The true measure of success.

Keeping track of your visitors can help you make your site even better

Throughout this series we've guided you from the conception of your Website to its completion--helping you avoid common mistakes and even offering tips on how to increase traffic. In this final installment, we'll help you find out if your hard work is paying off and make sure the Website earns its keep.

Measuring success on the Web is more complex than just hanging up a "hit counter" to tell you how many people have visited your site. The simplest Web traffic analysis tools can tell which pages of your site are most popular, letting you make informed decisions about the content and navigation of your site. "If I see 10,000 people come to my home page and only 5% are going into a section I've spent a lot of time and money developing, I'm going to dig in and find out why," says Steve McGuire, manager of Internet and Relationship Marketing at Saturn Corp.

Even if you're selling goods via the Net, don't be fooled into believing profits are the only measure that determines your site's success. Maintaining a site is an ongoing learning process and you can never have too much information about your customers and their interests. "If someone comes back every week to read our magazine but never buys anything, our marketing people might try to modify the content to lead them toward a purchase," says Cliff Sharpies, president and CEO of Garden.com, an Internet-based store that sells gardening products. Many very successful sites take years to turn a profit. For them success is not only about revenues but how well the site meets its other goals--such as building customer loyalty and finding out how to create the best possible user experience on the site. In some cases, Web measurement tools can also help quantify and qualify your offline marketing efforts.

MEASURING TRAFFIC

There is a wide variety of Website traffic analysis tools available. The prices range from a free download to upwards of $10,000, depending on the level of analysis you require. Many of these programs offer trial downloads at their Websites. Web analysis can also be outsourced to companies like iPro (www.ipro.com) or Net-Gravity (www.netgravity.com) that specialize in that area. Before you make any decisions about buying or downloading any program, find out what kind of traffic analysis the company hosting your site can provide.

Start by deciding which features you absolutely need and those you can live without. For instance, Access-Watch 2.0 (http://accesswatch.com) is a $25 Web analysis tool that offers basic reporting, including most visited pages, browser type, operating system and the URL of the page that referred the visitor to your site. Armed with this information you can enhance the pages surfers are most interested in, refine unpopular pages to draw in more viewers and develop partnerships with the sites that most often send visitors your way. If your site solicits advertisers, this knowledge could enable you to charge a premium for placement on frequently accessed pages.

For more detailed reports on how each visitor is navigating your site or analysis of the effectiveness of banner ad campaigns, you'll need a more robust program such as MarketWave's (www.marketwave.com) Hit List Professional 4.0 ($295) or WebTrend's (www.webtrends.com) Log Analyzer ($399). These programs typically offer more extensive reporting features, including visitor path analysis, banner ad analysis, top referring search engines and keywords.

For many companies visitor path analysis is an important part of Web traffic reporting. "We want to know how many times they've looked at shopping pages as opposed to content pages," says Sharpies. "People do different things on the site, so we look at their behavior and try to see what we can do to convert them to customers."

Garden.com uses a blend of proprietary tracking software and third-party packages to break out specifics on differences between visitors who found the site through America Online or some other promotion. This helps Sharpies determine which marketing methods are most effective and direct his budget accordingly. "I want to track how much it costs to acquire a customer or get somebody to the Website--then I can match that up to the lifetime value of that individual," he says. To do this he tracks how much money is spent on specific ads, promotions and other means to attract customers, then captures information about which promotion brought each customer in.

For example, Garden.com bought a third-party mailing list and sent out postcards with an offer of 20% off some plants. The postcard directed recipients to a specific Web page, which was tracked for initial response rate, as well as how many respondents actually purchased. "That helps assign an actual dollar amount to the marketing promotion," says Sharpies. In addition, when Garden.com places an advertisement on another site, such as Yahoo!, the company can track how many people click through from that specific ad and how much they purchase. Both methods let you assign a realistic value to what it costs to acquire a customer and how much the investment netted.

Like Garden.com, Saturn uses a mix of proprietary and off-the-shelf software to track its site. The software augments information that the site's visitors voluntarily provide, such as requests for brochures or follow-up calls and address or state of residence. By compiling this data Saturn's McGuire knows if there were more leads from a particular part of the country. "We look at how many people are visiting our site, how many request brochures and how many request that a retailer contact them," says McGuire, who tallies the information to aid in planning advertising.

Don't assume that eyeballs and dollar signs are the only things worth measuring. "We use customer satisfaction as another big indicator of how we're doing with the people who've purchased from us," says Sharpies. Unfortunately even the most sophisticated traffic analysis tool falls short in this area. Garden.com monitors customer satisfaction in two ways: internally, through customer correspondence, and externally, through Biz Rate (www.bizrate.com), a service that uses questionnaires to track customer satisfaction for many of the Web's larger sites. "At the end of the order process there's an ad for Biz Rate that says that we'd love to hear about your experience on Garden.com," explains Sharpies. Customers click on the Biz Rate icon and fill out the independent questionnaire, which reports back to the subscribing business.

McGuire also takes direct feedback very seriously and has learned valuable lessons from the site's visitors. "They might tell us about compatibility with their browser, how information should flow or if pages take too long to load," he says. "Our organization understands the power and the importance of the Internet, but, as with any project we do, we constantly evaluate it," adds McGuire. Similarly, you should constantly ask yourself if you're getting your money's worth from your site and implement ways to measure its effectiveness--unless, of course, you have money to burn.

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