Measuring Success
Different web sites will have different success criteria. Even within a company, different departments might attribute success differently.For the marketing department, driving more traffic to the site might count as success, even if sales don't increase. For the copywriter, success will come if the content is easy to understand and helps the customer find out more about the company and its products.
For the sales department, increasing the sales conversion per site visitor could be a good measure of success. In summary, there are many ways to measure the success of a site, and all these factors combined will give the truest and most accurate overall measure of success.
Traffic
One of the most obvious measures of success is traffic. The more visitors to the site, the higher the profile, the more people will know about your site, and the more opportunities you have to build a customer relationship. However, if no visitors buy from your site or view more than one page, then traffic alone isn't enough for success...Sales Ratio
This is how many visitors you need to get one sale. For instance if 1 in 100 visitors purchases from the site, then you have a sales ratio of 1%. One key aspect of success is to try and drive up conversion rates - if selling a product - so that more and more prospects are turned into customers.Repeat Visits
The more repeat visits you have, the more chance you get to build a customer relationship, build loyalty and ultimately increase sales. Therefore measuring repeat visits is a good measure of success: if people come back and back again then clearly you are fulfilling a need of theirs.Total Sales
For many people, the total sales is the figure that they look for - how many products were bought through a site in month x? Even though this figure may slightly misguide as to the overall success of a site, it is of course still an important overall measure.If you would like help identifying the success criteria for your site, and a site review against these criteria, please Contact Us with brief details and we shall do our best to assist you >>>
Knowledge Centre:
Building a Website | Web Accessibility | Reviewing a website | Sticky websites | Measuring Traffic | Defining site success | How to increase traffic | Creating dynamic sites | Testing your website | Free usability tests | Free website publicity | Reducing site size/cost