09 March 2010

Measuring success online

Submitted by: Carla
{pp}Analytics software like Google Analytics will help you gauge how visitors interact with your website and that data can be used to enhance your web strategy.

As previously discussed in “New Year’s resolutions for your website” website content should aim to drive action. Analytics software like Google Analytics will help you gauge how visitors interact with your website and that data can be used to enhance your web strategy.

In order to determine your website’s performance you need to know what to measure. Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) is defined by Wikipedia as “a measure of performance…such measures are commonly used to help an organisation define and evaluate how successful it is, typically in terms of making progress towards its long-term goals.” Essentially most websites are there to generate leads for the business and to sell products online. Below is a list of possible KPI’s for websites:

- Filling in a contact form to be contacted by a consultant
- Signing up to a newsletter
- Subscribing to an RSS feed
- Downloading a brochure or requesting more information
- Viewing the contact pageThe website’s

KPI’s can also be thought of as the goals you want visitors to complete on the website. Each website’s goals will depend on the type of industry that you’re in and what you want to achieve through the website. Below is a list of indicators that can be used to measure your KPI’s:

- Visitors
- Total number of visitors
- Number of page views
- The number of new versus returning visitors
- Visitor loyalty
- Bounce rate
- Top content
- Searches conducted within your website (if you have a website search bar)
- Goal conversion rate

Goal conversion rates are an important aspect to consider. This will tell you what percentage of visitors to your site convert into leads or sales.

In order to provide more accurate reports you can apply a filter in Google Analytics. For instance, you can exclude your company’s IP address from your reports for more accurate website visitor numbers (read more about filters). If you want to track certain campaigns (i.e. email campaigns or see how popular a certain link to your website in an article is), you can tag your URLs with variables to create a unique URL.

Are there any KPI’s that you consider important that are not mentioned here?

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