Actually, can success be measured? Is it estimated at dollars, thumbs-ups, inbound links from .edu and .gov sites, or at some other metrics?

Here is a short list of factors which are critically important for your business development.

1. You website traffic. While tracking the traffic you should pay particular attention to its sources, as without knowing where people come from you won’t be able to build a powerful traffic strategy and will just act at random. Fortunately nowadays there are many advanced tools to track website traffic quickly and efficiently.
2. The conversion rate of your landing page. The term “landing page” refers to the Web page(s) where clients arrive after clicking a link. You should track the conversion rate of your landing page to see whether it is effective and brings profit. Try to experiment with its structure and design, so that you can discover which elements are good for converting people and which are not.
3. The bounce rate (or abandonment rate) of your home page. Once your home page gets indexed by search engines, you should check its effectiveness by tracking the bounce rate. How many prospects leave your site as soon as they come to it, without visiting other pages? In case you notice that your bounce rate is rather high, it means that your home page should be modified, or that you chose an unappropriated advertising source. Tracking the bounce rate will shed much light onto your website’s success and can help you to find more efficient business solutions.
4. If you have an e-commerce site, what really matters is the shopping cart completion rate. According to the stats, about 75% of shopping cart transactions aren’t completed, so the number of customers who drop off is very high. You can decrease it by analyzing the whole checkout process. Maybe some steps have to be changed or even eliminated. Try to avoid sophisticated registration requirements – your prospects may lose their patience and leave your site. Remember that short forms are more preferable than long, and thumbnail images of the product increase the shopping cart completion rate. Make sure that you offered many payment options and didn’t forget to mention the extra charges for shipping etc.

So, there exist different metrics to measure your website’s success, and it makes sense to apply them all – this way you will get the full picture of your positioning in the market.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 19th, 2008 at 7:25 pm and is filed under Website Analytics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.