[thelist] Measuring site performance and succes

[Lotta Fjelkegård]

At 13:20 2000-07-19 +0100, Peter Van Dijck wrote:

>We've been at our company thinking about how to measure succes of the 
>websites we build.
>
>A pretty standard measure is conversion rate: how many people 
>buy/subscribe/... compared to how many people visit your website. Here's 
>an article on conversion rates: 
>http://www.news.com/Perspectives/Column/0%2C176%2C403%2C00.html
>
>I'm trying to find more info on this.
>How else can we measure site performance. How do you quantify success? For 
>example how can we measure the success of the new Vardus site? Of the 
>sites we design?
>
>Thanks for links/insights/...
>
>Peter

I'm going to take this and run with it. .-)

I worked for four years as a content manager/marketing manager and was also 
heavily involved in all the statistics gathering (and simplification) that 
was needed for our in-house sales staff.

Depending on your business model, and what you want to achieve with your 
site, there are many different numbers to look at, such as:
- logged IP#/period of your choice - day/week/month/whatever
- returning customers vs. one time visits
- pageviews
- how long do they stay on your site
- links to your site
- sign ups
- conversion rates
- sales per customer/time period

For instance: our site was a content site in a media conglomerate, so we 
were mostly interested in IP#:s (until we became popular enough to also 
show on MediaMetrix) and pageviews, which equals ad space.

Another company in the conglomerate is an ISP, and to them it was really 
important  to see how the amount of time spent by the visitors on our site 
increased. (Here in Sweden you pay your phone calls per minute, no flat 
rate introduced yet).

The B2C sites needed to look at conversion rates as well as sales/customer 
and actual paid invoices/registered sale.

Basic rule of thumb is of course that numbers used when companies promote 
themselves are the numbers that shows the most growth. Be it signed up 
customers, filled out CV:s, pageviews or whatever. :-)

Recommended site: http://www.clickz.com for more information on conversion 
and other metrics that can be of use to you. (Mostly from a marketing/sales 
perspective).

/Lotta