How and to what extent are e-consumer perceptions of website success reflected in basic website performance metrics?
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- Websites are constantly seeking to improve the profitability of online channels by attracting and retaining e-customers through successful web design. In the past, measuring the success of a site was primarily done through user and expert evaluations of the site. However, newer evaluation methods consider the use of web analytics data as an objective measure of web performance. This research project thus seeks to explore how and to what extent user perceptions of the site are reflected in key web analytics. Answering this question also entails addressing whether websites with better analytics performance are also perceived more positively by users, which web attributes appear to be most conducive to analytic performance, and how these different perspectives of web evaluation can be effectively combined to inform improvements to the site. To achieve these objectives, an existing heuristic evaluation model asked participants to score the interface, navigation and content of four different international travel & accommodation websites. Publicly accessible analytics were then gathered for these websites and qualitatively compared to the user evaluations to explore the relationships between the two data sets. The analysis concludes that, as suggested by recent literature, analytics such as visit duration, pages per visit, and bounce rate were able to reflect attributes of the tested websites. However, these analytics do not replace the need for user evaluations but rather serve as tools to enhance the understanding of the online customer journey. In addition, graphic design principles, logical structure, and interactivity seemed to show the most relationships to analytics within each attribute and thus may be prioritised when attempting to design a successful website.