Website Measurment Standards

                                                                  
Web based marketing is becoming very popular these days .It provides a lot of interesting revenue generation model. It is also very significant for startup companies where due to resource crunch application of offline media and traditional marketing channels are not easy, web based marketing solutions provide easy, economical & creative media & marketing solutions. But before choosing a website for marketing a product it is very essential that the size and the type of traffic for the website should be found out . There are various kinds of traffic measurement standards that are followed to measure the effectiveness of a website, though all these standards look similar but they do differ subtly . Another point that has to be noted over here is that the choice of measurement standards also depend on the objective of the marketer .Here the author will like to high light a few important terms regarding website measurement standards.

1> Hits :- is the most common and most misleading standard of measurement. Every website/blog has some html code embedded in it . Whenever a website is visited the no. of hits are equal to no. of html code embedded plus one more ( this extra is for the website as a whole ).Thus by making a blog/website complex with added photos, videos and gadgets the no. of hits can be increased .

2> Visits :- Whenever a blog is visited once by a user there happens to be one visit.

3> Page visits :- The no. of times a website is refreshed plus the no. of individual pages in the website that had been visited (& refreshed) in an website .

4> Unique Visits :- Visits are never a very effective tool for measurement, since it can happen that a small set of users might be visiting a website throughout the day, that means though the total visits will be high but the no. of unique visitors will be very low. For a marketer it is very essential that his advertisements must be viewed by a large no. of unique individuals .So unique visits come into picture. It gives the total sum of unique visitors visiting a website.

5> Bounce rate :- If a website is a visited by an user but left within 30 seconds then this is considered as a bounce .A high bounce rate is undesirable .

6> Average time spent:- gives the average time spent by an user during a single visit to a website/blog .Though much more pragmatic than the above said standards ,should be used with a bit of caution especially when dealing with social networking sites . For a social networking sites like Face Book & Orkut these are always high because once logged in users have tendencies to be logged in for a large time but this surely does not mean that users remain active .Users are active for small time periods and remain idle for the rest of the time .An idle user though logged in is not in the interest of the marketer.

7> No. of clicks per ad:- These days this is the most commercially accepted standard . It gives the measurement of no. of individual click an add gets while posted in a website .This is quite an accurate measurement since it directly gives the measurement of popularity of the ad itself rather than platform.

8> Geographical Profiling of visitors: - Many a times it is in the interest of the marketer to know that visitors from which geographical location predominates in a website. There are various tools available these days through which the geographical profiling of the visitors can be done.

These are the fundamental standards of website measurement, other than these there are various other standards. This is an emerging domain and every day newer standards and tools of measurement are coming into picture.But the author feels that going through the above standards will definitely give a fair idea regarding how blogs and websites are measured .