Digital Marketing – Life beyond Averages

Averages are great right? They give you quick overviews of how you’re digital marketing efforts are getting on. However they can be misleading, and cause you to miss important areas.

In Adwords you can view average position and cost per click, while in Analytics you have average such as time on site and page views. These metrics are fantastic for giving you a quick overview of how your accounts are performing across a given period but they shouldn’t be used to make key strategic decision regarding your campaigns.

So what should you look at instead of averages?

Depending on where you look online, you’ll find different advice on the Google Analytics metrics you should be looking at. (In fact for the search “What should I look at in Google Analytics” I was faced with 103 million results).  A lot of them do say that you can look at average this, and average that but the bottom line of this, is that averages can be misleading.

Quick Example

Take the average time on site metric; the following headline stat of 2 minutes 15 doesn’t look too bad at first glance:

However when you look beyond the average time, 75% of the visits are actually below 1 minute, which probably means your users aren’t engaging with your site as much as you think. The 1% of visits over 30 minutes are in fact skewing your results and hiding the fact that a lot of visitors are not engaging with your site for the 2 minutes 15 seconds.

In short I don’t recommend discrediting averages completely, but view them with caution and always look beyond them when making key decisions.

The same can be applied to your Adwords because an average position of 3 within your Adwords account doesn’t necessarily mean your advert has appeared there all of the time. It may have been in position 1 some of the time and position 5 some of the other time. Delve deeper and check out the keyword position report for more detailed data.