Measuring Success - Website Statistics

Introduction

In the course of my work I come across website owners and marketers who have little idea of whether or not their website is earning its keep. Yet most, if not all website hosting companies provide access to website statistics which can be used to help you measure the success of your website. Likewise, search engines also enable you to measure the performance of your website.

Why Measure

To my mind if you are not recording, analysing and reporting on the performance of your website, you are largely flying blind, and selling yourself short.

Furthermore, markets change, with changes in client requirements, and with new entrants into your market. Measurement and monitoring of your website, along with suitable adjustments to the site are essential for its long-term success.

What To Measure

Before measuring success, you need to define it. One of the first things I do when discussing the creation of a website is to ask for the purpose of the website. Is your website there to:

Generate sales leads?
Provide information or data?
Sell products online?

There is in fact, a fourth reason, relating to social networking sites - that of connecting people.

Once you have decide upon why you have a website, you are in a postion to decide upon objectives. When setting your objectives for the website ensure they are "SMART": specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound.

How To Measure

There are a great number and range of tools available that can be used to measure your website's performance. In the first instance, I recommend that you begin using a couple of readily available tools:

Make use of search engines to see what pages are listed (ranked) for a particular keyword phrase.
Access the website statistical package provided by your hosting firm.

Having decided on the metrics and selected your measurement tools, ensure that you also invest in the people skills so that value can be extracted from the data being captured. There is little point is simply reporting on trends and events without tying it back to the business objectives for the site and any marketing initiative.

Likewise it's important to tie the various measurement strands together. For example, on one site that I monitor, I noticed that a particular keyword phrase was resulting in a reasonable number of visits and conversions (in this case converting the visitor into a subscriber). Interestingly, this page was only ranking on page two of the search engine results page. So just imaging what would happen if the page were to be found in the top ten, on page one. There would most certainly be even more sign-ups for the e-newsletter, and hence an improvement in the lead generation.

At some stage, you may need a greater level of understanding of the website's performance, particularly if you are operating in a very competitive market. To do this you can use various sophisticated analytical tools, such as the Google Analytics statistical package or similar.

Assistance

If you're not tracking of all your rankings for each page with the search engines, or if various pages not ranked in the top 10 listings we can assist you with: Website Performance Monitoring, a Search Engine Optimisation Audit or a new Optimised Website.

To have Google Analytics added to your website to boost your understanding of what happens once a visitor arrives at your website please contact us.