These days, it’s pretty much impossible for any business to survive without a website.
However, survival alone doesn’t equal success.
If you don’t know much about analytics or metrics in the online space, it can be hard to track the progress of your company.
In order to tell whether your website is generating results or not, you’ll first need to define what success looks like to you.
Defining success
How does your business determine success?
Do you aim to increase product purchases or appointment bookings?
It’s hard to achieve much without concrete goals.
If you just created a website because “everyone else was doing it,” now is the time to revisit what you want to accomplish with it and set specific goals.
Understanding user experience (UX) and marketing metrics
Once you’ve set clear goals, you’ll need to get a grip on metrics in order to determine if you’re actually meeting said goals.
Here’s what you’ll want to look for:
Satisfaction
Customer satisfaction is one of the easiest metrics to monitor. By sending out regular customer surveys and soliciting reviews on your site, you can easily measure whether or not what you’re doing is working by asking your customers directly.
Conversions
Increasing conversions should always be your main marketing priority. Whether it’s filling out a request a quote form or buying one of your products, there are plenty of ways to increase and track conversions with your website. Tracking this data over time will show how your conversions were affected as you made different changes to your website.
Visitor retention
There are two types of website visitors that you’ll need to pay attention to: returning and first-time visitors. Retention measures the percentage of site visitors who come back to your website within a certain period of time. Like Chick-Fil-A’s drive-thru lines during lunch, a good website will keep users coming back.
Acquisition
Acquisition metrics look at how many people visit your website and how they find it. This can include anything from points of entrance and channel traffic, to number of gross visits.
Contrary to popular belief, rarely does a site visitor start their session on your homepage. Points of entrance will show you exactly what page they came in on, and you’ll be able to see which ones are the best performing. Channel traffic will show you where this traffic is coming from: organic search, social media, referral links, or otherwise.
Gross visits will give you a nice baseline to see how your site is performing overall. If you notice that traffic is up, that’s generally a good sign–so long as conversions are up with it. If not, then you’ll know you’re drawing in the wrong traffic.
Engagement
Engagement is the time users spend interacting with your content.
Generally, the more time someone spends on your site, the more valuable your content is to them–unless they can’t find the necessary information they need. In order to tell whether this time spent is a good or bad thing, you’ll need to dive deeper into the data.
Take a look at the total number of pages visited during the session and the bounce rate. This will help you get a feel for whether your visitors are thoroughly reading your content or skimming in hopes of finding what they’re actually looking for.
Bounce rate and exit points
Bounce rate tracks the percentage of people who only visit one page of your site before leaving. You want this percentage to be as low as possible–ideally under 30% (41%-55% is average).
If your current bounce rate is astronomically high, it’s most due to a lack of relevant, valuable content, or hiccups in your site’s usability.
It’s important to note that your bounce rate only accounts for a single page, whereas an exit page tracks those who visited multiple pages on your site.
The exit page is just as important as their entry page. You’ll want to document and monitor both of these carefully. Pages with a high exit rate are usually a tell-tale sign of a disconnect between you and your potential customers.
Generating real results from your website doesn’t have to be so time-consuming and complicated. When you hire a professional marketing team like Bizzuka, you’ll never have to worry about your website again. Our experienced marketers will work with you to analyze your current metrics and how to improve them. Schedule a free strategy session with us today!