring whether the supplier has certified its staff in using analytics tools.

Did this topic resonate with you? Book a time in Tom's calendar and let's discuss further!