Another measure associated with the volume of coverage relates to the number of people accessing an event website. Tools such as Google Analytics can be used to measure the following:
- Unique visitors which is a fundamental absolute measure of your audience size in a given period and is traditionally used to gauge the overall level of traffic to a website;
- Changes in audience size over time from for example a baseline pre-event to peaks during an event, or to visitors post event can provide valuable insight. Moreover, analytics tools often allow real time reporting of website usage which is a valuable tool in measuring whether a new piece of online content is having any impact; and
- Unique visits combined with sessions will help you to measure how many people return to your site more than once which indicates they may be particularly interested in the event which in turn organisers may be able to exploit in the future.
While unique visitor data provides volume of traffic, it does not show how much people like the website. In order to evaluate this, richer data linked to page views and time on the site will also be required. Various web analytics tools available can also be used to assess the number of unique views of specific online content of interest to an event and its stakeholders.
Apart from metrics linked to the event website, web analytics can also be used to measure traffic to other sites linked to specific events and media analysis consultants offer a variety of services for a commercial fee. The key point here is that the more in depth analysis is likely to have budget implications whereas the unique visitor metrics can be sourced via Google Analytics (for example) and other similar tools.
For more detail on the power of Google Analytics perhaps have a look at the following link
http://torpedogroup.com/blog/post/5-awesome-google-analytics-tools-to-measure-the-success-of-your-website