A site succeeds in part because of the quantity of content, but the other part of product success is the accessibility of that content.

Three metrics for measuring the quantity and efficiency of content on a site are total pages, total active or accessed pages and views per active page. Total pages is the amount of content that exists on the site. Active pages is how many pages were actually viewed during the month. Views per active page tracks the average activity level of each page that is viewed.

Google Analytics and other site reporting software track the number of active pages each month. In the case of GA, the line to look for is in the Top Content report where it says "2,400 pages were viewed a total of 17,100 times."

If a site has 3,000 pages of total content, a report showing that 2,400 of them were accessed during the month is cause to feel good. It indicates that site navigation, search engine marketing and search engine optimization, among other tactics, made those pages easily accessible.

But if the site has 10,000 pages of content, that same report is cause for feeling not so good. It should lead the site manager to review whether pages are archived in a way that makes them easy to find, whether the site search engine has been set up properly and whether each page has a good title, meta description and other characteristics of effective search engine optimization.

A more interesting view is how many times the average page was viewed. In the first example of 2,400 pages viewed a total of 17,100 times, the average page has 7.1 page views during the month. But some sites generate more than 100 page views for each active page.

Good Web sites, like good newspapers and magazines, are driven by both the quantity and quality of their content. The more content they present, the higher the perceive value by the visitor or reader.