Key Performance Indicators - KPIs

Page stickiness is one of the most useful metrics there is.   It gives a powerful insight into how your site is working and is vital when it comes to pay per click advertising.

Page stickiness is quite simply the proportion of visitors who enter a site at a particular page and then go on to visit more pages in the site. 

It is defined as

Its converse is bounce rate, ie the number of visitors who enter the site at a certain page then bounce straight off again without going further into the site.

I always recommend working with metrics that are defined so that a rise is good, so I work with stickiness rather than bounce.  (It is vital to be able to identify quickly and accurately any problem areas and take immediate actions.  Simply looking for any metrics that are going down is the easiest way of doing this and ensures that problems are very unlikely to missed.). 

 

Home page stickiness

Every webmaster should know how sticky, or not, is his site’s home page.  Most home pages are the biggest single entry point for a site, so if a significant number are not getting beyond it, you have a problem.  Of course, that begs the question, what level of stickiness is acceptable? 

I aim for at least 60%.  Below 55% I am worried and anything above 70% I feel is positively glue-like.

But web metrics is all about action, so if the home page stickiness is below the target, what does it indicate and what should you be looking at?

Graphical design

Is the home page attractive?  Is the design in keeping with the target market?  What would be ideal for a site selling ring tones is not going to work for a site selling mortgages. 

Keyword focus

Is the website promotional campaign well focused.  Look at your stats to see which keywords visitors are using to enter your site on the home page.  If they do not relate closely to what your site is offering then people are not going to stay.  This applies to all pages.  I was working with a client’s site recently which included a biography of one of the contributors to the site.  This bio page was picking up a large amount of traffic from visitors interested in the contributor, but they were not interested in the products the site is offering.  The result was a stickiness of less than 10%.

Call to action

If your visitors cannot easily see where to go next to find the information or product they are interested in, then they are going to leave your site.  The problem here might be page design, navigation or simply the whole site has not been thought through well enough.

Pay per Click landing pages

If page stickiness is important for the home page, then it is vital when running page per click campaigns.  Here you have total control over the keyword, ie the word you are bidding on, and the page on which your visitor enters your site, the landing page.  This means that you should be aiming at a much high page stickiness level, something like 80%, especially bearing in mind that you are paying for all those that bounce straight off again!

 

Summary

Measure the page stickiness of your home page, your PPC landing pages and also important landing pages for your natural search optimisation campaigns.  The home page information will provide invaluable insight into how well your site is working overall, and landing page information will enable you to increase the effectiveness, and therefore ROI of both PPC and natural search campaigns.

20th April 2007