If you are still using just hits and pageviews to measure your website’s performance, it’s time to ask yourself a few questions about how well you understand the performance of your website. How do these metrics contribute to understanding of how well you are acheiving your business objectives? eMarketing is just like offline marketing, in that requires measurement followed by optimisation. Only better, because we have more data.
Thus, central to every web project should be a Website Performance tracking sheet outlining targets and progress across a variety of measures that together communicate to your web management teams a picture of performance towards objectives. Use your imagination to find those indicators that provide into the performance of your website.
Below are a few alternative metrics to get you thinking. Do you know how well youre website is performing? What would your targets be?
- New Referrers
- Basket Size
- Repeat Purchase Count
- Number of Commenters / Comments
- Other Content Contributions
- Monthly Membership Registrations
- Newsletter Subscriber Count
- Click-Thrus from Newsletter Links
- Number of Social Bookmarks (i.e. Diggs)
Update: Bud Caddell has also written a post about website performance indicators along similar lines over at seoMoz.org, with a more exhaustive list.