How to measure website success when rankings, Google PageRank and sheer traffic have gone the way of “hits”: All these older metrics become more and more meaningless in the current web environment.
- Why measure rankings when they differ from location to location and from computer to computer due to localization and personalization efforts by Google and other search engines?
- Why look at a site’s PageRank when Google itself admits that it’s only one of 200 signals that determine the assessment of a site’s authority in Google and sites with PR 3 outrank PR 7 sites?
- Why brag about traffic when you can get hundreds of thousands of people visit you via Digg and the likes just to make’em run away in an instant?
The good old days of primitive measurement of website success are finally over. Business people demand more than just traffic and rankings, marketing professionals get more web-savvy than 12 year old kids who almost were born on the Web and new web analytics tools finally make it possible to consider far more and specific metrics than ever before. So check out these 33 website success metrics instead of rankings, Google PageRank and traffic:
Business Metrics
People doing business online, be it with eCommerce sites like Shops, publishing companies, consulting firms etc. do want to see results in Dollars, which in most cases makes sense although blogs for instance do offer ROI which is not easily measurable though. Often it’s more brand recognition, reputation building etc. For most commercial websites measuring revenue is the best possible was of determining success.
ROI
ROI means Return on Investment. If you spend 1000$ on your website and earn 2000$ your ROI is 200%. So calculate the cost and the financial benefits and compare both. There are whole books about that.
sales
ROI sometimes gets difficult to define. What is the investment exactly, is the time spent on social media e.g. an investment or only the work on the site? Thus measuring sales, especially for shops, is much easier. Higher sales = good website optimization of course.
leads
You do not sell directly on your website? You do want users to contact you via your site insetad? Measure leads. A SEO campaign that brought 100 leads is better than one which brought a million page views but no new potential clients.
conversions
OK, you do not sell anything directly and you do not sell services either, but you want people to join, participate in a survey, recommend your site or simply subscribe to your email newsletter? Measure conversions. You should do it for sales and leads too but even without these conversions make a very reliable website or marketing campaign success metric.
subscribers
While subscribers can be referred to as conversions you can count the sheer number every site should by now offer RSS and track RSS as well as email subscriptions like blogs do. Your subscribers are the most important users of your website, even if they do not buy anything. So if you don’t have an RSS/Atom or whatever kind of feed get one now.
Usability metrics
While not every site’s success can be measured in revenue, sales or leads you always can and should measure the sheer usability of your site. Many sites today still concentrate on being pretty, “having a bigger logo” and some special effects like Flash or AJAX, sound or video. While this might look good in most cases it’s not the most important factor that decides whether your site is going to fail or to succeed, usability is.
returning visitors
This is obvious, only returning visitors really like your site. So the more come back the better, the more successful you are. One time search visitors and casual social media visitors are not the backbone of your site. The subscribers and returning visitors (often the same people) are.
pageviews per visit
While measuring pageviews is sometimes futile as bad websites where you have to click more can have higher numbers of pageviews the number of pageviews per visit often will tell you a whole lot about how much your visitors like your website. A 1 to 1 ratio is bad unless they all click the buy button instantly.
time on page
The time spent on a page can be read in manifold ways but you can deduct from it whether people just skim your content or read your whole article among others.
time on site
It’s not always the longer the better but 5 minutes is in most cases better than 30 seconds, especially for a publishing site or simply a blog.
bounce rate
The bounce rate is one of the most important usability metrics and thanks to Google Analytics or Woopra easy to follow nowadays. 100k visitors with a bounce rate of 95% means that in the worst case only 5.000 actually visited your site while the others just fled. So a site with a much lower visitor number AND bounce rate can be much more successful than a “stupid traffic” site with huge traffic numbers. Targeted quality traffic is key for a successful site.
form/shopping cart abandonment rate
Forms are the most important parts of most websites in business terms, be it the contact form, or the shopping cart which technically in most cases is a form. Now imagine a super market where half or more of the customers abandon their cart in the middle of the checkout process or while perusing the market. Count these people and try to make them stay. The simplest way of checking the shopping cart abandonment rate is by sending a message to customer support each time a cart or other form gets abandoned. Sometimes you might be able to get back to the potential client with the incomplete data he entered.
