UK Government COI report

Charities and nfp`s looking for benchmark data on their web site performance will find the the recently released report on 46 government sites useful. The data is for 2009/10 and covers 46 sites with total monthly visits of 32 Million and a total cost of £127M. For each site there is a breakdown of Cost and Usage. Across the 46 sites the overall cost per visit is £ 0.22 with a Bounce Rate of 37.5%. The Average Time on Site is around 4/6 minutes (although this excludes all Bounce visits) and average monthly Unique visits per site of 690k each month. As with all data real care needs to be taken in any comparison. To get a more accurate picture I picked 10 sites where the costs are detailed and the sites have a mid range value of monthly visitors. For these 10 sites the average cost per visit was £0.07 over a total of 52M annual visits. This data is particularly useful as it is from government web sites. These more closely resemble the function and purpose of charity sites rather than commercial sites where most data comes from.

Picking one or two sites from the list that have Costs or Visits similar to yours and comparing their data to your site could be useful. For the most accurate comparison charity sites should I reckon omit data relating directly to Fundraising traffic as this differs greatly from cause related traffic and is not comparable to the data from these government sites.

The methodology used to gather the data is clearly laid out and could be a useful basis for doing an evaluation of your site. In addition there is a lot of good advice in the COI site section Measuring Web Site Quality. The section Delivering Web site objectives is useful in pointing the way towards more detailed measurable achievements giving examples such as 1. Reduced calls due to better site info 2. registrations for events and services 3.  measurable user participation, etc. Mind you the COI site itself could do with seo friendly urls. Better advice about getting your web site seen by search engines would be useful too.

Demonstrating that a web site is worth the investment is not easy but hard data is the best way to do it. Showing that your site compares well using this data and that it compares well to its peers using the info provided by Google in GA will help. Proving that you can reach more people AND lower costs elsewhere are pretty powerful arguments as budgets come under scrutiny.