by Christina Pomoni

Created on: July 06, 2010

Measuring a website’s success is of fundamental importance to the process of improving its performance. Many business owners consider that having high traffic levels is enough for a website to be successful and compensate their web marketing efforts. However, although traffic is a good criterion to measure the success of your website, it’s not enough. It takes a number of factors that need to be evaluated to assess if your website performs well with regard to your marketing goals. Then, you need to measure actual results against marketing goals and assess if your website is successful and what needs to be done to improve its performance.

The first two steps you need to take before start measuring are knowing your audience and establishing success criteria.

In particular:

Knowing your audience

A key element of any business is its customers. Similarly, when it comes to web marketing efforts, it is very important to know your target audience in order to convey the right message. This involves assessing properly who are the people who visit your website in terms of demographics, content preferences and information needs. Who these people are in terms of age, education etc? What are they looking for? Why are they using particular information? How often they look for that information? All of this information can be monitored by utilizing traffic monitoring, log analysis and user surveys features.

Establishing success criteria

By establishing success criteria such as the number of visitors, the time spent on the website, the number of subscribers to the mailing lists etc, it is easier to determine if your website is successful or not. Moreover, there is a number of metrics including Google Pagerank, Alexa Traffic Rank, and others that can be used to evaluate the effective success of a website.

After these two factors are determined, you can start measuring the traffic levels, the bounce rate, and the conversion rates of visitors. This can give you a pretty good idea of where your online site is heading and if you need to improve weak areas.

a) Traffic

Traffic is one of the key measures of a website’s success. The level of visitors your website gets is synonym to the efficiency of your web marketing efforts. The more visitors, the higher the popularity of the website as well as the greater the probability of building profitable customer relationships. In the context of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) you can drive more traffic to your online

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