Websites: measuring success.This checklist is designed to help measure the success of your website. It assumes a basic knowledge of the Internet and web browsers The following is a list of web browsers. Historical Historically important browsers In order of release:
Definition Imagine that your website is a supermarket. You want to be able to access information as supermarket chains do. They scan your trolley trolley: see streetcar. items and take that information to determine what sells best and how to organise their supermarkets to catch your attention. Measuring the success of your website, or web metrics metrics Managed care A popular term for standards by which the quality of a product, service, or outcome of a particular form of Pt management is evaluated. See TQM. , means defining your goals and assessing what happens at the site in order to meet those goals. You cannot manage what you cannot measure, and you cannot measure what you cannot define. Advantages of measuring website success Web metrics: * can strengthen your case when justifying the costs of running your website * can give you information that can be used to improve your site. Disadvantages of measuring website success * You cannot measure everything successfully. * Storing and archiving data can be a full-time job. * Some software can be expensive and it must be carefully selected to be sure it will do exactly what you want. Action checklist 1. Extend the use of the website Your website is not a separate entity. It is a tool to be used together with all the other marketing and delivery tools that you have. Are you using your website efficiently? Websites can be used to communicate with suppliers, customers and the press. Billing and checking the status of an order can be dealt with using web pages rather than by telephoning or posting information--both means of communication cost more than adding extra functionality to a website. For example, your website can contain the following download facilities: * information and brochure packs, press packs and news releases * advertising for your other services to regular customers, special offers and promotions * sign-in areas for your newsletters (which also helps to build up your database of potential clients) * sales if your product is downloadable (information or software for example). 2. Redesign re·de·sign tr.v. re·de·signed, re·de·sign·ing, re·de·signs To make a revision in the appearance or function of. re for usability How easy something is to use. Both software and Web sites can be tested for usability. Considering how difficult applications are to use and Web sites are to navigate, one would wish that more designers took this seriously. See user interface and usability lab. and accessibility Having a usable USable is a special idea contest to transfer US American ideas into practice in Germany. USable is initiated by the German Körber-Stiftung (foundation Körber). It is doted with 150,000 Euro and awarded every two years. and accessible website means that your company is demonstrating its social responsibility, as well as trying to increase its market share and audience reach, and to reduce any legal liability. Research has shown that websites that have been redesigned to be usable and accessible have increased their return on investment. 3. Make sure your website appears on search engines To check that your website is actually registered on a search engine, go to the search engine's home page and type in something unique about your company, such as your telephone number. If your web page does not appear in the results then you are not listed on their engine. If you design your website for accessibility then you are also designing for automatic web crawlers See crawler and WebCrawler. , spiders and robots (software used by the big name search engines). Some crawlers only go two levels deep and work best with a site map. Algorithms for Yahoo! and Google change regularly to counteract tricks such as spamming See spam. spamming - spam , where a website will contain a lot of buzzwords Below is a list of common buzzwords which form part of the business jargon of Corporate work environments. General Conversation
n.pl a set of standards, criteria, or specifications to be used or followed in the performance of certain tasks. to find out what sorts of site they list. Paying their fee is not a guarantee that you will be listed. Find out your website's conversion rate (the relationship between visitors and sales or actions), as this will help you decide if you want to pay to attract people to your site. Pay-per-click or bidding for keywords, as offered by various search engine companies, will only be profitable if you know your conversion rate. Bear in mind that attracting the wrong people to your website, especially if you are paying for it, will just increase your 'hits', not your revenue. So: * select the right key phrases, and spend time writing good titles and descriptions to attract people who will buy * send the visitor directly to a 'sales' page so that there are not too many clicks involved when buying your product or service. 4. Seek out other means of attracting traffic If you follow every search engine optimisation Noun 1. optimisation - the act of rendering optimal; "the simultaneous optimization of growth and profitability"; "in an optimization problem we seek values of the variables that lead to an optimal value of the function that is to be optimized"; "to promote the tip and find no search engine ranking Search engine ranking is a measure of the online promotional success of a web page or website. Most search engines default to ten organic or natural listings per page. Many include sponsor links before or to the right of the results. improvement, you will know that search engines are not the way your site attracts traffic. Concentrate your efforts in other areas. * Branding and reputation management are normally achieved by advertising. Advertising can be done by means of banners, click-throughs on HTML HTML in full HyperText Markup Language Markup language derived from SGML that is used to prepare hypertext documents. Relatively easy for nonprogrammers to master, HTML is the language used for documents on the World Wide Web. email messages, and affiliate programmes such as those run by Amazon, the result being that the user is brought to your site by clicking on a link that redirects them. * People also find sites by word-of-mouth, traditional advertising, the traditional media, newsgroup newsgroup Internet forum for discussion of specific subjects. Newsgroups are organized into subjects (e.g., automobiles); each typically has several subgroups (e.g., classic cars, Formula One racing cars). postings, web directories and links from other sites. Often these alternative forms are far more effective in attracting traffic than search engines. * Use the signature file on your email so that each time you send out a message there is a link to your website. * Calculate your promotion costs using these equations to carefully monitor the value of advertising and online sales pushes: * cost per conversion = advertising costs / number of sales * net yield = total promotion cost / total promotion results. 5. Study the web logs If you are hosting your own website you can readily access the web log files. These are long files which contain a lot of seemingly seem·ing adj. Apparent; ostensible. n. Outward appearance; semblance. seem  ing·ly adv. random
