Website Metrics

[NikeShoes]

Hey guys,

I am interested in trying to find some services that give metrics about websites in order to gain information about how successful businesses have been. I am well aware of the fact that most metrics can be gamed and that there exists a whole science and market to this (search engine optimization). Since I am 100% sure there are people here quite familiar with this stuff, I am hoping someone could help me out with which metrics are most useful (e.g. provide information similar to what an unbiased view counter could provide) for getting a realistic glimpse into a website's performance.

For reference, I am interested in analyzing websites of large corporations. Although I am sure these types of businesses do a hell of a lot less metric gaming than those in (for example) the rwt industry, I know they still do some of it.

Thanks in advance,
Nike

 

Confused about what you're asking. What attributes of a website lead to SEO success? Or website tracking and standards?

 

[NikeShoes]

I'm asking from the perspective of an investor doing research on a company before investing. I'm looking for metrics that I can use to reliably determine whether stuff like traffic has been improving on certain pages. In other words, I am looking for metrics that cannot be easily manipulated by the website owner.

Ignore for now the fact that most metrics are probably not available to those who do not own the website. I'm just interested in which metrics cannot be (or rarely are) gamed. Pretend I have access to all of them.

 

[Superfluous]

i seriously can't think of anything that can't be manipulated. are you trying to buy a website for investment purposes and are worried that you're buying a dud that's been inflated or something?

 

[NikeShoes]

A friend of mine is doing analysis on a certain company, and she was hoping to use the change in views on certain pages of the company's website to provide evidence for or against her investment thesis. She brought the idea up to me, and I was immediately concerned because of what I've learned from RuneScape websites (i.e. websites game their metrics). She is still interested in using this sort of analysis if possible, and I'm just looking to see if it's realistically something she can eventually use.

Edit: She's not interested in buying a website. She's looking into making a position in the company's stock.

Thanks guys. I'd definitely love to hear if anyone else has any input. My gut feeling is this sort of analysis just won't work, but I wanted to check in with people more familiar with the metrics first.

 

[Panda-Splosion]

I'm a bit outdated on this, but TF/CF ratio is what was the most important 2-3 months ago. Usually the ratio shouldn't exceed 1.5-2. The higher they both are and the closer the ratio is to 1 is, the better.

DA/PA is semi important, but it should probably be around 25-30+ to be relevant.

Alexa ranking can be ignored.

Terms of metrics, there's not really a lot to look at. Honestly, if you're looking strictly at large corporations, there's really nothing to do. They have a crap ton of links, and established corporations already have high DA/PA/TF/CF/PR. No point in filtering through anything, looking at metrics is only useful for picking up domains or trying to pick up sites to buy.

 

[NikeShoes]

I'm not sure it's only useful for picking up domains or trying to pick up sites to buy, but again I'm not super familiar with this stuff. I'll give an example of how we're looking at it.

Imagine a large store chain that specializes in selling clothing recently improved its t-shirt division and is now supposedly selling shirts of a more desirable quality. If this is true, it might make sense that the portions of the company's website dedicated to these t-shirts would experience increasing (and lasting, that is not temporary) page views per day. If we observe this happening, it is a piece of evidence supporting that this new t-shirt stuff has added some form of value to the company's business.

 

[Panda-Splosion]

I'm not sure it's only useful for picking up domains or trying to pick up sites to buy, but again I'm not super familiar with this stuff. I'll give an example of how we're looking at it.

Imagine a large store chain that specializes in selling clothing recently improved its t-shirt division and is now supposedly selling shirts of a more desirable quality. If this is true, it might make sense that the portions of the company's website dedicated to these t-shirts would experience increasing (and lasting, that is not temporary) page views per day. If we observe this happening, it is a piece of evidence supporting that this new t-shirt stuff has added some form of value to the company's business.

Unfortunately, there's no way to accurately gauge whether or not the increase in traffic was due to the introduction of a new shirt. A rise in traffic can be caused by any other factors, such as a new marketing campaign, a sale, or whatever. It may not be limited to the shirt at all. There's no accurate way that I'm aware of that someone outside the owners/managers of the site to accurately track the traffic coming in either, you would need access to the site's analytics or whatever tracking software the company uses to gauge user activity.

I suppose the only way to give a rough estimation of t shirt sales and whether or not it brings any value, would be to check how much traffic the new sub page selling the shirt has and then use an average of how many shirts would normally be sold. For example, if the industry/company usually sells 3 shirts per 100 customers/visitors, you can estimate that if the new web page has 3,000 visitors, the shirt probably sod 30 times. There's no real way to accurately estimate this without being part of the company though of course. Results can be totally skewed.