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Measuring Web Success |
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How can you know if your web site is a success? Well, first of all, if your site was created as nothing more than a hobby and you are enjoying yourself, then your site is a success. Great job! (I'm serious. Web publishing is good, clean fun.) Otherwise, read on. Many find themselves trying to measure the success of their web site, or even just gauge the effectiveness of some recent improvement. This may be at the request of one's manager or consulting client, or perhaps just out of personal interest. The first instinct of many publishers is to grab the server logs and summarize the data, showing the number of hits, top ten most popular pages, peak usage times, and so on. While this data may be interesting to compare month to month to spot trends, it is actually a poor measure of success. The number of hits on any given page may have almost nothing to do with the contents of that page, and much to do with the wording or images of the links leading to that page. For instance, links that consist of words such as "Discount Travel" or "Free Money" will probably increase page hits regardless of the content of the target page. Likewise, if traffic to your site increases, it may be more the result of some promotional effort or search engine positioning than the quality of the site. Of course, the number of visits to any quality site will probably increase over time, but that alone isn't a strong indicator of success because it can be so heavily influenced by other factors. So, stepping beyond server logs and hit counts, it might be reasonable to try to measure how well the site is achieving your desired outcomes. If your site is designed to sell a product, then counting the number of purchases might give a rough measurement of success. Or, if an intranet site is designed to give employees information about benefits, watching for a decreased number of calls to the Human Resources department might be an indicator that recent updates have produced the desired results, especially if your employee group is regularly gaining new members who are unfamiliar with benefit details. With web applications, counting the number of times a task is carried to completion can give some indication of how successful the application has been. While achievement of your desired outcomes is of interest, I believe a more compelling factor exists: how well your site achieves the desired outcomes of your target audience. In an ideal world, your desired outcomes and those of your target audience would be the same, or would be very closely aligned. But in the real world, this seldom happens without a great deal of planning and careful effort. Let's take the example given above of a site designed to sell a product. While selling more of the product may be your only desired outcome, it is likely that your target audience will have a broader range of desired outcomes. This might include such things as finding out if your product is compatible with another, or even (gasp!) returning your product for a full refund. So, how can you measure the success of your audience? I'd recommend keeping an eye out for times when they fail. This can include paying attention to any complaints logged about the site, examining web applications for actions that get only partially completed (such as abandoned "shopping carts"), or even just talking with members of your target audience who have actually tried to use your site. If you are extremely lucky, you might even have the opportunity to watch someone use the site, especially if it is on an intranet. OK, I realize this approach may seem to focus on the negative. It is much more satisfying to show your manager a page hit graph that is moving up on the right than show a dwindling number of complaints as a percentage of transactions. The truth is that sometimes the best measurements of success really are based on determining rates of failure. Designing a safe car will show lower injury rates. Good web sites should show lower rates of failure for an audience trying to use the site. |
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