Details of Audience Dialogue’s 9-stage model for measuring website effectiveness
|
Stage |
Description |
Measure |
Source |
|
1. Awareness |
Potential users know site exists and can remember its name correctly | % awareness (both aided and unaided) | Offline survey of target audience, using funnelled recall techniques |
|
2. Findability |
Ability to find site/page from search engines and directories using potential audience’s most common search terms (including misspellings) | Ranking of site and key pages in main search engines on the target audience’s most common terms (as with search engine optimization) | Search results from search engines commonly used by target audience |
|
3. Availability |
Uptime of site/page.
Lack of dead links — both within site and from other sites. (If another site makes a link to your site, and that link is broken, the problem is yours) |
% of time site is up.
% of time server is overloaded. % of links (both internal and external) that are dead or wrong |
Site logs + link-checking software (e.g. Xenu) |
|
4. Popularity |
Numbers of visitors and visits to the site |
Visitor data for this and competing sites.
Monitor trend in visitors as proportion of target audience. % of purchases abandoned |
Site popularity data (from syndicated services)
+ Site logs, using cookies to identify unique visitors and target audience members |
|
5. Accessibility |
Ability of impaired users, impaired computers, and impaired environments to read pages on site |
Heuristic analysis on a wide range of browsers, platforms, and screen settings | Accessibility testing software, e.g PC Bobby (watchfire.com) |
|
6. Usability |
Navigation within site; enabling performance of user tasks | Measure success rate, time taken, and satisfaction | Usability test with target audience |
|
7. Trust |
Willingness to interact with site | Triadic comparison of test site with 2 similar sites, one nominated by the user and the other from 2 sites nominated by the client | Survey of target audience |
|
8. Fulfilment |
Supplying what the site implies it will. | Response time and rate to email inquiries and online purchases - compare with information provided on site’s pages |
Mystery shopping methodology
+ local site |
|
9. Reputation |
Enhancing the reputation of the organization that owns the site | If the site is effective, its reputation will rise with detailed knowledge of the site (other things remaining equal) | Survey target audience, e.g. matched pairs of users and non-users |
The above table considers only output measures, most of which could come from a small survey of the website’s target audience. To complement this, a broader concept would also include measures of efficiency: not just maximizing outputs, but also minimizing inputs. Input measures include