Nicholas opened this session by diving into the Google Analytics dashboard of our own Mequoda Daily and gave the audience 12 things that you want to track when using Google Analytics:

• Most Popular Content
• Page Views for Specific Post
• Page Views for Specific Topic
• Top Referring Website
• Top Keywords
• Arrivals by Keyword Phrase
• Arrivals by Keyword Cluster
• Visits by Country
• Bounce Rate by Traffic Source
• Email Conversion Rate by Rapid Conversion Landing Page
• Most Popular Internal Search Terms
• Top Landing Pages

One thing we found in the presentation is that people come to our website searching for the keywords we are using in our free reports and targeting in our articles, than they do simply searching for “Mequoda”. That’s a good thing, right?

Nicholas also noted that your bounce rate (people who come to your site and then leave) is less important than tracking your bounce rate by traffic source.

We often see publishers unsure of which metrics they should measure for online publishing success. Or more likely, they know which metrics are important, but they aren’t sure how to improve them. Or even more common, they aren’t sure how their numbers compare to other online publishers.

As long as the numbers are going up (or down, depending) you’re doing well. While there are plenty of metrics to pay attention to, we’ve found that acting on the results of these metrics can make all the difference in your online publishing business. Here are 5 ratios all online publishers must measure:

1. Google Visibility Index
2. Site-wide email conversion rate
3. Revenue per M (RPM) emails sent
4. Revenue per M (RPM) impressions
5. Email opt-out rate

These key metrics create a dashboard that tells the publisher how fast the website is growing and how that growth is being powered by the website team’s efforts.

1. Google Visibility Index

The question: Where am I in Google? Am I a wallflower, or am I one of Google’s key players?

Your Google Visibility index tells you where you rank on your most popular keywords. To calculate this ratio, you must know the keywords you’re looking to rank on. Using this metric, you can either define a successful page that is ranking well, or beef up pages that are not.

The ratio: Your Google Visibility Index metric is your estimated search impressions divided by total searches for a given keyword universe at a point in time.

2. Site-wide email conversion rate

The question: How many casual visitors to my site am I converting into email subscribers?

Any website analytics tool can measure your unique monthly visitors, but projecting optimal email conversion rate (ECR) requires a calculation.

Most publishers we’ve studied are only implementing one basic email capture on their site. Thus, they are only seeing a 0.1 to 0.2% web-to-email conversion rate.

Using the six types of conversion architecture, you will get the highest ECR.  These conversion architecture page elements are called OFIEs, OFINs, floater order forms, display ads, text ads, and simple text links. If you are using all six, you could be seeing a conversion rate as high as 12%.

If you can double your ECR, you will double the size of your subscriber file over five years (or any fixed period).

The ratio: To get your site-wide email conversion rate, divide the total number of new email subscribers you acquired via your website in one month by the total number of unique visitors you received in that month—5% is a good number.

3. Revenue per M (RPM) emails sent

The question: How much money do I make every time I send out an email?

Many publishers use email circulation as a primary metric for measuring their online success. We’ve seen revenue per email subscriber vary from $10 per year for B2C publishers to as high as $80 per year for B2B publishers.

Depending on your contact frequency, you can severely limit (or improve) your revenue per thousand emails sent.

The ratio: To get your revenue per M emails sent, the ratio is email revenue divided by emails sent, often in a single effort. Then, divide that number by 1000.

4. Revenue per M (RPM) impressions

The question: For every thousand impressions I get on my website, how much money am I making?

Your revenue per thousand impressions is a very critical metric, especially if you’re ad-driven. This metric can pinpoint productive or unproductive website design changes and can indicate how well your site converts casual visitors into paying customers.

The ratio: To get your revenue per M impressions, divide your website revenue by your number of unique visitors, for a specific period of time. Then, divide that number by 1000.

5. Email opt-out rate

The question: Am I serving my email audience? What causes them to opt-out?

As publishers, we focus on our email list moreso than possibly any other online business. Content is our specialty, and this is why we depend on email to keep our readers engaged and actively involved in our business.  This is also why it’s very important to track our opt-out rate, to effectively watch what our users respond to—and to change, when necessary.

The ratio: To get your email opt-out rate metric—both voluntary and bounced—divide your number of opt-outs by the average number of email subscribers for a given period.

