Measuring the Impact of Your Web Site

If you have to justify corporate expenditures for your website, or develop a budget to fund your company's Web presence, you'll find this book extremely useful. Its subtitle offers a good idea of content: Proven yardsticks for evaluating customer impact, site evolution, revenue growth, and return on investment (ROI). Early chapters introduce the basic concepts of measurement and site justification, and then survey of various measurement strategies and data sources -- primarily logfiles, customer surveys, as well as company expense information. Interspersed with a discussion are brief case studies from a handful of sites: FedEx, Travelocity, Silicon Graphics, Toro, the Star Tribune, the US Senate, and others. They provide helpful real life examples to illustrate the points being made.

Later chapters provide a number of examples of how various impacts can be calculated. For example, the cost reduction justification strategy is divided into four categories in a chart:

1. Appropriate raw measures of data in the bottom section, then
2. Consolidated measures, which use a formula, applied to the data to produce some meaningful figure.
3. Assumptions and approximations specify the assumptions which underlie the conclusion, and the top section of the chart states the
4. Impact measure, in this case, how much money was saved by distributing literature over the Web, saving costs for printing, handling, and distribution via traditional means.

The examples cover most of the areas which would be used in a typical corporation to justify Web expenditures, and are well worth the price of the book.

While this book may not help you market your company better on the Web, it will provide beancounters the justification they need to fund your Web project, as well as provide an "authoritative" basis for your projections.