Measuring Without Hard Metrics: How to Analyze the Success of Sites that Don't Sell Directly

By Jon Lukas

Everyone knows that an e-commerce web site—with a shopping cart and credit card transactions—is set up to help you effectively track the success of your site and online marketing campaigns. But what if your site doesn't have a checkout or standard revenue-generating event? Can you still get the metrics you need? Yes! There are relatively simple methods to capture definitive data about your site and its visitors.

Forms and Conversion Rates
If your site has a form that visitors complete to receive further information about your products, services, or organization, the rate at which visitors submit the form will provide valuable information about your site's effectiveness. First, you'll want to determine how many of your visitors actually see the page with the form on it. If very few visitors reach that page, then you may need to make more prominent calls to action with links to the form.

If many of your visitors are reaching the form but not submitting it, then one of two things is probably occurring. One possibility is that your form itself is too intimidating—it may have too many fields or may be asking for excessive personal information (do you really need their cell phone number? Probably not.). Another possible pitfall is that the form page did not meet your visitors' expectations. This can occur when the call to action that leads users to the form does not relate closely enough to what is being offered to users that complete the form.

If you have a form that may ultimately convert visitors to paying customers, you can look at the history of your web site to get a good idea of your conversion rate—how many visitors filled out the form compared to how many of those visitors made a purchase. Using this information, you can calculate an approximate dollar value for each person that fills out the form.

Here's a simple example: If the form is to request information about a product that costs $1000, and one out of every ten visitors who submits the form ends up purchasing the product, then each form submission is worth approximately $100. If your web analytics tool tracks revenue, you can use this estimated value to track your revenue potential. It's not as precise of a revenue value as you would get from a shopping cart, but the information is still very meaningful and helpful.

If you don't think this method of estimating revenue is precise enough, consider this: For a period of one month, try to calculate the estimated value the way that we described above. Then, compare your estimated value with your actual revenue for that month. You may be surprised how close the numbers are.

If the form will provide no revenue (such as a form that simply provides a free brochure) you'll still want to see how many visitors reach the form, and of those, how many complete and submit it. Even though there is no money involved, the same principles apply.

Average Time on Site
Many web analytics tools provide information about how long visitors remain on your site. The average time on site for all visitors won't tell you much, but if you segment your visitors (according to which campaign they came from, which search word they used to find your site, or what country they are in, for example), you'll start to see differences in average time on site—and these differences reflect your visitors' level of interest in your offerings.

You can also use 'percentage of short visits' as an indicator of interest (or disinterest!) in your site. You'll soon see that visitors searching on certain keywords are spending more time on your site than visitors using other keywords. You should then optimize your site so that it receives the best possible search engine ranking for the keywords that generate the most interest, not simply the most traffic.

If you segment your visitors according to which online campaign they came from, you can compare average time on site between campaigns to quickly see which are more effective. If a particular campaign results in a significantly shorter time on site than the others, it might mean the visitors did not see what they expected after clicking on your ad. Make sure your ad copy and graphics match the campaign landing page—this provides continuity to your visitors, and establishes from the outset that you will consistently deliver what you promise.

Other Ad-Hoc Analysis
Of course, there are other ways to measure the effectiveness of your site. If you set a persistent cookie, you can see if visitors return to your site after the first visit—and with segmentation, you can see if these returning visitors spend a long time on the site, and what pages or sections of the site they spend the most time looking at. Your persistent cookie can include information about the campaign the visitor originally came from, so you can compare just the return visits from various campaigns to see if you've generated ongoing interest in your site—this is particularly important for frequently updated news and information sites.

Though we've provided several well-established ways of measuring success on your non e-commerce site, we hope that we've stirred your imagination, and that you'll be inspired to find additional ways segment and analyze your visitors in a way that's appropriate for your site's design, structure, and purpose.