by: Jessica Davis

Too often businesses look for one particular metric that can prove their website is successful. Companies will run hundreds, even thousands of data points, looking for that one “Golden Metric” that can be used to confirm goal achievement. So it’s tough for executives and business owners to hear that there is no such thing as a “Golden Metric”. It is a myth that simply does not exist.

Website metrics should be used in conjunction with each other to tell a whole story. Picking and choosing only one metric that has the best number, will not provide you with the information you need to continue to grow a strong and lucrative business.

Sales Is Not The Golden Metric

The amount of sales your company’s website brings into the business is not the Golden Metric. While the main purpose of your website is to increase revenue, your secondary purpose should be to build and cultivate your company’s brand. Although, increased revenue may look good on the books for a while, this revenue could be from repeat visitors. If this is the case, it suggests you are doing a poor job of expanding your brand and ultimately increasing future revenue. Therefore, if you’re caught looking at sales as your only meter of success, you’ll miss very important growth opportunities.

Visits Is Not The Golden Metric

While visits is a strong metric that can gauge your website’s reach in the websphere, it is not the Golden Metric. Having continuous increases in visits to your website is an objective for many website owners, however alone, this metric cannot prove or disprove the success of a site. If you have a consistent increase in visits every month, but your bounce rate is at 75%, your website cannot be deemed successful. This high bounce rate indicates a lack of interest in your landing pages, making visitors immediately leave your website. 50,000 visits to a site is a wonderful achievement, unless 75% of those visitors never made it past the first page.

Bounce Rate Is Not The Golden Metric

Low bounce rates indicate a high interest in the pages on a particular website. And, even though this metric is very important when doing several kinds of marketing, it is not the Golden Metric. Achieving a low bounce rate can mean you have met the demand of your industry and those visiting your website are interested in what you have to say. However, a low bounce rate does not take into consideration the fact that visitors may not be converting into customers. There is a large difference between website browsers and paying customers.

How To Correctly Measure Website Success

Measuring a website’s success should follow the lines of that company’s objectives. Before creating your website you should have come up with 3 to 5 objectives that you are looking to accomplish with the creation of an online presence. After creating these objectives, your metrics reports should highlight metrics that speak directly to your aforementioned objectives. For example, if one of your objectives was to increase website reach, you may measure visits, percentage of new visits and percentage of return visits. If another objective was to increase search engine traffic (free referrals), you should measure visits from Google, Yahoo, MSN, Bing and the like.

As stated above, there is no such thing as a Golden Metric. You can’t simply choose the best metric in your report and state, “we’re successful”. You must take all of your metrics into consideration when ultimately determining your site’s success. Also, your success is only relative to the objectives you’ve set for your website. A Golden Metric may not exist, but the right mix of metrics can be extremely valuable.