10 Steps to Measure your Website Success

Can a website’s success be measured? If yes, then how? This is a common question that occurs to people who wish to know if their website is really helping their business grow.

Discussed in this post are 10 easy-to-follow steps that will help you measure your website’s success.

  1. Define Success:This is an essential step that must not be overlooked. Be sure to set your goals first, defining the key purpose of your website-to attract a new customer base, to showcase your accomplishments or to provide information and help to existing customers.
  2. Get Analytics Installed: An analytic tool is essential as it helps provide critical information about your website. You can install Google Analytics which is a free tool that provides all necessary information. You can also go in for Omniture or WebTrends, which come with more advanced features.
  3. Calculate Unique Visitors vs. Visits: A Unique Visitor is a single person who can visit your website any number of times but will still be counted only once. A Visit on the other hand refers to a single person’s visit to the site, which includes all the pages they visited. Ideally, your Visits should be more than your Visitors, to indicate a successful website.
  4. Analyze the Bounce Rate: The Bounce rate of a website is the percentage of visits in which the visitor leaves the site after viewing just one page. Generally, a high bounce rate is viewed as a negative.
  5. Evaluate Time on Site: The average ‘Time on Site’ is estimated to be anywhere between 30 seconds and 2 minutes. Evaluating the ‘Time on Site’ using the analytics tool is a good indicator to measure a website’s success.
  6. Check PPV (Pages Per Visit) Rate: A PPV rate gives you the data on the number of pages a visitor views on each of their visits. Your website can be deemed a success, if the average PPV rate is two or more pages per visit.
  7. Determine Critical Metrics: Use web metrics to determine whether you are moving closer to your goals or further away. For example, if your main goal is getting more visitors, then make sure that all necessary steps are taken to estimate how the number of visitors will be calculated.
  8. Review Distribution Rate: Did someone tweet or share your article on Facebook? How many comments have you got on your blog posts? How many websites have linked back to you? How have Google, Yahoo!, and Bing indexed you? All these point towards the popularity and success of your website.
  9. Verify Conversion Rate:The conversion rate is calculated as the percentage of visitors who convert casual visits into order placements, product enquires, newsletter sign up and so on. The conversion rate is important as it indicates customer satisfaction and visitor involvement, which in turn determines the success of your website.
  10. Put Everything into Context: Finally, it is essential to place everything in context, paying attention to ensure that your analysis is always based on your goals. For instance, if your time on site is awful, but yet your salespeople are getting enquires from visitors to your site, it still means you’re doing great.

Related Posts