Today, I was talking with someone who is a webmaster managing various kinds of web sites. He has one specific question for me which I thought I should talk about it in my blog post.
“How do I Measure the success of a web page?”
I was a bit paused when I hear this question. And, that’s really an excellent question that should be looked into.
Well, when doing SEO I always see, though there are many common characteristics among the web pages, they always have a unique personality like individuals. Because of many uncontrollable parameters, a web page has unique personality which is what a web page with the same kind of content and links can be treated differently in search engines, even by the users sporadically. Perhaps, I will speak more on Web Page Personality in my future posts, now I really want to deal the question I was asked on “Measuring the success of a web page”. Please note, I am not talking about success of a web site but success of an individual web page.
Let’s take a real case as an example, have you ever advertised on Google, Yahoo or any other publisher’s sites or you might be getting some traffic to your website thru whatever source. Do they enter your website thru one of the web pages from your site which we call as entry page or gateway page. When the web site visitors land on one of your campaign landing pages or website gateway pages what would you expect them to do?
1. Buy a Product - Do you agree with people buy products/services as soon as they land on your website?
2. Fill-in a Questionnaire/lead generation form - Do you agree, people drop their email addresses and other personal info. as soon as they land on your website landing page.
3. Explore the website - Do you agree, visitors land on your campaign landing page and enjoy the user experience of your website or is it that you expect them to do?
Pls. ask the above 3-questions to yourself, the answers slightly vary based on what you are trying to achieve with your online campaigns or your website.
But, as soon as visitors land on a landing page or a website gateway page - within the first second they try to ensure themselves they landed on the right page. And, try to smell the scent that was lured them to come to this web page i.e. find the relevant text, links or images that help them to ensure themselves. If they can’t find the relevancy to their need of visiting your landing page…the best they will do is “Abandon Your Website Landing Page” and move their journey back to search engines.
So, the success of Campaign Landing Pages and Other Website Entry Pages is purely depended on how many people clicked on and get-into the next page of your website. These pages are typically I call as “Directional Pages”

A majority of the landing pages and gateway pages are “Directional Pages”. The primary duty of these directional pages is to direct visitors to the right section or source of information on your website. These pages include Home Pages, Site Maps, Product Listing Pages etc., The goal of all these pages is not to “Sell the products or services” but direct visitors to the right section where they find information or even buy something. Hence, the success of the Directional Pages is measured by no. of people getting into the websites. I use a metric called “Committed Visits” which is Total Visits to the page subtracted by exits at the page.
That is all about measuring success for Directional Web Pages. Now I will talk about another kind of web pages - Descriptors.
Descriptors receive visitors from Directional Pages. The goal of the descriptors is to talk to the visitor on your products, services or support in terms of giving an overview about your product, talking about the product features, provide the pricing, how your product works, how is it different from your best competition etc., Each descriptive page has one call to action (infact, several in many cases). On product overview page, you may call the visitor to read about benefits of the product, on the benefits page - you may call the visitor to learn about how is it different from your competition and testimonials. You would need to find out on which point you would need to call the visitor to make the ultimate action i.e. “Click Here to Buy Widgets Online!”

The success of these Descriptors is measured on No. of times the website visitors have taken the action on “Defined Call to Action”. For example - No. of times viewed the product flash demo, no. of times people clicked on Benefits link in Product Overview page. You can mix and match while defining these call to action even combine a few of them for each descriptive web page.
Lead Generators/Converters are the web pages whose responsibility is to convert the prospect into the defined goal. These are the web pages that generally upsell your products or services, these are the web pages that pitches about the benefits of your product, offers, testimonials etc,
The success of these web pages is measured by associating the visits to these pages to the no. of goals achieved. For example, out of 100 orders that you made today check how many of them visited these converter pages prior to their purchase at your website.
I was recalling myself when I was learning computers, the teacher was telling computers is all about taking Input from the users and Processes (CPU) to give a defined Output. Similarly, we do have a list of pages that come into this category “Processors” (let me know if I could coin a better word
Processors are the web pages whose sole responsibility is to receive the information as Inputs and process it and give the defined output to the users. These are the pages typically we have in any website like login forms, registration forms, shopping carts, payment forms etc.,
The success of these processors is measured by no. of people started the process and completed the process successfully. The best example is web site shopping cart funnel. The success of shopping cart funnel is measured by looking at the people started adding products to cart, to checkout to payment information to our best friend thank you page or order confirmation page.
Similarly, we can measure the success for a registration form, login form etc.,
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