How to Measure Success of a Non-E Commerce Web Site

Source:  www.drivecrossroadsford.com  

I do marketing for a franchise car dealership so we have products to sell, but people don’t buy them online.  We used to be able to measure leads as a way of looking at the success of our Web site, but recently we've found that our leads are decreasing although the number of cars we’re selling isn't changing.  Otherwise consumers aren't bothering with submitting leads they’re just showing up at the dealership.  So you’re like me and you have a non-e commerce website.  How in the world do you determine whether or not your website is even benefiting your company? 

One of the best ways to know if your non-e commerce website is a success is to measure the visitor behavior.  Visitor behavior will give you a little insight on what your customer’s intent on the website is, and will focus on the metrics:  visitor loyalty, visitor recency, length of visit, and depth of visit (Kaushik, 2010, p. 162).  Visitor loyalty will tell you how frequently visitors come to your website during a certain time period (Kaushik, 2007).  How often do you add new content to your website?  This will tell you how frequently you’d like for visitors to return to your Web page.  In my case we add new inventory to our Web pages daily, but that is probably an unrealistic expectation for most of our visitors, what’s reasonable for your Web site may not be reasonable for another company. 

The next metric for you to consider is visitor recency, or “how long it takes someone before they decide to come back” (Buckley, 2011, para. 10).  For me this is a catch 22, I want people to visit my site regularly if they are in the market for a vehicle, but I also want them to find a vehicle come in and buy it. Then I only want them to visit my site when they need to set up a service appointment.  The question to ask is, how often to you want visitors to come to your site, and what are you doing to incentivize them to come back?

The length of visit is a pretty self explanatory metric, how long do your visitors stay on your website, or “during the reporting period what is the quality of visit as represented by the length of a visitor session in seconds”  (Kaushik, 2007, para. 20).  However instead of looking at a typical average number consider looking at the distribution of time spent on the site (Kaushik, 2010, p. 165).  This will give you a better idea of whether most of your traffic came and left quickly, or if most of your traffic stayed for an extended period of time.  When you consider what you want your visitors to be doing, and for how long this will give you an idea of success.

Lastly consider the depth of visit which measures how many pages your visitors view on their visits to your Web site.  This is another metric that is useful to view the distribution of page views and not just the average (Kaushik, 2007, para. 26).  In my case I’d like visitors to view recently arrived inventory at a minimum if they’re a repeat visitor, as well as a page like specials.  My visitors don’t have to go far into my site for there to be engagement, especially after I've considered the other metrics we've discussed.    

  

There is one other useful thing that some non-e commerce sites can consider to measure success, and that is to use Google Analytics e-commerce tracking tool.  Although non-e commerce sites aren't necessarily selling something they are doing some things like generating leads in some cases.  Nissan Motor Company uses the Google Analytics’ e-commerce tracking tool to measure “whenever a visitor submits a request for a test drive or a brochure” (Ouchi & Vijeyakumaar, 2012, para. 3).  By measuring their analytics this way instead of through the traditional goals method, Nissan is able to collect more data from the events of their visitors that can be useful to their business.  It may be useful for your company to consider a similar approach for your non-e commerce Web site in conjunction to reviewing visitor behavior frequently.     

References

Buckley, H.  (2011, August 25).  Google Analytics – Measuring success using visitor loyalty.  [Web log post].  Retrieved from http://www.siliconbeachtraining.co.uk/blog/google-  analytics-measuring-success-using-visitor-loyalty/ 

Kaushik, A. (2007, July 17).  I got no ecommerce.  How do I measure success? [Web log post].  Retrieved from http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/i-got-no-ecommerce-how-do-i-measure-success/   

Kaushik, A. (2010). Web analytics 2.0: The art of online accountability & science of customer    centricity. Indianapolis, IN: Wiley Publishing. ISBN# 978-0470529393

Ouchi, N. & Vijeyakumaar, V.  (2012, May 11).  How Nissan uses ecommerce tracking without directly selling online [Case study].  Google Analytics Web Log.  Retrieved from                             http://analytics.blogspot.com/2012/05/how-nissan-uses-ecommerce-tracking.html