Blue Dreamer Blog
Written articles and my personal thoughts on web design, ecommerce, the internet and odd ramblings about life, the universe and everything!
Measuring web site success
When I built my first web site many years ago I remember getting an email from someone thanking me because they found the information useful - that made me smile because it made me realise I’d made a (small) difference to someones life and to me that signified success, my site was appreciated!
Move on 10 years and the landscape of the internet has changed somewhat, from a relatively small number of people simply sharing information to a vast network of services and commercial outlets. Of course there are still many people running personal web sites covering every single subject under the sun, but the web has become critical for many business ventures and monitoring success is key to ensuring your investment was well spent.
So how do you measure the success of a web site?
Different types of site will have different definitions of success. An ecommerce site might measure by number of sales, a membership site may look at the number of members joining, and a news site might want to monitor the number of stories read.
What you shouldn’t measure by is “hits”. Often venerated by clueless marketeers and the media, the term “hits” does’t have any useful meaning. As defined in web statistics a “hit” can be any component of a web page, including images, movies, and other invisible page elements - this page has probably racked up 12 hits just by you viewing it!
Page views can also be misleading. You might have a nice little web shop that gets 100,000 page views every month but if you make no or few sales it’s obviously not working for you. Also, if your site is not well made it can take many page views before someone can find that product they want to buy, in which case it could be a sign that you might actually be losing sales despite the high page numbers.
Methods of measurement
An increase in sales or so many additional sales per day/week/month
An increase in customer enquiries
An increase in page views
An increase in time spent on the site per visitor
An increase in advertising revenue
An increase in sites linking to you
An increase in user participation (ie forums, community sites)
Comments
There are no comments for this entry yet.