I've seen an awful lot of people list such criteria as being named
in the top 5% of sites, or cool site of the day and such. I've also
heard people talk about hit counts, visitor counts, and such. Here's
my take on things.
Success first and foremost depends on what you are trying to achieve.
If you achieve what you set out to do, you are a success.
It is however, important to set good goals to achieve. IMHO hit counts
and specified levels of visitor traffic are "inch pebble" goals, not
milestones. (Inch pebbles are the micro goals between milestones).
Getting traffic is good. Getting qualified traffic is even better. (by
qualified, I do mean people that can take the sales process further and
are interested in doing so). Why bother getting a million hits if they
are all there to see what made you cool site of the day, and none of
them are interested in buying thingamabobs?
After you get reasonable visitor traffic, and you have managed to
get enough traffic patterns to identify people that are probably
interested (ie they circled a set of data pages for a while) you
can say that you have made a second inch pebble. Now comes the
real stuff.
If your goal is to generate qualified leads, at this point, you should
be routing the circling users to a followup mechanism successfully.
If they contine to circle but fail to take the next step, you should
be finding out why. Is there enough "actionable" information. ie do
they have the information that they need to take action? If so, are
they turned off by the high pressure techniques that follow the low
pressure web?
<i>> - measure in actual sales of a product?</i>
This is a valid measure of success. Of course, it is important to
separate increases in sales in general from increases of web sales
versus decreases of other channels. That wouldn't be a real revenue
increase. That would be more like a cost reduction in doing business,
(assuming that it costs less to do the same sales on the web).
<i>> - are hit rates sufficient to convince people of the usefulness of a</i>
<i>> web prescence?</i>
That would convince me for the first one to three months. After that,
I'd be looking for more tangible criteria.
<i>> - how can you get user profiles for your service, who is doing a</i>
<i>> reasonable job at that?</i>
It is important here to determine just how important these profiles
are to you. Are they worth alienating the audience to get them? Many
companies wait until the first sale is complete to obtain profile
information. Lookers are often driven away by these types of high
pressure tactics.
<i>> - can you store data about consumers or are there legal restrictions</i>
<i>> on storing the data about who accessed?</i>
Data about your consumers should be accessible inside your company
to employees on a need to know basis. Netcom's loss of 20,000 credit
card numbers when their user database was lifted is not a good thing.
There are still plenty of hackers that rely on far more than just
a credit card number. "Social engineering" got Mitnick far more than
credit card numbers. As for laws, to my knowledge, you cannot give
information about a specific customer to an outside source to other
people. Companies like credit companies are an exception, but other
individuals are not good things. Written releases should be provided
before turning over information.
<i>> - what about the trail the consumer leaves behind, i.e where do they</i>
<i>> come from, where do they go, can you get this information, how, who is</i>
<i>> doing that, is it ethically correct ...</i>
Ethics are not black and white. Ask 10 people and you stand a good
chance of getting at least 9 answers. You can get the trail of where
they go on your site, and what site refered them to you.
Mary Morris
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