Evaluate a Transactional Site

From Research Intelligence > Company Research > Website Analysis, enter a website you would like to analyze.

From the left menu, select Audience > Traffic and Engagement and select Monthly Visits. The monthly visits help us understand the total reach of a site. This can be trended out YoY to reveal true growth or decline. Unique visitors can be used to indicate the actual reach of a website.

Next, go to Acquisition > Marketing Channels. This view reveals the paths through which people arrive at the site. Direct traffic indicates brand awareness and recognition. Organic search is traffic coming from search engines for branded or non-branded search terms. Paid search volume shows search terms that they are paying for via search engines.

Visit Research Intelligence > Company Research > App Analysis Overview > Engagement to understand the website’s app performance. App downloads represent the number of devices the app has been downloaded on over a specified time period. However, some people will download without actually using the app, so further investigation is required. Use this metric to evaluate the growth rate of an App. Correlate this data with events to see how it influenced app acquisition (i.e., app updates, reviews, promotions, etc.).

By benchmarking one site against the industry or its competitors, we can get insights into how the site performs relative to the market. From Research Intelligence > Company Research > Website Analysis, enter a website you would like to analyze and then select a site to compare. Navigate to Audience > Traffic and Engagement. Evaluate and compare the quality of each site’s traffic/engagement with the site. The data can be trended over time to look for any seasonality or anomalies.

Competitors can be benchmarked under App Analysis and trended over time to see the install penetration rate between the two. Install Penetration represents the percentage of Android devices that have the application installed out of the total Android devices in the selected market.

Benchmark the two sites by looking at Marketing Channels under Research Intelligence > Company Research > Website Analysis > Acquisition. By comparing the differences in the share of marketing channels, we can see the differences in user acquisition strategy and brand awareness.

When analyzing a site and looking at key engagement metrics, we can see the site's effectiveness and the audience’s engagement.

This data was pulled for Asos.com, looking at the past 24 months. The pulled metrics included monthly visits, unique visits, deduplicated audience, visit duration, pages per visit, and bounce rate.

Effectiveness can be measured by looking at App data and giving you a holistic view of both website and app metrics.  From the App side, we can calculate the Daily Active Users (DAUs). DAU’s represent the number of unique users who use the analyzed app daily in the analyzed country. Use this metric to assess an app’s stickiness compared to other apps.

Look at: trends in bounce rate, pages per visit, and average visit duration, over time... If there happens to be an increase in bounce rate over time, that could be a concern as the audience is less engaged with the site.

Benchmark these engagement metrics against competitors to spot any trends within the Traffic and Engagement section.

Look at: trends in bounce rate, pages per visit, and average visit duration, over time. If there happens to be an increase in bounce rate over time, that could be a concern as the audience is less engaged with the site.

To understand volume, from Research Intelligence > Company Research > Website Analysis, enter a website you would like to analyze.

In the left menu, select Overview > Subdomains.

Subdomains: Domains under the single parent site, but start before the domain name (i.e., secure.xyz.com). Depending on the structure of the site, it is sometimes easy to spot a secure site, which is indicative of someone going through a secure checkout process. It might not be clear for every site, so it helps to look at the Subdomain section to identify this.

Once identified, we can see the secure domain and the share of traffic sent to this subdomain. You can export this data and estimate the traffic being sent to this subdomain and what the potential conversions are.

In the left menu, select Website Structure > Pages.

Pages: Shows the popular URLs that are capturing traffic share for the site.* Here, we can look to identify shopping carts, login pages, and even thank you/confirmation pages. This indicates the shopping cart process and what share of traffic is going to the thank you or order confirmation pages.

* The methodology for pageviews is different than how we calculate web traffic as the pages need to capture a certain threshold of traffic for us to include in this section.