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How to measure the success of your website…
The secret to a successful website is by knowing how to effectively collect and utilise the right information in a way that makes key business decisions clear and obvious.
Unlike any other marketing, the success of your website is completely and naturally trackable. Not only is every page and image access recorded in a log file, but you can even add tags to the pages on your website for special web analytics servers to monitor the visitors on your website. Web statistics reporting tools can access this information and represent the data to highlight visitor patterns and behaviours.
In order to make sense of this information, you need to determine what information is fundamental to the key decisions you need to make. Once you know what you’re looking for, you then need to determine how you are going to look after and nurture this information in order that the right decisions can be made.
How to determine what information is important…
The information is only important if it is relevant to the purpose of your website. If you know your purpose, then you need to assess what key performance indicators (KPI) you need to start measuring.This is achieved by determining candidate indicators and build ways to measure them.
- Start by recognising your desired results. These can be broken down into tangible and intangible results.
Tangible results are things like more visibility, more leads, more conversions, more sales etc.
Intangible results are things that facilitates the needs of the customer. These could be things like 'information found', 'enquiries resolved', 'fewer complaints'.
- For each desired result, consider what information, if it were available, would help you to judge whether this result was being achieved. The objective of this exercise is to create a list of required information or candidate indicators, whether directly measurable or not.
- For each candidate indicator, consider what could be used to measure it.
For tangible results, this could be the creation of special landing pages, tagged buttons or images.
For intangible results, this could be the creation of additional buttons and images to be strategically placed on existing pages to track behaviour, or perhaps adding questionnaires or polls to attract the visitor to provide feedback.
- Once you have determined the method of measuring the chosen indicators, create an action list of things that need to be done to your website in order to begin measuring.
How to Track Your KPI's
Your KPIs will be a set of measurements you take on a regular basis in order to track the performance over time. This data can be used to make performance predictions for changes in any of the measured data.
Standard performance indicators are:
- Daily, weekly, monthly visitors
- Daily, weekly, monthly page views
- Most requested pages
Specific tagging of pages or landing pages (pages your visitors see first – for example from a link from a directory or sponsored link) can be used to measure conversions. By conversions, I mean the visitor has completed an online form or clicked a special button you are particularly interested in.
The performance indicators for conversions are:
- Number of views
- Number of submissions
- Number of completed enquiry forms
How successful your website is depends on your ability to measure this data and then compare them with your expected results.
Your expected results will depend on previously measured KPI results or perhaps based on a needs analysis. For example you may need 100 enquiries to convert to 20 sales that generates £20,000 of orders each month. Based on these figures, you need at least 4 enquiries a day for your website to be judged a success.
If you have a clear path set for the actions you want your visitors to take, you can either use web analytics to track these specific actions, or you can include tagged pages or landing pages throughout the path your visitors take and then count the number of visits to those pages using your webstats analyser tool.
You can then measure the number of visits to each page on a daily, weekly or monthly basis and compare with previous results to determine whether things are improving. As soon as unexpected results are discovered, you will be armed with enough information to make business decisions to get the results back on track.
Depending on the results, you can do things such as price changes (up or down), create or modify offers, or analyse whether the marketing material is expressing the advantages to attract the right prospect.
Summary
If you want your website to be a success, you need a clearly defined purpose. With a purpose, you’ll know what to measure to determine whether the results are good or bad. You’ll also know what needs to change in order to meet your objectives.Further Info
