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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