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Books by
Gerry McGovern
Content Critical
Gaining competitive advantage through high-quality web content
The Web
Content
Style Guide
The essential guide
for online writers, editors and managers
July 21, 2003
What's important to measure on your website?
By Gerry McGovern
Websites are very measurable. However, reams of data can be time consuming and confusing. The knack is to know what is really important to measure. This includes the following: reader actions; reader numbers; most and least popular pages; subscribers; external links; search keywords; page size; broken links and malfunctioning processes.
Reader actions
Content should drive action. How many purchases, downloads, form completions, queries, searches, were there? Remember that search is not necessarily a positive action. People initially like to navigate; searching may represent a failure of the navigation.
Reader numbers
How many readers visited your website? How many of these were unique, as against repeat? How many webpages were viewed? How many people left after looking at a single page? In particular, watch out for the homepage. If a lot of people leave after only looking at the homepage, that's not a good sign.
Time spent on a website can be a misleading measure. Some people may have spent a lot of time on your website in a frustrated attempt to find what they were looking for. Others may have got what they wanted quickly and left very satisfied.
Never ever use 'hits' as a measure of success. Hits measure the number of files downloaded. An average webpage may have anything from 10 to 30 files. So, 30 hits might only represent one page.
Most and least popular pages
What were the ten most popular pages on your website? Write more pages like them. What pages have not been accessed at all? Those pages that have not been accessed in a year should be deleted.
I've rarely found data on the path a person took through a website to be useful. There are so many paths people can take and so many reasons for taking those paths that it's hard to derive useful information from all this analysis. Such analysis is very time consuming and the time lost doing it is usually greater than the gain derived.
Subscribers
Every good website should have a minimum of one email list. How many new subscribers were there? How many subscribers were lost? If you see an upward trend in subscriber loss, you need to start re-focusing the content you send.
Links
Links from other websites are the single most important promotional tool you have. They act like word-of-mouth. Search engines such as Google depend on them to rank your pages. Who's linking to you? Can you get them to link more? How many new links did your website receive?
Search keywords
People often turn to search after they have scanned your navigation and content, and can't find the keywords they are looking for. They then search using these keywords. So, the most commonly searched-for keywords may indicate words you should be using in your content and navigation.
Page size
The faster your pages download, the happier your reader is. Make sure you establish a page size limit and rigorously measure to ensure that it is being adhered to. (I would recommend a 50 KB limit.)
Broken links and malfunctioning processes
Always watch out for broken links and fix them immediately. Regularly test all your processes—search, forms, purchase process, calculators—to ensure that they are still working. Remember, the unhappy customer rarely waves to say goodbye.
Gerry McGovern
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