Measuring The Success Of Your New Website

You've paid to have your website designed and it looks great. Your message is clear, you're getting plenty of site visitors, your CMS is working smoothly and your e-commerce functions are all set up.

However, how do you gauge the success of your new site? What are your metrics, and how do you measure them?

Small businesses, and even large organisations, often struggle with this dilemma. For some, it's still not clear what the relationship is between sales and web activity. Clear metrics are needed – and it's not all about traffic.

Setting your goals

The only way to know how well your site is performing is to have clearly defined goals from the outset.

Your goals will be highly dependent on the nature of your business. For example, the aims with e-commerce web site development will be very different from those of a news website.

If you're selling products directly online you could set a target for number of sales in a given period. If your business model relies on advertising revenue, then you may want to aim for a certain amount of page views – or an average user time spent on your site.

Analytics – what is it?

You may have come across the term analytics in relation to tracking performance online. This refers to a range of software programmes or processes that you can use to track user behaviour on your site.

Statistics presented usually include:

l Number of page views
l Number of unique visitors
l Time spend on each page
l Where visitors go after they reach a particular page
l Where your visitors arrive from (referring links, search engines or direct URL entry)
l What keywords visitors use to find your site in the search engines

There are many more factors, but those are some of the most useful areas. The most popular free analytics software is Google Analytics.

Analytics results make it easier for you to determine your return on investment. For example, you can divide your total website and web marketing costs by number of visitors to calculate a cost-per-visitor (or cost-per-click). You could divide the number of visitors by the number of sales to get your cost-per-sale, and so on.

However, if your objectives are more complex, for example trying to promote your brand or get a particular page to rank in Google, then your ROI is much harder to calculate. There are also unmeasurable aspects such as customer satisfaction and long-term retention. For really in-depth analysis it's worth speaking to a professional web and multimedia consultancy.

Making adjustments

The power of analytics and web marketing is that you can quickly identify any weak areas and adjust your site accordingly.

For example, if lots of people are arriving at your homepage then that means you're being found easily on the search engines. However, if your visitor number is high, but the vast majority only stay a few seconds before clicking away, then you may need to adjust your copy or your design.

A common issue is customers leaving the shopping cart process before the payment is complete – often a sign of confusing navigation, poor load times or confusing text.

Similarly, tracking keywords can be very useful. You can find out what people are typing into search boxes to reach your website. You can then adjust your search engine optimisation (SEO) tactics to cover a set of relevant keywords.

By: Oliver Pluckrose

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Oliver Pluckrose is the Head of Development for Online Business Solutions UK Limited (OBS Group) – a web design agency based in London. Formed in 1998, OBS Group’s ethos has always been to provide simple, end user-driven website development services for a sensible, fixed price.