So you have a content-based site, and you want to know whether your visitors’ time on your site was successful.

You have two options:

1. Attempt to measure this via their on-site behaviour; or
2. Ask them, via one of the many “voice of customer” solutions.

This post will deal only with #1.

Content sites can be challenging to measure the success of a visit, simply because there’s not necessarily one path. Rather, revenue is often generated via advertising, where page views = ad impressions = revenue.

If you are trying to measure the success of your content site, there are a few ways you can go about this.

• Page Views per Visit: Seeing a large number of PVs/Visit could indicate a visitor has found information that is useful to them and has had a successful visit. However, a lost or confused visitor would also generate a large number of page views. How do you distinguish the two?
• Time on Site: This too could indicate a successful visit. However, it could also indicate that someone is spending time searching for (and not finding) what they want.

So how could you better measure success?

• Focus on valuable pages. A high number of page views to actual content suggests a more successful visit than a high number of page views that might include, say, site searches. Therefore, focus on PVs/Visit (or Time Spent) to a subset of pages. This can be more valuable than site wide PVs/Visit or Time Spent.

But you can do better. First, you need to assess why your content site exists. What behaviour can a visitor perform that would indicate they successfully found what they were looking for?

• For example, your site exists to provide information X – that’s the goal and purpose of your site. Therefore, a visitor seeing content X achieves that goal, and suggests they had a successful visit.
• If your site exists for reasons X, Y and Z, a successful visit could be a one that saw one or more of of X, Y or Z.
• Setting up goals or segments around these behaviours can help you measure over time whether your visitors are performing these behaviours. Can better navigation drive up the percentage of visitors successfully completing this task? Which tasks are more popular? Are you even doing a good job of communicating what your site exists for? (If very few actually complete that main task or tasks, I’d suggest probably not!)

A final note: the intention of measuring a successful visit to your site is to measure this success from the point of view of the visitor. Is your site doing a good job of providing what visitors want?

This “success” doesn’t necessarily tie to short-term revenue for a content site. After all, a successful visit might be one where the visitor comes in, finds what they’re looking for immediately, and leaves. However, that visitor might generate more ad impressions by getting completely lost on your site. Good for you … in the short term. But doesn’t mean they had a successful visit to your site, nor does it bode well for your long-term revenue.

Therefore, measurement of visit success should be analysed alongside measures of revenue success, while carefully weighing the long-term benefits of successful visits (and happy visitors) against the short-term revenue generated by “lots and lots of page views”.