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evaluating your website performance
Evaluating Your Website Performance
By Scott Buresh
This month, we'll cover measuring
your web site performance. When trying to gauge how
effective your web site is in helping you to meet
your organizational goals, the following three basic
questions can help.
What is the goal of the
web site?
Many companies consistently get poor web site performance
because there were no predefined goals in place when
the site was made. What do you want the site to do?
Sometimes the goal is easy to define. If your web
site sells items online, you most likely want your
visitors to make a purchase. For many other companies
that sell services (or high end products that can't
reasonably be sold online), the goal is to have the
visitor initiate a contact so that the sales staff
can attempt to convert them into a customer. The important
point is that your web site should be more than a
static billboard that proclaims that your company
is open for business- it should be designed to help
achieve predefined goals (and unless the site is strictly
informational, this usually means encouraging the
visitor to take a desired action). Simply "having
a web site" does nothing to help your business
or your customers, and will lead to poor web site
performance.
How many people are coming
to the web site?
As discussed in previous newsletters, most site owners
have access to traffic statistics, usually provided
by their web host. This data is an important part
of determining web site performance. Without knowing
how many visitors your site receives over a given
time period, you cannot determine whether your web
site is meeting the stated goals (more on this below).
Benchmark data over at least a month is recommended
to ensure that you have a representative sample. Ideally,
this sample will not be drawn from a period in which
the company was doing an unusual amount of offline
marketing and promotion, since this number would not
be indicative of website traffic for an average month.
How many visitors take
the desired action?
During the same time period that you tracked the total
number of visitors to your web site, you should also
track the number of visitors that take the action
that you desire. For instance, if your primary goal
on your web site is to get visitors to fill out a
form, how many forms did you collect in the allotted
period? This number, coupled with your traffic data,
forms the basis of your site conversion rate, a critical
component of web site performance. For example, if
you had 1000 visitors over a one-month period, and
10 of them sent in a form, your web site conversion
rate is 1% (10/1000). It is important to draw a distinction
between your site conversion rate and your regular
sales conversion rates (unless your site is selling
online). Not all people who send in a form, for example,
will become customers. However, your site conversion
rate is a very useful piece of data to have, as you
can use it to measure the success (or failure) of
changes that are made to the web site.
Three Quick Tips for Improvement:
- If your traffic levels are too
low to draw any meaningful data on web site performance,
consider launching some traffic-building initiatives,
such as search engine optimization. (For more info,
see our article, "Four
Tips to Increase Search Engine Ranking").
- Make certain that you make it easy for your visitor
to take the desired action from any page of your web
site. For example, if you want them to fill out a
contact form, make certain that there is a prominent
button inviting them to do this on each page.
- Check your sales copy to be sure it also invites
visitors to take the desired action. Too often, companies
use offline brochure copy on their site without taking
into account the unique opportunities that the online
arena affords. This simple step can often increase
web site performance dramatically.
© Medium Blue 2007
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