Unique Visitors.  Time Spent On Site.  Repeat Visitors.  Bounce Rates.  These metrics and so many more and quickly becoming less a means of determining how well your site is performing.  Unique Visitors was supposed to tell us about the reach we were generating, while things like Time Spent on Site and Repeat Visitors was all about “engagement.”  And of course, the Bounce Rate told us how appealing our site was; if you will it spoke of “interest” to the visitor.

So the formula and approach for measuring success was simple.  We run a bunch of TV, print and outdoor that has a URL in it.  Of course that URL is written in minuscule font and only up for 1/2 a second during the spot, but I digress.  All these people see this URL and of course say, hey, I’ve been itching to visit a site about erectile dysfunction, so they type it in and come to the site.  After all this is a sequential process, right?  I mean we’ve only seen the path to purchase funnel a billion times over our careers.  And then after you visit the site, you’re of course going to spend gobs and gobs of time getting all the information you need.  Then, even though you have all this information you’ll of course want to come back multiple times to read all this information again and again.

Perhaps, my favorite misconception is that more time spent on site is better than less.  I’ve seen situation after situation where the reason time spent on site is so high is because the site is to difficult to navigate that you can’t find what you’re looking for.  I think you’re starting to see the lunacy of this model.

Today, though, the means for how we evaluate the performance of a site are even less relevant because simply put, people just don’t want to spend on your website.  They’d rather hang out on youTube, Facebook, etc.  This is why brands are rushing to build real estate on those sites.  So great, you’ve built a Facebook Business/Fan page.  You have 100s of thousands of followers who spending time “engaging” with your brand on Facebook.  Well, doesn’t it reason that if they’re spending time with you there, it’s coming at the expense of spending time on your website?  So, why is it so difficult to wrap our heads around the idea that previously key metrics, like Unique Visitors, should be decreasing?

Despite the obvious reasons why these data points are less important, we still rely on them to tell a story.  Why?  Simple, because those are the numbers being used internally by brand managers (and the like) to indicate their success to their superiors.  The same KPI report being used today, is the one that was used last year, the year before that and 5 years ago.  Internally, people have been conditioned to evaluate performance a certain way and it’s too difficult, daunting, challenging, time consuming, etc. to get them to change.

However, change, they must.  And it’s our duty to help them change.  If you don’t take it upon yourself to help guide the conversation and evolve how performance is being measured, you just might find yourself getting fired for not meeting a goal that’s impossible to meet.