Corporate new media strategists have simple concerns when it comes to managing their public website and extranets - how to maximise traffic and loyalty. These are obvious measures of success, but are they the only - or even the key - measures?

Last month's article - the first of a regular monthly service by the Online Research Agency and the FT-IT Review - gave an overview of companies' online activities; their budgets and management arrangements. This month we look in depth at the key success factors in a website, and the extent to which companies are able to meet their own criteria.

The respondents, chosen because they have responsibility for their companies' new media spend, were asked what were the most important factors in a website's success and which are the most difficult to get right.

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Generally, the factors regarded as the most important were also seen as the most difficult to get right, suggesting that management still has some way to go in conquering the technology.

The top two success factors were: keeping the site up-to-date and ensuring the site contained good content or useful information.

The ability to drive traffic to a site is seen as the most difficult among the important factors, as a result of the volume of information online. User friendliness is the other key factor in a website's success. This is not generally regarded as a difficult factor to get right, but perhaps it should be.

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In general, panel members are finding it just as hard to manage their websites as they did a year ago, when the perceived difficulties were all similar or less than reported now. The percentage of panel members reporting difficulty in keeping the site up to date, for example, was 41 per cent in 2000, compared with 49 per cent now.

The ease with which most respondents are capturing their visitor metrics does show a greater confidence and familiarity with the medium, and early investment paying off in terms of management control.

The success factors were not the same as the criteria for measuring success. Success measurement is in terms of management goals such as cost reduction or PR benefits, as well as the more predictable targets of audience size.

The current convention in measuring audience size is to count unique visitors - that is, the number of different daily visitors that come to a website each month, and page impressions - the total number of times all the pages are accessed per month.

Audiences are still low. More than 60 per cent said they receive less than 100,000 unique visitors per month and just under half the sites achieved less than 250,000 page impressions per month.

Although the size of audience is seen as an important indicator, the key success criteria for the business.eu panel were more interactive - the number of inquiries generated by the site was the most commonly mentioned success criterion. Feedback and sales were in the top four, and response to promotions was mentioned by nearly 15 per cent of respondents compared to just 7.1 per cent mentioning advertising revenue.

Coincidentally, 7 per cent of the sample achieve more than 1m monthly page impressions. This is regarded as the minimum level to be able to offer cost-effective banner placement to advertisers. A page impression is currently the basic unit of measurement for banner advertising sales.

In a future survey we will be asking respondents what other ways they have of charging for their site in order to generate advertising revenues. One fashion at the moment is to charge by the number of clickthroughs - the number of times a user clicks on a link or banner, rather than charging because someone may have seen a banner on a web page. Online Research Agency (www.online-agency.com) is a specialist B2B internet market research company. Business.eu is available by subscription (E795 quarterly or E2,350 annually). For more information please contact info@online-agency.com Next instalment: see FT Telecoms on September 19.