In the wake of the great dot com demise (and welcome consequent recovery), companies are getting more and more concerned regarding the return on their online investments.  If you wish to assess whether your internet investment has been for nothing more than the emperor’s new clothes (no doubt purchased at Boo.com) then perhaps the following pointers will help.

To measure the success of your online venture, you must first clearly establish and set out aims, objectives, audiences, messages and services. These aims and objectives can then provide a benchmark by which you grade the return on your online investment. With this in mind, it is important that you pay more attention to qualitative information than to quantitative information.  Your measures of success could include some or all of the following:

Average length of time on the site

This will depend on the kind of site you are operating. If for instance you are running a news and information site, if the average length of time people stay on it per visit is 30 minutes, that is a good thing. It will inform you that they have received information which is stimulating and structured enough to enable them to stay and read more information, related or otherwise. If however you are running a website providing online banking information, if the average stay is 30 minutes then it is likely that they are finding the site difficult to use, rather than full of interesting information. For some companies, pushing down the amount of time people spend on their site is important; for others it’s pushing it up.

Number of subscribers

Subscriptions mean e–mail addresses, potential e–mail newsletters, and as long as your content is good, a band of loyal customers. Subscriptions are an indication of interest in your offering, and a confirmation of potential sales. The number of subscribers provides a more accurate indication of the success of your online product than raw hits or page impressions.

Target audience

Despite the fact that the internet is a worldwide network, it is likely that your target audience is localised to one area of the globe. It could be an area as small as Dublin, or as large as Europe and North America. Measure response from your target audience through site feedback and Web traffic reports. Web traffic reports can provide you with detailed qualitative information about which countries your site was most accessed from. These figures are never 100% accurate but can provide a useful framework by which you gauge interest in your site in different geographies.

Turnover

For Web projects which result in selling directly to the customer, how many units are you selling? More importantly, what are your trends in turnover? Has it grown steadily month on month? How is it affected by other features on your site such as e–mail newsletters, content sharing, polls, competitions and other interactive tools? Companies such as Clockwork Orange clothing are consistently improving online turnover through such features, including sending SMS messages to their subscribers only, and giving them discount on certain items.

Customer service

When using the Web as an interface with your customers, it is imperative that you set up internal systems to respond to and manage queries which are generated from the medium. Have you been able to communicate with your customers more quickly, more reliably, or more often through the internet? Has your average response time to queries been reduced? Does e–mail remove ambiguity in orders, or provide a seamless electronic ordering mechanism straight through to dispatch and delivery. Has anecdotal feedback from your customers led you to believe that you are serving them better through this means?

Cost savings

Using a dynamic environment such as the Web to publish latest events, PR stories and other news items means that information can quickly and easily be amended and edited.  Does this save you time and money developing for instance a monthly newsletter or a weekly bulletin? It is this very factor which has caused a large dip in the sales of football magazines in the UK and Ireland, as readers are using the Web to find up to the minute information, rather than the magazines which by their nature are up to a week old.  Make sure you spend time on a monthly basis analysing the facts and figures regarding your web project’s performance. It is these figures which will prove invaluable in allowing you to wisely invest future development budgets. Behind the figures are the pointers to the key questions: Who are my customers? What do I want to offer them? Am I doing that? How can I do it better?

By answering these questions, you can truly embrace internet technology as part of your business to better serve you and your customers.