How will you measure success?
If your website is successful, you will know about it, right? So why do you even need to think about this, let alone measure it? The reason you need to measure your success is to see if the site really is performing as well as it could.
There is a classic phrase used in many marketing and business books – a business owner says 'I know that 50% of my marketing is working, I just don't know which 50%'. One of the real strengths of the internet is that it can tell you almost exactly which 50% is working, providing you understand what you are measuring and what it really means for your business.
A good website analytics package will help track exactly what is happening on your site, but without a good understanding of what success means, this numbers will never be particularly helpful.
What to measure.
I have seen some analytics packages advertising the fact that they offer hundreds of different charts and measurements. However, that means that someone would have to plow through each of these charts on a regular basis to understand what is going on. To much measurement will have you throwing up your hands in despair and giving up with the whole venture.
There are only a few things that most people want to know:
- How do visitors find your site
- How can you get more visitors to your site
- Which visitors reach the site goal
- What stops visitors from reaching the site goal
To begin to answer these questions, you need to be very clear about the purpose of the site and how you can monitor this. If it is something an action performed on the site like making a purchase through your online shop, or completing a form, this will be easy to measure.
However, if you are asking the visitor to do something away from the site such as visiting your store or calling your office, this will be harder to measure. Offering a discount voucher, a reserve before you buy option, or a call back form can all help encourage visitors to perform an action on the website that you can measure.
Make sure you know exactly what you are measuring
There are some things that most website analytics packages can measure easily and accurately, and a few that are notoriously difficult. The hardest of which is measuring first time visitors compared with repeat visitors. Are you getting 100 new visitors a day, or 10 who come back 10 times?
The difficulty likes in the fact that a statistics package can normally only recognise the computer, not the user. If the user looks at your site on their mobile, then decides to look at it in more detail on their computer, this will register as two different visitors. If three different people look at the same site on a public computer (i.e. in an internet cafe) this will normally register as one user returning three times.
No matter what statistics package you use, make sure you understand how accurate certain measurements are. Some should be used only as a general guide and to show which direction your website is moving in, whilst some are completely accurate and should be taken literally.
What to do
Make sure you have a plan for measuring the success rate of your site. This may mean building in a couple of additional pages to your overall website structure. You will also need to make sure your website comes with a good quality analytics package that you understand.
These articles are part of the '10 steps to building a new website guide'. Move onto step 5 - Planning your landing pages - or go directly to the main contents page.
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