Mitash SEO, e-Commerce, Shopping Cart, Web Design & Development Blog

Until recently, website effectiveness was measured through increased traffic and Google PageRanks. The greater the number of hits your website received implied that it was attracting visitors and therefore successful. This method of measuring web traffic and ranking status has undergone a drastic change in today’s business environment; as marketing and web-savvy business professionals incorporate analytics tools to quantify their websites strengths and weaknesses. But before we get into the nitty-gritty of the latest web measurement parameters let us look at what constitutes a website’s success.

Defining web success

I believe defining website success is a very subjective issue and consists of what success means to you and your company. It can imply different things to different businesses and institutions. While, in general, success for most businesses is more often related to the profits they derive through their website, in reality it is not the case for everyone. For instance, a banking website can measure success on various fronts, from enhancing customer service, to increasing online transactions and product sales. However law enforcement agency’s website would exist to simply disseminate essential public information, while a news portal may target traffic to justify its advertising rates. Therefore, for your website to succeed, you need to develop it with the desired goal in mind and figure out the most appropriate way to measure its success.

Now let us consider the other metrics you can incorporate to effectively ensure your website’s success.

Page-views versus time-on-page

Visitor page-views per visit are an indicator of how attracted your visitors are to your website. If you’re selling products through your website, a 1 to 1 ratio is bad unless the purchase button is clicked. The amount of time people spend on your website can help you discern if they are merely skimming through your content or reading your entire editorial. Though a longer duration cannot always be taken as a guarantee of your website’s effectiveness.

Lead-in versus web views

Your website’s aim may not be product sales, but possibly you are a service company where you’d like to disseminate service-based information through your website. Based on the information visitors discover on your website, you’d like them to contact you. In this case page views will be of no consequence unless they translate into leads. You should then focus on an SEO campaign that will probably bring you 50 potential clients rather than a 1000 page views that give you no leads.

One-time versus repeat visitors

If your website draws visitors back over and over again, it implies that there’s something that attracts them to return. Casual, one-time search visitors and stumble-upon social media draws cannot be considered as a yardstick of website success.

Traffic versus bounce rate

The bounce rate is a critical usability metrics and the best part is its available free through Google Analytics. This means if your website attracted 100k visitors from StumbleUpon with a bounce rate of 95%, in reality only 5.000 actually visited your site. Therefore, a website with reduced, but targeted and quality traffic combined with a low bounce rate would prove to be more effective than a website with huge traffic numbers.

Conversion ratio

There are times when you want visitors to recommend your website, participate in a survey or campaign, subscribe to your online newsletter or merely join your mailing list for future marketing opportunities. In this case, it is essential to measure this subscriber list as it can transform from a prospect to a customer evangelist in the near future. Ensure that you keep them on your radar through possibly including an RSS feed to track, inform and convert them to customers.

There are several ways to track your website’s effectiveness – it all depends on your business goals. If you have any interesting analytic techniques that may have worked for you, feel free to share it.

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