Measuring Website Performance
Online businesses will usually have developed a website with certain expectations as to its future performance. The expectations may be formalised as performance targets based on traffic, enquiries or sales. Often they are less concrete notions such as anticipating that, within two years of launching a website, 50% of company turnover will derive from online sales. Most businesses turn to Search Engine Optimization because actual website performance has fallen short of the performance that was expected at the start of the project.
Recognising Poor Performance
It is usually not difficult to recognise if a website's performance is truly poor. Low visitor numbers, an absence of search engine referrals, poor visitor retention are signs that a website is failing to connect with its potential audience. It is much more difficult to make an assessment of a website's performance if is it generating significant amounts of traffic, but still falling short of what the owner anticipated. In some cases the owner will have wholly unrealistic performance expectations, in others the performance will have been recognised correctly as being sub-optimal. The traffic that a website could potentially receive depends principally on its products and the area of the marketplace towards which it is focused. For a website selling low volume, niche products, 200 visitors a day may represent an excellent performance, with little prospect of increasing traffic further. Conversely, a website operating in a high volume market sector may be performing poorly if it receives 2,000 visitors a day and may require a 10 fold or greater increase in traffic to approach an optimal performance.
Performance Indicators
The indicators used to measure and monitor website performance are all to some extent interrelated. The figures which are of most importance to website owner are enquiries, sales and turnover. These secondary performance measures are all dependent to a greater or lesser degree on two primary performance measures: website usage (expressed in terms of visitors, unique visitors, page views or time spent per visit) and conversion rates (the percentage of website visitors who act in the manner desired by the website owner, be it making an enquiry or placing an order). Other factors such as website usability, customer service and trust confound the relationship by affecting both conversion rates and the probability of generating repeat business.
Website Performance Indicators
Every website obtains statistical information from its visitors, collected in the server log files. In order to make an assessment of a website's performance, one needs to be able to view and manipulate these statistics, which is best achieved by purchasing a commercial 'stats package'. Visitors, unique visitors, page views, average page views per visit and average time spent per visit all provide useful information for assessing and monitoring a website's performance. Referral reports allow analysis of how visitors find the site, whilst site paths track visitor behaviour when using the site. Bandwidth usage and hits - the number of server requests - are a better measure of how cleanly the site was constructed than of its performance and are thus of little relevance to Search Engine Optimization.
Search Engine Rankings
Search engine rankings are not strictly a website performance indicator, but rather an indicator of the effectiveness of the website's Search Engine Optimization. Search engine rankings impact directly on website visitor numbers, as there is a very high correlation between website rankings and search engine referrals. Search engine rankings also impact on conversion rates, since quality of website traffic is dependent largely on the source of the referrals. A search engine directs high quality, often termed qualified traffic, to a website, which will produce higher conversion rates than non-specific web traffic.
Economic Performance Indicators
The economic performance indicators for a website - number of sales, average order value, turnover, ROI - correlate with website traffic and conversion rates, but are confounded by numerous other factors including website usability, product pricing, stock availability, trust in the website etc. Ignoring the confounding factors, to increase a website's economic performance requires an increase in at least one factor from volume of traffic, quality of the traffic or conversion rate. If other factors remain constant, doubling website traffic will have exactly the same impact on the economic performance of a website as doubling the conversion rate.
SEO and Website Performance
Search Engine Optimization is concerned solely with achieving improved search engine rankings for targeted search terms. Achieving high search engine rankings for relevant, high traffic search terms will directly impact on the volume of traffic that a website receives via search engine referrals. High search engine rankings may also, depending on the primary source of referrals previously, result in the website receiving higher quality traffic, which will in turn result in higher conversion rates. It would be wrong to think of Search Engine Optimization as a panacea for all poorly performing websites - SEO will not, for instance, solve the problem of a poorly constructed, shoddy looking website which puts off potential customers from making purchases. Search Engine Optimization is nonetheless a potent tool for improving website performance and profitability, whether used on its own or in combination with other Internet Marketing techniques.