next pages
To make people visit more than one page on a site we use internal links. Some of the links are links that we really want the people to follow. Checking the “next pages” from a particular landing page we can determine whether the readers followed our advice or wanted to see more of it. When on your home page the next page is in most cases the search or the sitemap page you’ve got a problem.
links clicked (heat maps)
Modern “Web 2.0″ web analytics solutions sometimes offer heat maps views or at least a site overlay way of checking clicks. This way you can determine where your visitors click or try to click (to no avail sometimes in cases of not linked logos or underlines words which are not links). Do people click where you want them to click or not?
eyetracking
Even better than heat maps of click behavior are heat maps of actual eye movements. You need more than a web analytics package to check that you need real people to take part in a study but if you are large company depending on your website you should check this for sure. Do people look at your main message at all? Do they actually see the “buy now” button?
internal searches
Are most of your visitors clueless or targeted? You’ll find out via the analyzing the internal searches. There is even a widget to do just that. Google Analytics also allows that.
SEO metrics
SEO experts love to measure. They loved measuring PageRank, rankings and traffic and they still need something to follow this urge. Well, there still is a lot to measure beyond strict business or usability metrics. Old school SEO still makes sense in lots of cases, especially with backlinks which still determine above all your success in Google search. I’d concentrate here on Google, but on the US market it still also make sense to check these with Yahoo and others. Also, checking backlinks with Google is not fun (only a fraction of data is released by Google unless you check your own site in Google Webmaster Tools) so you’re advised to measure them with Yahoo tools are tools that measure it using Yahoo data.
number of backlinks
You still need to know how many people or rather pages link to you. especially if this week more or less do it. The sheer number may be meaningless if you have 10.000 links from one site though. So focus also on domain popularity (links from one domain counted as one).
quality of backlinks
Getting a ton of links may mean nothing in comparison to one link from the NYT. So determine the quality of links: Has the linking page many other outgoing links? Has it PageRank? It it an old authority domain etc.?
Google cache date
Many SEO specialists resort to checking the cache date in Google (Google saves most pages in a “cache”) for determining the quality and success of a website in Google. If the cache date is older than one month the site is either dead (no fresh content) or has a very low authority with Google. Of course you always should check whether a site has a cache at all. Not cached sites probably get de-indexed (penalized) by Google.
Google bot visit frequency
Your cache might be one week old, but if Google bot visits daily it’s OK in most cases. You can check with most server side web analytics solutions, those relying on server logs or PHP.
Last time Google bot visited
This is almost the same as above but only almost. If you have a new content page and the bot visited yesterday and you’re still not in the Google index something might be wrong (like duplicate content problems)
Pages indexed
It’s seldom as simple as “the more pages indexed the better” but for small sites it often is. If you have 50 pages online but only 20 indexed your site is not successfully spidered by Google. A “site:yoursite.com” search in Google is enough to find out.
PageRank “pass rate”
While I argue that looking at the actual toolbar PageRank does not make much sense nowadays anymore you certainly want to take a look at the pass rate of PageRank. Google PageRank is passed via the links on your site. A home page with PR 5 should have subpages with PR 4 or at least 3, otherwise you have too many links or your internal link structure is broken.
Alexa Rank
While Alexa is not really reliable or never was many advertisers use it to check your traffic numbers. Also the Alexa traffic estimates can be compared to other sites, other time periods (more or less trafic this year than last?) and to other traffic estimation tools.
Compete Rank
While Compete is said to be more reliable than Alexa it only is for US traffic. This is both good and bad news but at the same time allows, e.g. compared with Alexa, to see where you’re heading. If you server the US market, take a close look at Compete.
