What is Site Helpfulness and Why It's My Favorite Metric

In several of my past roles, I created Site Helpfulness, a metric designed to measure the ability of a website to help its users. Over time, I’ve come to appreciate this metric more than any other including revenue, orders, average order value (AOV), and even conversion rate (CR). And the reason for that is because I am increasingly convinced that the vast majority of users, if not every single one of them, aren’t going to websites to buy something. What they’re actually looking for is information and when they get it, sometimes they buy.

Website Visitors Aren’t There to Buy

When you go to a restaurant, your primary motivation is to buy. And that’s why nearly every time you walk into one, you sit down, eat, and pay for your meal. I would imagine that of the times you walked into a restaurant, that you paid for your meal at least 80%-90% of the time or more.

Conversely, how many times have you visited a website and left without buying anything? This is data we have and we already know that this is what happens the vast majority of the time. To validate this, I pulled aggregated ecommerce industry conversion rate data from IRP Commerce for every month between Jan 2014 and March 2024.

Here’s a few insights from the chart:

• On average, visits to websites purchased just 1.68% of the time

• In the best month of the past decade, just 2.4% of website visitors purchased

• Conversion rates stay relatively stable over time

This is in spite of collective efforts over the past decade by marketers to implement growth hacks, run A/B tests, optimize conversion rates, create personalized shopping experiences, increase retention, and run hyper-targeted digital ads, among other tactics. The takeaway? Website visitors, unlike restaurant goers, aren’t visiting to buy, even if that’s what we as marketers want to believe. Instead, it’s more likely that they are in pursuit of something else, and I believe that thing is information.

How I Calculate Site Helpfulness

If we start with the premise that website visitors are primarily motivated to get information, and is therefore something we should optimize for, how can we know if we’re effectively helping them get it? The simple answer is that you can ask them. This is something that I’ve done many times using post-visit surveys in which we asked users a number of questions to better understand why they were on our website in the first place.

For measuring Site Helpfulness in particular, we did this by asking survey respondents the question “Did you accomplish the purpose of your website visit today?” and calculating the percentage of those that answered yes. It feels good to track this metric over time and know that you’re increasingly doing a better job of helping customers. But even for those that are more driven by financial metrics like conversion rate or revenue, just know that focusing on helpfulness will get you there too.

Site Helpfulness and Conversion Rates

When I measured Site Helpfulness data at Targus, we observed a strong positive correlation (0.6+) to conversion rate. In other words, the more helpful the website was to visitors, the more likely they were to purchase something. This seems obvious of course, but in a world that is tirelessly working to increase conversion rate directly, perhaps a better path for doing so is to optimize for helpfulness instead.

In fact, this is what I did in my time at Targus. By focusing solely on helpfulness, we were able to successfully increase our site conversion rate, among other metrics like NPS, by over 40% without running many CRO tests at all.