How do you measure the success of a website? Success is measured the same regardless of whether you are measuring your website, your business, the success of an event or a grade on a test. You have to have an actual goal in order to measure it. If you have no goals, you cannot define success.
What are some goals you may strive for with your website?

• Provide information or persuade
• Promote and sell products
• Provide value directly with website functionality

You have to take your website goals and figure out the best way to measure them. Proving success that you informed someone with your website content might be setting a goal of getting 20,000 visitors a month who, on average, spend more than five minutes browsing your website. Knowing that on average people read 5 minutes of your content would probably be a good indicator that you are getting your message out.

If you are using your website to persuade your audience then you may measure success by setting a goal of having users fill out an online survey or fill out a contact form for more information. If you are selling products online, the actions you want the user to take is to add items to their shopping cart, proceed to checkout and then purchase your product. These goals can be measured by your gross online sales numbers or perhaps simply by a sum of the number of people who bought your product during a specific time range. Each action you want the user to take or to measure is called a conversion, or a conversion point on your site.
The fastest growing tool to help you measure traffic and conversions on your website is Google Analytics – www.google.com/analytics/, which is totally free and very easy to setup. Google Analytics goes beyond just web statistics because you can configure the statistics to actually measure your goals . After you put Google Analytics on your website you can also put in other snippets of HTML code to measure sales, form submissions, or the number of times someone visits a hidden conversion page.
Here is a simple example of measuring your goals. This screenshot is the general dashboard picture from Google Analytics on one of our websites, over the last month.

From this graph, we can see that there were 7,970 visitors to the website, 59,100 pages were actually viewed on the site that month and, on average, each user viewed 7.42 pages on the site. The bounce rate of the site is 35.5%, which means that 35.5% of the people that came to the site did not move past the page they came in on. A bounce usually means that your site’s visitor arrived from a search engine, another website, or directly, and did not find something they were immediately looking for which should have made them move further into the conversion process. 35.5% is considered a satisfactory bounce rate. The average time visitors spent on the site was 4 minutes and 35 seconds, and out of the site’s 7,970 visitors this month, 43.4% of them had never been to the site before. This statistic means that 56.6% of the visitors are returning or have been to the site previously.
That gives us a view from 1,000 ft. Google Analytics will allow you to zoom in much closer than that.
The next chart is an example measurement of a key conversion point: the sales process.

These charts show us that from the 7,970 visitors the site had this month, 787 people, or roughly 10%, added items to their cart. Of those who added items to their carts, 262 proceeded to checkout and purchased the items in their carts. This resulted in a final conversion rate of 3.29%. From these numbers, roughly two-thirds of those who add items to their carts did not go on to purchase the contents of their cart.
Now that we are actually measuring our success, we can take steps to improve them. Some reasons people do not finish the purchasing process might be:

• Shipping may be too expensive
• Possible technology issues preventing visitors from completing purchases
• The customer found their purchase was not affordable
• The customer may not have access to the means of payment accepted by your site

You will have to continue to develop hypotheses for why people would add items to their cart and not go all the way through the checkout process. After building this list, try making incremental changes to address these issues. For example, offer free shipping on certain days to see if your conversion rate spikes on those days that you offer unannounced free shipping.

The secret to website success is having your goals in mind, measuring them appropriately, and making adjustments based on your measurements, then repeating the process.