Social Media metrics
In the age of social media, user generated content you can’t rely solely on bots and other automatically gathered numbers to collect data on your website success. You have to find out what your users like and what they actually say about you, or at least how often. There ale plenty of ways to find out, these are the most obvious:
bookmarks on delicious
A site or page with a few hundred or thousand of bookmarks on Delicious can’t be that bad, can it? On the other hand a site that has none can’t be that successful can it?
bookmarks elsewhere
While it is not that hard to pay some services to submit you to Delicious etc. It’s still far more likely that a site is a good one if it’s only popular on Delicious but also has bookmarks elsewhere. I’m sometimes surprised how many people bookmark my articles on sites I do not even think of.
social media shares
Do really think getting tens of thousands people visit your site is the ultimate proof of being popular? In contrast the number of submissions and shares tends to allow a better assessment unless of course the “SEO India” service is at work. When not, you can see that popular pages get shared all over the place. Every SEO knows that. The number of shares/votes by real people on Facebook, Reddit, Tumblr counts though.
tweets (Twitter mentions)
Being mentioned or recommended on Twitter is truly a success because here people communicate with their peers and fans and only links pages their truly recommend. Being linked more then 2 or 3 times means you are huge. It means 2 or 3 people telling 200 or maybe 200 other people that you rock. TweetBeep will send you email each time.
niche social sites’ votes
Being successful on niche social news site means recognition by several experts and traffic from a few hundred highly targeted visitors. Each niche has by now it’s own niche social news site, be it YCombinator for startups and tech, Design Float and Design Bump for, you guessed it design or DZone for web development and programming. Here you get visitors and readers who really care and their opinion really counts.
number of “thumbs up” on StumbleUpon
Other than the almost US only elitist crowds on Reddit social discovery site StumbleUpon is populated by the general public from all over the world. People voting for you on StumbleUpon “like you” if you can offer something for the John Does out there. Other than that you only get a limited number of votes. Whether you have “mass appeal” in the positive sense of it you will find out here. My own SEO blog has been very popular on StumbleUpon for years and still gets stumbled. Likewise does SEOptimise.
StumbleUpon reviews feedback
People who review you StumbleUpon really care for you, the StumbleUpon community or the subject. So listen closely. getting 10 or more “awesome” reviews on StumbleUpon means a lot if you want to determine the overall popularity of your website or particular page.
Technorati Blog mentions
A page often mentioned on Technorati is truly popular in the blogosphere. You are part of the conversation if you get linked often by other blogs. The Technorati authority is not reliable though as a metric. It’s based largely on Technorati bookmarks which bloggers can game easily.
Google BlogSearch Links
While the main Google search doe not show you many links the Google blog search is good at it. It’ll show you the legit links by other blogs, not the scraper blogs. Watch out for these, the simplest way to monitor them is by using Postrank.
Some of you might assume now that all this is far too complex for them but it isn’t. Freely available tools like Google Analytics allow every webmaster to find out much more about a website than just a few years ago where we were the obvious numbers of PageRank, rankings and traffic had to suffice. The real web metrics experts will laugh this list off probably as advanced SEO and web analytics starts in most cases beyond the ways mentioned here.
You are certainly much better off checking these 33 web metrics instead of Google rankings, PageRank and sheer website traffic.
Last updated: March 14th, 2011 – Fixed several links, changed the text in some cases.
Exactly. Instead of being so concerned about Google pagerank, the numbers and indicators above are much more important. Great post and thank you for actually saying what you did.
Awesome review of how to be classified as “success” in the World Wild Web :)
What’s wrong with PR?
This is a great list to put in front of a client. Some of them have heard somewhere from someone that they need to be #1 on Google. Time and time again I’ve told them that there are more important factors — now I have a list.
ROI is the most important metric
Good review! I only would suggest to add the recently launched “Google Trends for Websites” which gives more accurate traffic data than Alexa and Compete.
Great post
So tired of the obsession with PR
Focus really should be on search engine results page position, traffic and conversions
Great list of metrics! I would not have though thought of bounce rate!
This is great. Exactly what I’ve been trying tell them here but they seem to keep their focus so much on the visits that they lose track of the actual value and aren’t optimizing for the core goal!
Thanks for the feedback!
