How do you measure the success of a website?

[dwd2000]

There are many ways to measure the success of a website. Some people measure by the income it provides, while some may measure by how many visitors it attracts. Maybe it's just the pride of doing something you never thought you could do, or the fact your peers like what you have done.

 

[dWhite]

I believe a large portion of how successful a website is is how long it has been running and operating.

After that comes the amount of traffic it produces, and the amount of revenue it brings in.

Opinions on this matter might vary from person to person, but this was my opinion on what a successful website means to me.

 

[tittat]

Measuring Success
Different web sites will have different success criteria. Even within a company, different departments might attribute success differently.

For the marketing department, driving more traffic to the site might count as success, even if sales don't increase. For the copywriter, success will come if the content is easy to understand and helps the customer find out more about the company and its products.

For the sales department, increasing the sales conversion per site visitor could be a good measure of success. In summary, there are many ways to measure the success of a site, and all these factors combined will give the truest and most accurate overall measure of success.

Traffic
One of the most obvious measures of success is traffic. The more visitors to the site, the higher the profile, the more people will know about your site, and the more opportunities you have to build a customer relationship. However, if no visitors buy from your site or view more than one page, then traffic alone isn't enough for success...

Sales Ratio
This is how many visitors you need to get one sale. For instance if 1 in 100 visitors purchases from the site, then you have a sales ratio of 1%. One key aspect of success is to try and drive up conversion rates - if selling a product - so that more and more prospects are turned into customers.

Repeat Visits
The more repeat visits you have, the more chance you get to build a customer relationship, build loyalty and ultimately increase sales. Therefore measuring repeat visits is a good measure of success: if people come back and back again then clearly you are fulfilling a need of theirs.

Total Sales
For many people, the total sales is the figure that they look for - how many products were bought through a site in month x? Even though this figure may slightly misguide as to the overall success of a site, it is of course still an important overall measure.
courtesy

 

[tcmstr134]

This could vary allot from person to person.

But in my opinion, the most important thing isn't the amount of visitors, the amount made or how long it has been running.

A successful website could simply be defined as a website in which the Webmaster learned something. Whether it is a new thing in PHP or just something that he/she learned about a community through the site.

 

[Xemnas]

There are more ways of measuring a site's success than just profit and websearch hits. Take MySpace for instance. True, it's had huge success in terms of visits and content and so on, but you won't see the full extent of that success unless you look at the social impact it's had. Today, MySpace is the go-to place for interaction with others (real-life friends or otherwise . . .), for employers to learn more - perhaps too much - about potential employees, for stalkers to coerce victims into placing themselves in ideal locations for general victimisation, and for independent music groups to bring their media to the wider community at a lesser cost. When you take all this into account, now that is success (however morally dubious some of it may be).

 

[Spartan Erik]

Hits, revenue, and Digg. All too often I see people making websites that provide similar content as larger and popular websites. If something already exists, why bother wasting time? If it is something truly original and may be of use, then I believe a website has potential for success. True success is achieved through hits, revenue, and being dugg.

 

[fireput]

A good measure of success of a website is by the number of hits on the website.

 

[jensen]

Hey fireput,

I agree with you. not just the number of hits but how many new visitors you get and how many repeat visitors you get.

The money part would be a good measure for online shopping websites. You can use that to measure good websites that have great articles but sell nothing.

 

[phalyn]

My idea of a sucessful website is the originality. Sure, making money and getting hits is nice, but it feels good when your site is one of a kind.

 

[VPmase]

Activity is a good measurement.

 

[kyledude92107]

I measure it by how many visitors/members/posts forums get.

 

[allinone]

website success can be described by the number of clicks on the site. its simple becoz if site is successful then it will get a lot of clicks

 

[jensen]

Success depends on the definition you give it

A website with one very interesting picture can get hundreds of visitors but then people will only visit it once. So it is successful in that it manage to attract lots of visitors but not successful because it cannot keep the traffic coming constantly.

BLogs that are active can be successful at bringing people in regularly but then the author needs to keep posting. A lot of work.

Forums can have 10, 000 members. Is it successful? Yeah if you look at the numbers. But are they active? Are they posting? So each site has its own target. If it gets that target then it is successful.

 

[tnl2k7]

I'd rate the success of a site by the amount of views it gets from individual visitors, but also by paying close attention to returning visitors.

x10Hosting's AWStats offering is brilliant for getting this information.t

-Luke.

 

[Perfect7]

For me, I would measure the success of a website based on:

How much visitors like my website. If they like it very much, and they keep coming back,and they introduce their friends, and they send fan mail saying 'I love your site!', etc.

I guess that's mostly it...

 

[n3v3rl0v3]

It is measured in traffic, hits, quality of the material. public interest, contents and the services providing by it. And yeah, site uptime also depends because you wont find any worth of a website if your website isn't having best uptime.

 

[like2program]

Returning visitors. If someone comes back, that means you have a website they actually need/want