With growing importance of the internet, web sites have to be continously improved. Web metrics help to identify improvement
potentials. Particularly success metrics for e-commerce sites based on transaction analysis are commonly available and well
understood. In contrast to transaction based sites, the success of web sites geared toward information delivery is harder
to quantify since there is no direct feedback of the user.
We propose a generic success measure for information driven web sites. The idea of the measure is based on the observation
of user behaviour in context of the web site semantics. In particular we observe users on their way through the web site and
assign positive and negative scores to their actions. The value of the score depends on the transitions between page types
and their contribution to the web site’s objectives.
To derive a generic view on the metric construction, we introduce a formal meta environment deriving success measures upon
the relations and dependencies of usage, content and structure of a web site.