Measuring the Effectiveness of Your Web Site

Even if you don’t run a large web site like Amazon or Yahoo, you should still use metrics to measure its effectiveness. Knowing where your visitors are coming from, how many there are, what pages they’re viewing, and how long they stay on your site are vital pieces of data. Let’s roll through why these metrics are important for you to measure:

• Where are your visitors coming from? Are they coming from a search engine such as Google, another web site, or are they direct visits? If they’re coming from a search engine, what keywords are being used? This information can help you to identify how people initially find your organization online. With this, you can develop more effective advertising campaigns and tailor your content to address what your visitors are looking for.
• How many visitors do you get? How many unique visits do you get in a given day? A dozen? A couple hundred? Measuring the number of visits to your site gives you a great benchmark to work from.
• What pages do your visitors look at? When people land on your site, do they follow a specific path? You must understand what your visitors click on first and where they go from there. Perhaps they’re clicking the wrong thing on your homepage. Or, maybe they click the right thing but get lost along the way. Regardless, you need to know what path they take up until they either meet your call to action (e.g. filling out a form, ordering something) or until they leave your site.
• How long do your visitors stay on your site? Know the duration of visits to your site. If the average time spent on your site is 30 seconds or less, you have a problem. It could be that people aren’t being engaged by your content, or that they’re getting lost or confused. A healthy metric for most informational web sites is two minutes or longer.

So, how can you measure this data? We recommend using Google Analytics. It’s free and the data it measures is fairly comprehensive. All you have to do is place a snippet of JavaScript code on each page that you want to measure. Remember to collect a reasonable sample of unique visits (30 or so) before making any rash changes to your web site. You want to learn how the typical person uses your web site.