By Shelia Watson
Contributing Writer

Web statistics are useful for measuring the effectiveness of your Web site for the customer or viewer. WebTrends Inc., which provides analytical reports on the Web, noted these useful marketing-relevant indicators. Most of these are available with standard Web statistic packages.

Penetration = (unique visitors to the home page) / (unique visitors)

Penetration reflects the percentage of site visitors that go beyond the organization’s home page. A Web site can lose 50% of its visitors before the home page finishes loading. A home page with 10,000 visitors a month stopping at the home page will be less effective than a site with 5,000 visitors moving on to other pages on the site.

Migration = (visits to content area) / (site exits from the content area)

Migration refers to the number of site visitors who leave the site from a certain content area. Areas with the highest migration (i.e., pages where more visitors are leaving the site) are less effective than areas with lower migration.

Connection = (referral click-throughs) / (desired pageviews)

Connection is the number of site visitors from an external location, such as another Web site or a banner advertisement. This can measure whether online promotions are effective.

Conversion = (unique visitors taking desired action) / (unique visitors)

Conversion shows the percentage of site visitors that take a desired action. Examples are the percentage of site visitors that subscribe to the organization’s newsletter or the percentage that make purchases online.

Clicks to Action = (average number of clicks from the home page to the desired action)

This is the number of clicks it takes from the home page to reach a desired action. For example, this is useful in reducing how many times a customer has to click to make a purchase.

Intro Skip Factor = (number of visitors to the intro page) / (visitors that bypass the intro)

This indicates the number of visitors that view the site’s intro page. A large percentage bypassing the intro would indicate either an ineffective intro or a large number of return visitors.

Web statistics typically are not collected with marketing or sales objectives in mind, so other tools may be required. However, data for measuring the success of Internet objectives can be incorporated in other processes to determine the overall success of marketing objectives, sales objectives and communication goals.

For example, customer surveys can be used to collection information about the Web site and evaluate whether objectives are being met.

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