How to measure website effectiveness using new success metrics

Traditionally, Google PageRank and pure traffic have been the measure of website success. However, these older metrics are becoming less meaningful in today’s web environment.

Entrepreneurs are now demanding more than just traffic and rankings, marketers have become more web savvy and are using analytics tools provided for free by Google to understand their websites and their strengths and weaknesses. Here are 7 website success metrics to consider in addition to Google PageRank and traffic:

1.Leads. Websites are often set up to be “corporate brochures” and not just to sell products. If your website is a brochure, you want to educate, and you want consumers to contact you based on what they have learned on your website. For this reason it is important to measure leads. An SEO campaign that brought in 100 leads is better than one that brought in a million page views but no new leads.

2. Conversions. Maybe you don’t sell anything directly on your website, but you want people to join, take a survey, recommend your site, or just sign up for your email newsletter? It is important to measure this subscriber because you have the opportunity to convert this person from suspect to prospect and from prospect to buyer and from buyer to evangelist.

3. Subscribers. Your subscribers are the most important users of your website, even if they don’t buy anything. Subscribers are often referred to as conversions. To make sure you keep them informed, consider adding an RSS feed so you can keep track and continue to educate and convert.

4. Returning visitors. This is obvious, only returning visitors really like your site. So the more they come back the better, the more successful you will be. Unique search visitors and occasional social media visitors are not the backbone of your site. Returning subscribers and visitors (often the same people) are.

5. Page views per visit. Page views per visit will often tell you a lot about how much your visitors like your website. A 1 to 1 ratio is bad unless everyone clicks the buy button instantly.

6. Time on page and time on site. Time spent on a page and on your site can tell you if people are just skimming your content or reading your entire editorial. Longer is not always better, but 5 minutes in most cases is better than 30 seconds, especially for a publishing site or just a blog.

7. Bounce rate. The bounce rate is one of the most important usability metrics and thanks to Google Analytics you can obtain this information. 100,000 Digg visitors with a 95% bounce rate means that only 5,000 actually visited your site. Therefore, a site with a much lower number of visitors and a bounce rate can be much more successful than a site with a high number of traffic. Quality targeted traffic is key to a successful site.

In short, there are numerous ways to gauge the success of your website. These 7 tips are some ways to judge the impact and success of what you are sharing on your website with your customers. Sign up for Google Analytics (it’s free) and take the tour of how to use the tools. It will help you and your marketing team assess the success of your communications program and help you plan future website strategies.

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