How to Measure the Success of a Website

Many have asked me how do I measure the success of a website. You will probably agree that it depends. It depends what you want to achieve with the website in the first place.
Ok, ok… Make Money Right?

Most of us build websites to make money. And if that is the case, it’ll be easy to measure success. You would set a target as to how much you want to make with a website right at the beginning. No? Most of us do not have the slightest idea how to build a money making website so I understand why we did not set a monetary target in the first place. Otherwise, it would be a lame reply… “As much as possible!”.

If you make more money than you initially invested, you’ll be in profit. Typically, a DIY website would cost you less than $100 to set up and maintain for a year or even two. So if you make $100 in the first year, you break even. If you make $100 every month from the 6th month onward you are doing really well. So build 20 such websites and you could probably tell your boss you don’t really need that job!
But do you know…

• How to make $100 per month with a website?
  
• What do you sell to make money?
  
• How much traffic do you need to make that monthly cheque?
  

It is true that your website revenue depends on the number and quality of visitors to your website regardless of what you sell - hard goods, e-products, subscription or advertising space (e.g. Google Adsense).

One of the easiest ways to monetize your traffic is to put up Google Ads by registering to be an Adsense publisher. Content website is probably where Google wants the ads to appear so you will need unique and useful content. You will need to optimize each of your web page for search engine so that you will get free traffic from Google, Yahoo, MSN and etc.

So you can see that the success of a website is a function of visitor traffic. Now, let’s determine how much traffic you’ll need to make a $100 cheque every month.

We shall take the example of an Adsense publisher. Since you are a new publisher, let’s target less competitive keywords which you can still get ranked in the top 3 pages with proper SEO techniques. Each click will probably earn you $0.10 or less. You will need at least 1000 clicks to earn a $100 cheque. That will work to 33 clicks every day. If 5 out of 100 visitors click at one ad, you will need more than 650 visitors to your website every day. And that’s a lot of traffic for a new website for a newbie publisher!

If your website is not already generating 500 unique visitors a day then you’ll have to

• Add more content to target more keywords.
  
• Promote your website by submitting articles and press release.
  
• Solicit backlinks by submitting to directories and other related websites.
  
• Rewriting your content to make it search engine friendly and interesting to your readers.
  

Finally, one more tip for you to find out if your content is liked by your visitors. Go check you server log and see how many people bookmarked your website - people usually bookmark a website when they find it interesting and useful. You should have at least 30% of your visitors bookmarked your website.