What is the most important information about your site? What few numbers will tell you whether everything is on an even keel? Clickthroughs, pageviews, and revenues, of course.

Clickthroughs tell you where people are coming from: advertising, affiliates, search engines, pay-per-click service and the like. Pageviews tell you what people are looking at. Revenues, of course, represent the bottom line, the goal, the moment of success whether that means buying, registering, downloading, calling for an appointment or whatever your particular conversion event might be. See what people did just before they bought, and figure out how to get more of them to do that. Then work the chain backwards from there.

With the goal clearly defined, it is easier to measure the effectiveness of your site because you know what to look for. Conversion is defined in relation to the goal you've chosen. So measure prospect acquisition as the percentage of visitors who give you their details out of the total number of visitors to your Web site. Measure conversion on sales as the percentage of people buying a product against the total number of Web site visitors. Conversion on in-house cost saving is simply the number of people using the system as a percentage of the number of people supposed to be using the system. A good internal policy here will mean this is a 100% conversion rate. The number of people using the resources and systems you have put in place as a percentage of total visitors to the support Web pages can give you your customer service conversion.

So why measure conversion? Because it allows you to accurately measure the impact of changes you make by measuring the performance of your Web site before and after the change. With this valuable information, you can make adjustments accordingly.

Measure & Analyze Customer Experience >>