Measuring the Efficiency of Web Site Traffic Generation

A productivity model for Web sites is developed in which page views are treated as outputs, and Web pages, scripts, and certain other Web constructs as inputs. A non-parametric production function is constructed, based on empirical data for a number of Web sites, making it possible to determine which sites are most efficient at generating Web traffic. For inefficient Web sites, reference sites are given from which they can learn in order to improve their performance. Web sites with special-interest content are found to perform, on average, more efficiently than those with general-interest content.