data and are not easy to read. However, you should be able to decipher Same as decrypt. :
* hits--entire site, average per day, home page. Hits do not represent a single user. They can be for part of page or a graphic. On average, sixteen hits represents one visitor. * page views--average per day, document view. This is more useful as you can see which pages are the most popular. * Visitors--unique, one-time visitors, more-than-once visitors, length of visit, origin of visit * the type of browsers your visitors use, who they work for, and what time of day they visit the site * where the visitors were referred from, such as for example: * a search engine and the words used. Knowing what people are looking for Looking for In the context of general equities, this describing a buy interest in which a dealer is asked to offer stock, often involving a capital commitment. Antithesis of in touch with. can help you to attract more customers: is it something generic such as 'running shoes' or specifically your brand? * a portal such as Oxmedianet. You can judge whether your website listings are working. If you are unable to decipher this yourself because of time or technical constraints CONSTRAINTS - A language for solving constraints using value inference. ["CONSTRAINTS: A Language for Expressing Almost-Hierarchical Descriptions", G.J. Sussman et al, Artif Intell 14(1):1-39 (Aug 1980)]. , obtain some software. Before you buy any, however, decide what you want to measure, take it for a test drive so that you pick the right product and learn how to use it thoroughly. Basically there are four types of tool--ask yourself what you need: * monitoring--for deciphering what people want, and how to get them to stay longer on your site * feedback--trying to provide a better user experience by personalising the site according to according to prep. 1. As stated or indicated by; on the authority of: according to historians. 2. In keeping with: according to instructions. 3. demographics The attributes of people in a particular geographic area. Used for marketing purposes, population, ethnic origins, religion, spoken language, income and age range are examples of demographic data. * leverage--increasing customer profitability Customer profitability (CP) is the difference between the revenues earned from and the costs associated with the customer relationship in a specified period. According to Philip Kotler,"a profitable customer is a person,household or a company that overtime,yields a revenue by cross-selling, customer profiling and providing customer satisfaction * strategic--optimising your business model, getting rid of low-margin customers, tracking customer lifetime value. On average, any statistics you have containing numbers of visitors are inaccurate by as much as 30 per cent. This is because robots, caches and dynamic IP addresses falsely boost / diminish your hits. 6. Calculate benchmarks Some of the benchmarks that you can easily calculate using your web log information are as follows: * stickiness = total amount of time spent on a page / total number of visitors * freshness = average content area refresh rate The number of times per second that a device, such as a display screen or DRAM chip, is re-energized. See vertical scan frequency and dynamic RAM. (hardware) refresh rate / average section visitor frequency * skip factor = number of visitors who skip introductory scripts / number who don't skip X 100 * migration = average number of exits from an area / average number of visits to an area X 100 * focus = average number of pages visited in a section / total number of pages in the section X 100 * first purchase = number of clicks required to purchase / actual clicks to purchase. Any good website will keep its stickiness factor high, its freshness factor less than 1 (so you should update your site regularly) and its first purchase factor low to increase its sales. If people keep returning to your site then eventually they will buy something. Keep an eye on these benchmarks and try to improve your performance. 7. Remember that you can't measure everything Archiving data can be an expensive process. Think carefully therefore about what you want to measure. Admittedly log files become most useful over time but can take up a lot of space. More expensive analytical analytical, analytic pertaining to or emanating from analysis. analytical control control of confounding by analysis of the results of a trial or test. tools can compress and archive log files before classifying them for future use. Dos and don'ts for measuring website success Do * Be focused about what you are measuring and why. * Shop around. If a search engine optimisation company offers to get you listed on 20,000 search engines, ask them which ones. Are 'big names' included? * Ask how much time you are going to spend working on your website. At some point the law of diminishing returns law of diminishing returns n. The tendency for a continuing application of effort or skill toward a particular project or goal to decline in effectiveness after a certain level of result has been achieved. Noun 1. will come into effect. * Compare the cost of running your website with the cost of other forms of advertising and sending out brochures for example. Don't * Try to measure everything. * Forget that search engines are not the only way of getting people to visit your website. Useful reading Journal article: Corporate websites: is yours doing the job effectively?, Phil Bradley Useful sources Downloadable tools for analysing web log files and visualising how your visitors surf your website are available from http://zing.ncsl.nist.gov/WebTools/ Thought starters * What is the purpose of your website? Does it earn its keep? * Where are your log files? Are you using the information you already have effectively? |
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