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.

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We often deal with clients that are planning to "revamp" their sites with Flash, with SEO having already generated tremendous gains in their sales. The thing that we most dread to hear is that they’ve hired an experienced "Flash designer" that will be taking their websites to the "next level." Unfortunately, that "next level" is often the basement - at least in terms of SEO results.

The bottom line here is that a site built entirely in Flash still faces huge obstacles. While there have been recent moves from Google and Yahoo! to try to index the content from combined Flash/SEO sites, those moves have not yet, from my experience, translated into SEO results or success (at least when compared to html sites).

We should make a distinction here between embedded Flash and sites built entirely from Flash. For example, a site that contains Flash elements but still contains basic html elements will not overly suffer, as the Flash element (usually a movie in a box on the homepage or elsewhere) is externalized. A search engine spider will generally not try to parse through any files that have been externalized in the code - they will only index the code that is readily apparent on the source page.

However, from an SEO results perspective, there are still major issues with sites that are built entirely in Flash, and SEO is normally the first thing that suffers. First of all, the URL generally never changes no matter where people navigate on the site. As any decent SEO practitioner will tell you, every page of your site is a potential entry page for a search engine. With a site built in Flash, SEO suffers even more as you only have one potential entry page, which is the main URL. This cuts off dozens, hundreds, or thousands of potential pages that could otherwise be indexed in Google and Yahoo! (and all other engines). When your only potential entry page in the search engine listings is your home page, it is very difficult to target a wide assortment of keyphrases, potentially eliminating SEO results or rankings.

Content is another very large issue. Search engines rank pages based upon a number of criteria, but one of the most important to SEO results is the text that they can "understand" on individual pages. At present, search engines read primarily html text (although some also read text in the PDF format) - which means that if you decide that you want to use a rare and fancy font that must be displayed in graphic form (since the visitor may not have that particular font available on his or her computer while browsing), the engine will not read the text and therefore will not know what the page is about, which could harm SEO results. Naturally, this also includes any of the text included in Flash. While Yahoo! and Google have recently announced enhanced capabilities in reading content within Flash, I have not personally seen that translate into great SEO results for competitive keyphrases.

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Only targeting "follow spam"

It’s probably not a safe assumption that there’s a limit on the number of people one can actually follow on Twitter. After all, it’s possible someone has no life to prevent them being able to monitor a stream of thousands. Hey, if people actually camped out or bought scalped tickets to see "The Dark Knight" instead of just waiting 12 hours, then it’s possible to justify almost anything.

It’s sort of requirement, for example, that Robert Scoble follow 21,000 people. This is his gig. Personally, I follow 237 people very poorly. I’m fond of a few of them, but wouldn’t notice if many of them disappeared off the face of the Earth, and have no interest in building up a huge list of people to follow. This is generally how I am in real life, too. If in the real world you’re a Calacanis, tweeting incessantly and saying nothing, then you’ll be unfollowed quicker than I can start my car and drive away.

I’ve got things to do.

But with something like Twitter, it’s not about managing the personality quirks and relative gregariousness of one person. It’s about managing all types in the fairest of ways as well as Twitter spam. Bloggers this morning nonetheless were miffed at new restrictions put on the number of people one can follow.

The current follow threshold appears to be 2,000, as Brent Csutoras and others (some of whom also have multiple accounts) are discovering. There was a brief ballyhoo over the assumptions Twitter was limiting the number of people that can follow a particular account. That’s since been cleared up by Twitter founders.

Twitter instated the limit to combat Twitter spam and insists there is no actual limit to the number of people a person can actually follow, just a limit to the number of people a person can follow in a certain time period, and that limit is directly proportionate to the number of people a person has following them, among some other factors undisclosed for the same reason Google doesn’t disclose many of its own parameters.

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Hoboken NJ (PRWEB) July 30, 2007 — Bryan Eisenberg (http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3622853), co-author of Wall Street Journal, New York Times, USA Today, and BusinessWeek bestsellers Waiting For Your Cat to Bark? and Call to Action, has teamed up with John Quarto-vonTivadar (http://www.grokdotcom.com/author/john-quarto-vontivadar/), Chief Scientist at Future Now, to write the perfect book for everyone looking to improve their web site conversion rates.

Always Be Testing: The Complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer (http://tinyurl.com/65be8e) (Sybex, an imprint of John Wiley & Sons; August 2008; $29.99; 336 pages) teaches users of all levels what to test, how to test, how to use Google Website Optimizer to do so–and ultimately, how to improve conversion rates.

In the book, Eisenberg and Quarto-vonTivadar discuss the important theory behind testing so that readers not only understand the clicks reports, but also the "why" of clicks and the data behind the reports. While primarily intended for hands-on implementers (marketers, webmasters, designers, media buyers, small business owners) who need to better understand, design, implement, interpret, and tune for conversions, the book also speaks to financial decision makers (directors and VPs of marketing) about better understanding the importance and impact of testing and optimization.

Always Be Testing is the latest addition to Wiley’s online marketing library. As a publisher, Wiley offers a number of titles that help develop successful online marketing plans; leverage quick start solutions for blogs and websites; test and tune for maximum results; get buy in and support from key stakeholders, and so much more.

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