Web business beginner series - Part 6: How to measure the success of your Web Site? Tuesday , October 06 , 2009 by Hasnain Zaheer

Measuring the Success of your Web Site

Hasnain Zaheer introduces readers of Web Business Age to basics of Web metrics and analytics. You have built a good Web site for your business and marketed it on the Web. So now, it's time to relax, right. Wrong! A Web based business has some more aspects that we need to learn and one of those is Web analytics i.e., to analyse the traffic that the Web site gets. Traffic details and statistics such as the identity of the computer from where the traffic originated (computer's IP address), pages from where the visitor entered and left the site, pages viewed during a visit, time, date and duration of visit and other useful details can be valuable if they are analysed and inferences are drawn. You can then further develop and market the site keeping those inferences in mind.

Web metrics terminology

Let's discuss the basic terms used in Web traffic analysis:

Number of hits is number of times the Web server received a request and served a file. Because many Web pages contain images that are separate files, a request for a HTML page containing say 3 images is recorded as four hits - one for the HTML file and 3 for image files in the HTML file.
A page-view adjusts the hits generated by image files so that a page-view consists of one page only that was accessed by the visitor irrespective of how many images or other files that the page contained.
Visits are more useful to analyse. A visit is a series of events that begin when a visitor arrives at your site and ends when they left the site. Analysing a visit and comparing it with other visits and finding patterns between them can give you good insights. A visit may consist of several page-views and several more hits.
Unique visitors (or uniques) are the de-duplicated number of visits to the Web site. So, if the same person visited the site more than once, it is counted once only.

Generally, all traffic to your Web site is recorded by the Web server on which your Web site is hosted. However, the raw log data is extremely difficult to read and understand. Therefore, most Web hosting companies (companies that maintain the facilities and servers that contain your Web site and connect it to the World Wide Web) provide a basic Web statistics report. This may be weekly or monthly, basic or advanced reporting software depending on the Web hosting company and hosting plan that you have taken. Many of these hosting providers plug in a log analyser software such as AWStats. However, Google Analytics has emerged as a popular Web analytics software.

A few important metrics to track

Listed below are just a few metrics to check in the report. As you get into traffic analysis using these indicators, you will discover a large number of indicators on your own.

Are the number of page-views and number of visits increasing over successive periods? If not, your Web site is declining in popularity and it is time to repair any problems in the Web site and / or market it properly.

What is the average session time (or duration of visit)? If it is increasing over successive periods, visitors are holding on to your Web site for longer time and have a better chance to complete a transaction - fill a form to inquire about your products, buy a product online etc.

Is there any particular page or section of your Web site from where a large number of visitors exit? If so, that page must be examined to check why it cannot hold the interest of the visitor.

Are there any particular pages from where a large number of visitors enter? If so, those pages are being linked from search engines and you may optimise those pages even more to get more traffic.

Analyse those visitors who were referred by search engines. What are the keywords that they typed?

Trace the route of visitors through your site and watch for any patterns. Let's say, a high number of visitors exit the site on reaching your "pricing" page. This may mean that they probably find your product's prices too high and decide to look elsewhere. In this case, you may check your prices and confirm whether this is true. Or, they may accept your price, select the product but abandon the online shopping cart just before payment. This may mean that they don't feel secure sharing their credit card number on your site. If this hypothesis is true then you may decide to display security certification or take other steps to assure your customers.

What are the most popular and least popular pages? Do your visitors use the internal site search feature? If yes, what are the keywords that they search? If some keywords are frequent, make it easy and more obvious to them to get to the content.

This article just introduces you to basic analysis of Web traffic statistics. As you grow further in your Web business, you will need more complex analysis.