• Average Page Views: the number of pages the visitor visited can indicate the strength of your visitor's connection to the information you provide
• Percent Returning Visitors: percentage of retained visitors returning to your site
• Cancellations: the likelihood your subscriber cancels their subscription through an unsubscribe form
• Average subscription length
• Active subscriber base (based on different time weekly, monthly, etc depending on model)
• Visits per month (or quarter or week).
• RSS Syndication
• Blog Stats: (ie. Technorati, Digg etc)
• New account sign-ups
• Contact Us form completions
• Number of PDF or brochure downloads
• Article views
• Press Release Views
• Case Study downloads
• Online Sales
• News Letter Signups
• Page Views
• Returning Visitors

Fast forward 18 months and today the talk is about Web 2.0. The question becomes are the same key performance indicators that we identified then still going to be important with Web 2.0? Or are there any new metrics that you should be using to measure your online success?

For the most part, many of the KPIs that we identified will still be applicable and useful when measuring your online goals. However KPIs that relate to items such as site stickness, time spent on site and page views become even more important. As the search engines move to personalized search and incorporate things like Google's Universal Search, measuring your online success will mean identifying new metrics to measure and track your online goals. Here are a few other metrics that you may want to consider when measuring your online success in the Web 2.0 World.

Web 2.0 may mean some new KPIs are incorporated into your metrics. Things such as:

• number of times your widget has been embedded on a visitor's site
• number of users who have joined your online community
• number of users who have subscribed to your blogs' feed
• number of positive listings for your brand in the search results pages (think online reputation management)
• number of positive user ratings that your videos have received

Of course there are many others to consider, but the point is that to measure your online success, it's not going to just be about on-site conversions (although ultimately that is what you may be striving for) it's going to involve tracking a number of metrics specific to user activity on your site. The consumer is the one who will ultimately determine the success of your site. Understand your user and identifying the proper key performance indicators is a great step in achieving online success.


Copyright 2007, Enquiro Search Solutions, Inc.