Most important indicators measuring web performance

Before I start sharing results of my researches, I’d like to explain my approach, why I have chosen particular areas of measurement. Primarily, each and every website serves one or several, clearly defines goals. This is obvious, but at the same time, usually people responsible for the websites don’t really focus on the most important objectives, trying to challenge too much of them.

There are several different major kinds of websites, that are characterized by common set of objectives. They could be divided as follows:

• e-commerce – must lead to (direct) sales of a product of service
• corporate / personal website – building image, and (should be) leading to contact details
• publishers’ / community website – monetization through ads, so leads are mainly registration or maximizing avg. views per session

All of them has several common factors determining quality of performance – apart from simple number of visitors, there are indicators explaining both relevancy of users and quality of web interface architecture & design. They can be measured mainly through number of goals achieved (that is, percentage of visitors, that performed expected action, usually sending fulfilled (order/contact/registration form), a funnel of a way that is necessary to achieve the goal (like finding a product, adding it to a basket, fulfilling order form, and sending it), as well as number of exits and bounce rate.

First, number of goals achieved can tell us, what’s the basic rentability of a website. That is, if we pay EUR 0,50 per click to attract a visitor, and 5% of our visitors realize a goal in a shape of order of EUR 100, including EUR 10 of our margin, it means that for becoming a profitable venture, we need to:

• increase prices/margin (-> overall business performance and operations, sales and procurement strategy)
• lower the costs of advertising (-> marketing and advertisement optimization)
• increase the customer/visitor ratio (-> internal web performance optimization)

All three above issues are very interesting, but I primarily focus on the last aspect. As the number of goals gives only a picture whether a business is or is not profitable, major focus should be made on explanations why is it so.

Starting with issues with the highest effects vs. costs ratio, I would focus primarily on first impression of the user. It can be measured by number of exit rate, and especially by bounce ratio. This indicator explains what is the number of visitors, who see only one page of your website – that is, they are exiting website, just after entering it, without any interaction. High bounce rate means that either these visitors aren’t correctly targeted (they’re not interested in your product/offer), or your website isn’t designed efficiently. Or both.

As targeting visitors is an external issue (connected with marketing optimization), I’ll dig into it much later. However, frequently even only introducing small changes to website architecture, can bring great results. My first researchers proved that adding properly only one line of simple text with a hyperlink, can keep 20% or more visitors at your website.

I’ll present details in the next posts.