There are many ways to measure the success of your website, and they don't all involve the "hits" mentioned in the previous post. Some relate almost one-to-one with your standard brick-and-mortar store success:
- Word of mouth
- How many contacts you receive via the website (email form)
- How many website-only coupons are redeemed
- Use your imagination. Place a call-to-action on your site that isn't anywhere else.
However, you may want to measure more than this, ater all, you probably spend quite a bit of money on your site, and it's the most difficult to measure success. Analyzing your website logs can provide a lot of detail about your visitors' online experience, as well as about your visitors themselves. An easy and useful tool for analyzing traffic for any site is Google Analytics. This is a free service provided by Google, requiring only a free Google Account to get started.
By placing a hidden JavaScript at the end of each web page on your site, each time the page is viewed by a visitor, all information available about that visit is collected by Google. Based on this data collected, they provide your site statistics for your study. Information includes the basics such as how many times a page is viewed, allowing you to see which pages are your most popular, but also information such as profiling your customers (location from country and state and even city, languages, browser and operating system used, speed of Internet connection, and more), visitor loyalty (how many returned to your site vs, how many were first time visitors), length of time on your site and how many pages viewed, and more. Traffic Sources analysis offers such information as how many came directly to your site and which search engines provide the most referrals, and search terms used to find your site. Content information includes top "landing" pages - the first page viewed by a visitor, as well as top "exit" pages - the last page viewed on your site. Google Analytics offers a lot more advanced information as well, but we'll get into details about all of this later.
For now, if you're not using it yet, contact your webmaster and ask them to add Google Analytics to your website. For more information about it, go here: http://www.google.com/analytics