Management by exception

We’re big fans of what we call “Management by Exception”, which means regularly reviewing a standard set of daily, weekly, or monthly metric reports, looking to see if something is above average, way above average, or way below average.

The idea is to manage for the things that are coming out differently than they have in the past or than you thought they would. These five metrics above will help alert you to any problems or opportunities you may have in your online business.

Compete.com is one of our staple tools for conducting market research and reporting key metrics. Today around noon, they launched “the new Compete.com”.

Their first facelift, back in 2007 was for their 1-year anniversary and focused on better usability and enhanced search capabilities. This time around, it’s all about functionality.

Before the site launched today, Compete promised users that there would be (1) user generated tagging, (2) improved graphing (3) daily digest emails and (4) an enhanced user interface.

When I privately messaged Compete on Twitter about the rollout, and what features would be free vs. paid, @compete told me that “all features will be free except for email digests, since those metrics are paid.”

When I asked them if they were heading in the direction of an entire analytics package, like Google Analytics, they humbly said, “that would be an honor – think Google Analytics with visibility into your competitors”. My thoughts exactly.

What popped out of the Compete womb today around 1pm EDT was pretty impressive. If there were ever a client-side analytics package that didn’t take any effort on your part, this would be it.

Let’s take a quick look at a before and after comparison of the free Compete.com tools (click the image to open the large version):

As you can see, the new interface looks a whole lot like Google Analytics (in a good way).

Possibly the most helpful new feature is the “Daily Digest”, which is a part of their paid membership. It works like “Google Alerts”, except that it sends you alerts when you reach certain metrics, get found on certain keywords, and tells you where your traffic is coming from.

If you’re a Compete.com member, go sign up for that digest!

About two years ago (almost to the day), I wrote a post on folksonomy, the process of naming things in the common language of your users; especially in tags.

With the new Compete.com, visitors can tag your site in their own words on Compete, which in turn helps you understand how users define a site, brand or product.

Currently, we use Compete.com as part of our key metrics toolkit to track unique visitors (currently under “Monthly Normalized Metrics” on the new site) and also as a client-side tool to track the number of keywords we have vs. our competitors, aka “Search Analytics”.

With the new Compete.com, you can more effectively compare your competitors all on the same page. If you compare BHG.com and MarthaStewart.com, you’ll now see:

• Unique Visitors
• Monthly Change %
• Yearly Change %
• Top Search Terms
• Top Referral Sites
• Top Destination Sites
• Top Tags

As a market comparison and research tool, this is just invaluable.

Helpful tips from Compete on their new redesign:

• Site Analytics is now named “Site Profiles”. Find detailed data on a single domain or use the Compare Sites report to benchmark across multiple domains. Search Analytics, Referral Analytics and Ranked Lists are all updated as well.
• As a registered MyCompete member, navigate to the sites that interest you. On the lower right hand corner of the page, add your tags or vote up community tags.
• Compare myspace.com’s UV’s vs. Pages/Visit. It is a great example of traffic trending down for MySpace, but visitors looking at more pages per visit—looks like the core audience is hanging around longer than ever.
• If you are a Compete PRO subscriber, run a Site Comparison report. Just below the “Compare” button click on “Add to Portfolio”. Once created, make sure that your email preferences for “Compete.com Portfolio Digest” are turned on to receive Daily Digests.

With their paid plan ($199-$499 monthly), you can get more in-depth reports and metrics. If you ever wanted to tap into your competitors’ back-end analytics, Compete.com is still (and now even more so) your best bet at an online spy.

To learn more about our key metrics toolkit and how you can develop a key metrics dashboard that works for your company, subscribe to Mequoda Pro for a full year at the low rate of just $197 per year.

How email newsletter contact frequency affects the annual value of an email newsletter subscriber

The online metrics of making your email newsletter yield more revenue

If he had been a consultant to our industry, the legendary Peter Drucker probably would have said something pithy like “measure your email revenue right, and measure the right email revenue.”

A Mequoda online publishing and marketing system measures revenue produced by email newsletters differently from the way that print publishers have traditionally measured the lifetime value of a subscriber.

So, how do you calculate the revenue a Mequoda System makes in a year? And when does it make sense to increase the frequency of your email newsletter?

Here’s the short course, and a clue as to why Mequoda Daily is poised to increase the frequency of its email newsletter to five times weekly.

Based on the 15 Mequoda Systems we have built for my consulting clients that were live for all of 2008, the average email newsletter had about 100,000 active email newsletter subscribers who are all potential paying customers.

