Popularity metrics are yardsticks by which you can judge the relative popularity of your content over time. The primary metrics are as follows:

Let's take a quick look at each of these popularity metrics.

The number of unique visitors is perhaps the most vital statistic, as it counts the visitors to your site while factoring out double counting. Be aware that there are limitations to the counting. The primary impact comes from what are known as "masked IP addresses", that is, networks that automatically give all their users the same IP address. This brings us to an important point: Unique visitors does not count people; it counts computers, and that is the root of the problem. If, for example, two members of a family use the same computer to visit your site one week, you only see one visitor in the number of unique visitors stats.

The visits statistic, on the other hand, gives the total number of visits to your web site during the reporting period. It is a useful metric that will help you arrive at a conclusion regarding the activity trends on your site. Using both the unique visitors and visits metrics, you can run a quick visits-per-visitor calculation as a means of assessing repeat visitors.

Page views (also called impressions) tells you the total number of pages viewed by site visitors during the reporting period. If visitor A looks at just the home page, but visitor B explores the site, visiting nine pages before leaving, visitors A and B would be collectively responsible for 10 page views. Here again, you will want to look at the average number of page views per visitor. Tracking the trend in this statistic gives you a way of assessing how effective your content is at engaging visitors.

The final primary popularity metric is average visit length. Ever wondered if your site is sticky? This statistic and the average pages per visit stat give you a good idea of how sticky your site is. Track this metric across time to assess trend. Content-heavy sites, subscription sites, and sites relying on ad revenues, obsess over this number as it indicates pretty clearly the success of their efforts to draw and hold an audience.

Where are your visitors coming from? What keywords are bringing them to the site? Look to your analytics reports for answers to these questions. Your Google Analytics dashboard will tell you the sources of traffic, be it search engines or referrals, or even e-mail. Look carefully at the various sources driving traffic.

The search engines section of the analytics reports will also tell you which keyphrases are driving traffic. Look not only at the number of visitors produced by each keyphrase, but also at the amount of time those visitors spend on the site and the number of pages they viewed. This method will give you good insight into whether your content is matching up well with your keyphrase strategy.

Also remember to look at the geographic information in your analytics to assess your progress in your target markets and to discover new markets.

Measuring the success of your website in terms that are meaningful to management, that is looking for those metrics that are directly relevant to the site's business goals, are what we'll call e-business metrics. This is not a fixed set of indicators common to all sites, but rather a set of indicators that vary according to the nature of the business, its online presence, and the firm's business goals.

There is some common ground here with the popularity metrics discussed previously. The amount of time visitors stay on your site is clearly relevant to whether your site is effective at delivering its message. Of course, this still needs to be tied back to your goals and target markets, and you must take a look at where they are spending the time. In other words, determining the significance of this metric is more involved than simply crunching numbers.

If your firm is concerned with selling advertising space, page views is a key metric for you, as each new page gives you a chance for further ad impressions, which correlates directly to ad revenues.

Conversion rates are a common measure of a business's ability to inspire prospects to take action. While the most common focus is on purchases, conversion rates should not be so narrowly defined. Conversion can also mean registration for a newsletter, download of a product brochure, even participation in a discussion board.

Benchmarking conversion across the site requires you to look at a variety of numbers to get the full picture. For example, if your site provides an option to become a member or sign up for a newsletter, your log files won't give you the clearest picture. Instead, you should count the number of new registrations.

Sites focused on online sales should, of course, be tracking the conversion rates as they relate to purchases, but there are also a number of other stats of interest. In addition to the number of purchases, you should at least be tracking the items per purchase and the value of purchases.

Some firms engage in very granular analysis of e-commerce performance and if you wish to really dig into these metrics you will need tools that allow you to slice and dice the data accumulated in your database for each transaction.

Another valuable indicator of e-commerce success is shopping cart abandonment, that is, how many people put items into their shopping cart but then failed to make a purchase. This number should be tracked across time, and consistent efforts must be made to manage this number. A high percentage of abandoned transactions may signal problems with the site's usability or technical glitches that require your attention.

In contrast, if you are not selling online but only marketing your company for offline sales, a key metric for e-business success is leads generated for your sales team. While it is easy to track the number of inquiry e-mails or forms you may receive from your site, it is an incomplete metric. Many people will prefer to contact you directly, rather than submit an online inquiry. In order to track this, your intake process for prospects should include questions about how the prospect found your firm.

In the end, the relevance of particular metrics will vary from firm to firm and you will have to make a decision about what to look at, how often, and how much weight to give it. Data is not the goal, but rather intelligence.

To track your success gathering inbound links, you will need to look beyond Google Analytics. There are several tools you can use, including your Google and Bing Webmaster accounts. While Google and Bing are free and easy to use (assuming you've already set up the accounts, as we advised in earlier chapters), there is a much better solution: Majestic SEO.

Majestic SEO provides both a free and a premium subscription service. If you control the site you want to track, and have access to the site's root directory on the server, then you can use the free service. Once you have registered, and verified your ownership of the site, you can use Majestic SEO to produce rich reports on the link history of the site. The data is very complete, and allows you to track both internal and external links, to view trends over time, and to look at a variety of other metrics. Visit http://www.majesticseo.com and register to get started.