Jan 14, 2013
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By: Mike Green
Is Your Website A Success?
Determining the effectiveness of a website can be a bit of a mystery at times. Here at Innovation Simple, we build fantastic websites for our clients, but know that’s just part of the eqation for success. The website must perform at a high level in order for it to be classified as a success. Below are a few metrics we use to track how a website is preforming.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is like the first time you kiss a girl. Your eyes are opened to a whole new perspective. Google Analytics gives you an opportunity to take a peek behind the curtain and see what’s going on with your website. Who’s visiting it, for how long, and what they’re looking at. I remember my first time poking around Analytics, I was blowing away by the regional map. I could actually see what town each of my web visitors were from. That was a game changer for me on how I approached marketing. But that was just the tip of the iceberg. The amount of critical marketing data available through Google Analytics are a marketers dream. There is an endless amount of information, both provided by Google and others, to teach you how to get the most out of Google Analytics. Well worth your time to learn.
Google Page Rank
Google Page Rank is Googles way of “ranking” your website compared to others on the net. It is literally named after Google’s co-founder Larry Page. It is a scale from 1-10 with 10 being the highest possible. Because it is a broad based scale, you’ll not see the fluctuation that you would see on a more granular metric, such as Domain Authority which we’ll discuss in a moment.
Page Rank is an indicator of how well Google is “reading” your information. How legit you are as a company. Some of these factors include, fresh content, relevant content, links from other credible websites, and so on. Google is constantly modifying the rules of the algorithm, which is why it’s so important that there’s someone in the wheel house watching for icebergs (that’s where we come in, hint, hint, nudge, nudge).
Alexa Ranking
Alexa Ranking has been around since 1996, crawling websites for data. The short definition for Alexa is that it ranks websites by popularity on a daily basis. If you are one of the 16 million websites that Alexa tracks, you’ll be giving a number which represents how popular you are. Of the Metrics listed, Alexa is my least favorite in terms of judging marketing effectiveness. It assumes that a website is successful purely on the volume of traffic when the reality is, a website is successful by how much it converts visitors. I think you would agree that conversion is the ultimate goal of any business that creates and markets a website.
That being said, we do still track the Alexa ranking for our clients out of our Provo, Utah office. It does act as a guide, especially for a new website trying to gain traction.
Domain/Page Authority
This is my favorite metric. It’s a large enough scale that I can track small stepping stones of progress. This is important to us as a web marketing company as much of our efforts are based on small gains. Large gains normally are riddled with fishy black hat practices. We don’t play that game at Innovation Simple.
Domain Authority is based on a 1-100 scale with 100 being the top of the game.
What Really Matters
At the end of the day, the most important web metric is whether you are converting web vistors into sales. Everything else pales in comparison to that. If you’d like to learn more about how we help you attract and convert more visitors to your web site, give us a call or stop by at our Provo Office. We’re located at 379 North University Ave. Suite 202 Provo, Utah.