Nice post! Found this on Google News in a search alert btw…
I think that it is like Page Rank
Wonderful list of metrics… some of the metrics were actually not in my mind, thnk you so much for making me know… Keep up the great work :-)
Excellent article. Thanks. :)
This is a great article, because there is so many ways a website can be judged by other than just ranks.
Thank you for this great post. On my blog I commented about the downside of this recent change: keywords may show as “active”, when they are really “inactive”. This complicates bidding optimization, and makes it very difficult to accurately judge when it is ok to delete keywords with no impressions.
thank for sharing. nice tip
I love it. Something that is very informative and educational which I can understand.
Webmasters may have moved on from boasting hit rates, counters and page rank. But they somehow continue the habit with other numbers games such as posting the number of facebook friends, twitter followers and rss subscribers. But they fail to acknowledge the quality in their numbers. Even for a non-profit online presence, the numbers should translate to some form of quality assurance.
Nice list. However some of the metrics I feel are still important at those early stages of the life of a site. Often its only when you start to get significant traffic that other metrics actually start to be useful.
What an awesome article on SEO !! Being a newbie on SEO,I find this article really helpful to me. The business metrics undoubtedly plays the major role behind the website’s success.Apart from it the niche areas still plays its part too.PR is crucial to bring the turnover of a website.
Thanks…
Really helpful article, you wake me up because I always cared about Alexa, PR while others are so important that I’ve ignored for a long time.
Agree! PR is not the most important to measure the success of a website. In most case, people will measure it based on ROI, no. of enquiries through online form and feedbacks.
It is an unbeliavable compillation of information on SEO. Basically it tells you it all. Thank you for sharing. I can use it a lot on my every day seo work.
I was wondering if anyone can help on increasing my number of quality links on my self esteem webpage. I have tried different methods, but lost on which one is the most effective.
It is a very good list to have when talking to clients!
It took me over a year to figure out half of the things you have mentioned above. I am glad I have found your site. The only thing I do not understand is how much these factors are worth in SERPS?
Loan lady, these are things you can use to measure your websites success instead of SERP’s, for example if you had a website at position two for a keyword and it converted better than the site at position one, you could actually be making more sales. I think however, that the SEO metrics are the main things that will have an affect on the SERPs
I am just wondering how you determine leads through SEO? Thanks.
You are going to want to be sure that all of your posts are formatted. Doing so will leave out any confusion for the search engines and you will have everything nice and clean and all organized. The mark tags are there for a reason when you are dealing with blogs. So using them and not leaving them out is a fantastic thought.
Don’t be a Copycat. Don’t write news or posts just to have something for the big Google. Nowadays, duplicate-content filters are continuously evolving and even if you gain something on the short term you will loose it later. Try to be innovative.
Have you tried to explain it to the client?
On October 23rd we had a pagerank change from 0 to 2 on our blog tus-hasede.blogspot.com. So there could have been a small update on that day.
What good is twitter? Today, there is a lot of good blog!
The more engaged your visitors the more ROI you can expect. You have to provide them with something in value in order to get what you want by giving them what they want. It´s always about them not about you.
I agree that you must engage your visitors with something unique in order to acquire the desired ROI. The most important thing is to be as creative as possible so that visitors get an increadible experience browsing your site.
I think Google’s engineers are getting better at ranking websites with unique content higher. It is amazing to see how mechanically you can measure quality.
Great post, lot of people still stuck with page rank and forget about social media ranking and mentions etc
Great article, Tad
You have put a lot of work into your post there..
I am now coming to realize just how pointless chasing high PR actually is..
And thinking in terms of a websites success, what good is high PR and a ton of traffic if the site is not converting that into dollars.
If a site is optimized and built around being a business, then it needs to be making some decent returns on what has been invested.
Ranking on the other hand, seems to be quite important. Especially breaking into the top 10’000.
I know this is a few (5) years old, and even though I just found it, I think it still holds weight. Thanks for the list as it helps put what my company is currently endeavoring to accomplish. I especially like that you put the notes in here about page-views and time on pages and visit duration, along with bounce rate. Maybe newbie concepts today, but sometimes these things can be easily overlooked in large organizations.
Thanks again!