The 15 email newsletters had circulation ranging in size from 3,500 to 210,000. These email subscribers pay nothing for their newsletters directly but monetize themselves by buying all manner of products and services that sponsor their email newsletter.

Many of these products and services carry the same brand as their email newsletter. The Mequoda Summit for example is the premiere sponsor for Mequoda Daily.

How much is each email newsletter subscriber worth?

The answer to that question is a function of contact frequency.

If you can average $50 in revenue per 1,000 emails sent to your email newsletter subscribers, and your contact frequency is daily (five mails per week), you’ll generate an average of five cents per subscriber every time you mail. At five times a week, that amounts to 25 cents per week or about $13 per year for every email newsletter subscriber.

So, if your average value per subscriber is $13, and you have 100,000 subscribers, your Mequoda publishing system is grossing $1.3 million annually.

Based on our experience with about a dozen Mequoda consulting clients for whom we have a full year of metrics, that’s about average. They range in revenue from $150,000 to about $3.5 million.

The revenue per subscriber for Mequoda Daily in 2008 was about $60, based on its current, three-times-weekly contact schedule. For most of 2008, we ran three email newsletters per week, which always include links to premium Mequoda information products.

The straight math suggests that if you generate $60 per subscriber per year based on a three-times-weekly contact schedule, you should be able to generate $100 per subscriber per year based on a five-times-weekly contact schedule.

However, this plan only succeeds if you have sufficient products to offer your loyal email newsletter subscribers. Plus, you need the online copywriting horsepower to create sufficient, engaging editorial content.

Mequoda Daily gets a new premier sponsor – Mequoda Pro

Between our new Mequoda Pro membership website, and the twice yearly Mequoda Summit, we believe we have enough premium product and related content to increase our average revenue per Mequoda Daily subscriber to $80 per year for 2009.

We don’t expect a straight, linear increase from $60 to $100. We expect the increase will be something less than that, but nevertheless substantial.

With Mequoda Pro, we have a brand new product — the ultimate publishing answer machine — designed exclusively for experienced online publishers, editors, marketers and webmasters who need 24/7/365 fast access to their toughest questions when they need them.

Mequoda Pro Members can ask any question about online publishing and marketing, and receive a detailed answer from me and the other members of the Mequoda Pro Research Team. Plus, Mequoda Pro Members get unlimited access to all eight Mequoda Pro Video training modules online. The special introductory price is only $197 annually.

Our other premiere product is the Mequoda Summit, a two-day conference that explains, in detail, the best practices for starting and running a profitable online publishing business. The program was a sellout in 2008, with a total of about 130 publishing professionals attending when we increased the frequency of the event to twice yearly.

The price of admission to the Mequoda Summit is now $1297. If you want to attend the bonus, one-day, SEO workshop, it’s just $497 more.

Even though the country is in the midst of an economic recession, most print publishers recognize that creating an effective online publishing and marketing program is not an option, if they want to survive in a Web 2.0 world. And with the barriers to entry lower than they have been any time in history, entrepreneurs are launching new Mequoda Systems at an ever increasing pace. We’ll help launch six new ones in the first six months of 2009 and cover dozens more right here in Mequoda Daily.

As I write this, registration for the forthcoming Mequoda Summit, is ahead of last year. So, we believe we have the depth of products to support our increase in customer contact frequency.

What about your email newsletter contact frequency? Does it make sense for you to increase the frequency of your email newsletter in 2009?

More than 50 years ago, legendary management consultant Peter Drucker was telling American businesses like General Motors that they didn’t know how to count.

More specifically, he said, “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” and “what’s measured improves.”

Today, those pithy observations are accepted as common wisdom. Computers help us record and count any and every interaction with our websites and content management systems. But all too frequently, the result is more confusion than clarity.

Anyone who has installed monitoring and reporting software in an attempt to measure what’s happening on their website knows you can easily become dazzled by the number and variety of variables. There are dozens of reporting systems you can use to make decisions, but you risk being overwhelmed with too much data.

So, we’re big fans of what we call “Management by Exception”, which means regularly reviewing a standard set of daily, weekly, or monthly metric reports, looking to see if something is above average, way above average, or way below average. The idea is to manage for the things that are coming out differently than they have in the past or than you thought they would.

