How to evaluate a website performance and productivity

If your company was asked how to evaluate a website it owns, what would the answer be? A quick look to see how many people have visited the site? The number of sales generated directly from the site over the last month? The number of comments on a social media page about the content? a website Performance doesn't fall under one particular metric, which makes it a bit more difficult to manage as a viable asset. However, understanding how to gauge the sites performance can help tremendously in identifying what should be changed to make it work better.

Quantifying Performance

Defining metrics for how to evaluate a website is a key step in understanding that website's health. These can include:

• Traffic (i.e. visits, clicks, input etc.)
• Conversions (actual sales, requests for information, submittal of contact information)
• Presence (how long activity occurs, level of interaction, types of interaction)
• Contributions (added content by readers and visitors)

In most cases, businesses that truly want to evaluate their website's health look at multiple factors versus just one category. This provides a far more holistic view of what's going on and what readers want versus just one narrow view.

Using Measurement Information

With metrics established and now a measurement process being used, the big areas to focus on for improvement usually involve building more traffic and providing better content. Why? Both aspects follow the principle of the sales funnel. Not every reader is going to convert into action and then to a sale. However, by creating a wider funnel of traffic, the potential of a call of action being effective and sales occurring increases statistically. That in turn improves the function and performance of the website from a revenue perspective.

Marketing Outward Based on Results

Alternatively, sales may not be the primary target. Instead, brand development and awareness may be the goal. Again, traffic and content play key factors. Good content brings in interest, search responses, referrals, links, and discussion. Traffic happens as a resulting product when content is delivered timely and provides relevant information. That said, just having good content doesn't automatically generate 1,000 more readers and so on. It needs to be marketed. People need to know the content exists. Ergo, a third component is needed which is outreach.

Outreach can happen in different forms whether it's using SEO to attract search engine metacrawlers or using social media to announce new content availability. May businesses use multiple tools. Whichever is the case, they should all be driven by a primary strategy to bring readers back to the website for traffic generation. There shouldn't be a distraction that sends traffic elsewhere. Outreach efforts can be deemed successful when they show a marked increase in traffic from those sources specifically.

In Summary

So when asking internally how to evaluate a website currently posted for the company, a business should also be asking itself how that website performance and productivity is being measured, how big is its funnel, and what outreach is currently being performed to market the site. All three play critical roles in a website's health. To find out more on how these components work together consider taking a Website Marketing Evaluation. The results may surprise you and be very informative on what steps to take next.