We all want to enjoy the results of our hard work. We struggle to achieve our goal and we just want to “feel” the results, to make them more obvious. Otherwise, we would be working in vain only for the sake of it, without being able to appreciate our work at its real value.

So, measuring the outcome is a valuable tool in business. It is the only way to see if your strategies work and if your business is successful. Of course, it goes without saying that before measuring results you have to set a clear objective to accomplish.

For instance, you decide that you want more profit out of your business. You have to think of some strategies to achieve this: to increase sales by investing more on marketing, or coming up with a new product. Now, that you have a clear goal, follow your strategies to get it done and you see how you can change it into results. These results are the elements which make your business be measurable, quantifiable.

These measures can be figures that establish if your business is profitable or not – some financial indicators such as: revenues, turnover. Some other indicators can be measured, such as: customer satisfaction, sales and marketing and growth opportunities.

Once you have studied your business metrics you can make further decisions and set other goals and strategies to achieve them. It is a certain way to control your business and to make it profitable; set a goal and an associated metric so that you can assess performance.

There are lots of useful indicators to measure when running a website: reader actions (downloads, searches, queries); reader numbers; most and least popular pages (focus on the most popular pages); subscribers; external links; search keywords; page size; broken links and malfunctioning processes.

Measuring at least a part of these indicators will help you greatly improve your website. It is easier to see what works and what doesn’t. Moreover, you can focus on those problems which need immediate measures to be solved. For instance, you may have a satisfying number of visitors on your website, but you see they are leaving very quickly, spending a really short time on your website. Check where the problem is and fix it.

The next step you have to do is to come up with a strategy to eliminate this shortcoming. Boost the quality of your website and improve its content by offering more useful and attractive content.

After you have done all that, measure again the time visitors spend on your website and you will surely see that the situation is different. And this is just an example of how useful is to measure your website!