Effective website publishers isolate and track a handful of operating statistics using a Key Metrics Dashboard that alerts them to problems and opportunities in their online business.

A Key Metrics Dashboard would provide you with more than enough data to know, at a glance, what items need immediate attention and enable you to spend your valuable time concentrating on more important issues.

As a website publisher, your primary concerns are search engine optimization (SEO), email performance and website traffic. Essentially you want to know the answers to the following 9 questions, plus the results of 5 calculations below:

1. How big is my website? Using the Yahoo Site Explorer tool, keep track of how many pages of content your site is being indexed on. The more the merrier!
2. How many links does my website have? Using the same Yahoo Site Explorer tool, keep track of how many inbound links your site is receiving from other website publishers.
3. How big is my audience? Many of you use internal metrics to measure your unique visitor count – you should also keep track of what free tools like Compete.com are reporting and understand how visitors are counted.
4. Which keywords do my audience use to find my website? Most internal metrics tools will tell you the keywords your audience is using to find your site. Compete.com also has a Search Analytics tool. Analyze your top terms and explore how you could be taking better advantage of that traffic, perhaps by putting stronger conversion architecture on those pages.
5. How popular are those keyword phrases? Using the free Google Keyword Tool, query how many people are searching for any particular keyword phrase per month.
6. How many other websites use those keyword phrases? “Google” the term in “quotation marks” and see how many competing web pages are using that term in an exact order. This tells you how many web pages are competing for that phrase.
7. How many times does that keyword phrase appear on the winning pages? Using a keyword density tool like KeywordDensity.com (for a specific search) or Motoricerca’s Keyword Density Analyzer (for a much broader search) you can analyze the keyword density on the winning pages.
8. Where does my website rank on that keyword phrase? Using a free tool like RankingCheck.com, or a paid tool like Advanced Web Ranking, see where your website ranks in Google on any given keyword phrase.
9. How fast does my homepage load? Using a free tool such as the Web Page Analyzer from WebsiteOptimization.com to test your website load time

Here are 5 ratios you need to know to run an online publishing business:

1. Google Visibility Index
   This is your estimated search impressions divided by total searches for a given keyword universe at a point in time.
2. Unique conversion rate
   Email adds divided by unique visitors for a specific period, normally a month – 5% is a good number.
3. Revenue per M (RPM) emails sent
   Email revenue divided by emails sent, often a single effort.
4. Revenue per M (RPM) impressions
   Website revenue divided by unique visitor, for a specific period of time.
5. Email opt-out rate
   Email opt-outs – both voluntary and bounced – divided by average email subscribers for a given period.

In a session called “Realizing Business Value from Web 2.0: An IBMer’s Perspective on ROI, Metrics and Anti-Patterns” at the Web 2.0 Expo today in NYC, Aaron Kim delivered some Web 2.0 metrics to think about.

Supply Metrics (good, but not the same as business value)

• Number of wiki articles
• Number of wiki contributors
• Number of wiki registered users
• Contributors per page
• Editing activity per page
• Number of blog posts
• Number of bloggers
• Number of social bookmarks
• Number of communities
• Number of forum posts

Demand Metrics (think conversions!)

• Page Content views (includes mouse-over)
• Searches that are satisfied by user-generated content
• Searches that are not fulfilled (helps to understand what content is in high demand and low supply, or just not “discoverable”
• Comments by blog posts
• Replies to forum posts
• Social bookmarks per blog / blog posts

Qualitative Metrics

• Create a simple questionnaire based on the business objectives you are trying to achieve and measure it on key project milestones: before implementation (baseline), after pilot, after training sessions, after 6-12-24 months.

Kim’s Food for Thought:

• There’s an ROI for calculating ROI
• Funding is a scarce resource
• Bean counters prefer projects where ROI is easier to calculate
• Corporate strategy often entails a decision on what NOT to invest on
• Even when a decision is made to invest on Web 2.0 and Social computing, a measurement framework is required to decide which alternative to pursue
• It’s important to track progress compared to targets: when should you stop investing in something?

More notes and quotes from the Web 2.0 Expo (and still more to be added so stay tuned):

A (Mostly) Free SEO Toolbox

7 Ways to Get Ranked in Google

Web 2.0 Supply & Demand Metrics

Is Web 2.0 Worth It?

Customer Service is the New Marketing

Why is SEO Important?

7 Reasons Why Search Engines Are Your Friends