The Most Important Metric in the World
Pop quiz, hot shot: you have to run your site by keeping track of just one metric. What’s it gonna be? Bounce rate? Time on site? Conversion rate?
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
The most important element of anyone’s website is the customer. We should all know this by now, so it shouldn’t come as a shock—but no numbers or charts or data reports are going to help you aren’t devoted to your users. That’s the whole point of tracking what they’re doing online: to know what they’re doing so you can get out of their way and give them more of what they want.
Most of us typically worry about how to make customers click on this or sign up for that. Should we put a border around this box and maybe blow the font out on this widget? Maybe we should force a pop up when they do this so they can then go to this page, where they can buy the PDF.
Wrong, wrong, wrong! What we need to do is listen to our users—whether it’s via the analytics, surveys, user testing, etc. Anyway we have to see what our users are doing with our site or our product is a way to get a peek into what they want.
For example, when the first Mac came out Apple wasn’t supposed to be about desktop publishing—it was supposed to be all about spreadsheets and word processing. But Pagemaker changed the game. It was an unanticipated consequence that took Apple to the next level (Check out Guy Kawasaki talking about the Apple example).
You want to hear the best part? As a blogger or small-business owner, you have a HUGE advantage over larger companies with structured bureaucracies because they have very short-term goals that they need to meet. And they usually succumb to those pressures. As a small-business owner (which is what all bloggers really are), you don’t have to let those things get in your way of tending to your customers.
Avinash says it best in his book, Applied Analytics:
It is important not to underestimate the challenge of moving from a company (short-term) focus to a customer (long term) focus. It is extremely hard for most company employees to pull off (the mindsets are more entrenched the higher up you go in an organization).
Take heed, all you small-business owners: here is one advantage you have over the big boys. Please don’t waste it away—make sure you listen to your customers!
Image by 10ch