When defining site effectiveness most of us use headline statistics such as Visits, Page Views, etc but for sites devoted to providing information and news, ie Content Sites rather than e Commerce, this does not provide an accurate or useful picture. To get greater insight into how visitors are making use of a Content site or the Content part of a site we can define two key measurements, User Loyalty and User Engagement.

First User Engagement. Google Analytics provides on the Dashboard two useful indicators ie Pages per Visit and Avg. Time on Site. Next, in the Visitors section > Visitor Loyalty there are two further indicators of how engaged visitors are with the site – Length of Visit and Depth of Visit. Taken together these 4 give a clear measure of how `engaged` users are with the site.

To measure the overall User Loyalty we can consider 3 figures. First, from the Dashboard we can deduce the percentage of returning visitors from the % New Visits figure. Second, we can determine how many visitors make more than 3, 4, 5 (whatever number we choose) visits per month from: Visitors > Visitor Loyalty > Loyalty. Finally the number of Visits divided by the number of Unique Visitors will give the average number of visits per visitor.

While average figures can be useful they rarely provide the all important `actionable insight` that we really need. To make the User Loyalty and User Engagement metrics as defined above really useful we can do two things. First we group pages or sections of interest together so that the people who author material can see clearly how the audience is responding . Secondly, segment by Traffic Sources ie direct, referring site, PPC, etc so we can see what the `best`traffic is coming from. In this way we get real insight into how each part of the site is performing.
Fortunately Google have now provided a really easy way to do all this selection of pages and sources in Google Analytics – The Advanced Segments feature. This feature allows non programmers to easily segment any group of pages and see all historical data for them. Something that until now was not possible in GA. Well worth checking out.