We often run in to potential clients that solely focus on website traffic and total views to measure their success. While increasing traffic does provide an overview of the strength of your website, what it fails to tell us is how successfully your website is selling your products and services.
The metric goals that you set for your website should not soley focus on attracting visitors instead, the website metrics that you should be focused on surround customer action.
Conversion rate equates to profitability and refers to the number of unique visitors divided by total site conversion. A conversion can mean many things to many different businesses; it can refer to a new e-newsletter subscriber, a sale, an appointment booked, a premium content piece downloaded etc.
Fully optimized websites with high-level content are the most successful at persuading users to convert. This is because they are able to build enough trust with their audience through the content provided that customers want to make that conversion. Tip: monitor those pages and calls-to-action that are equating to the most conversions and design future campaigns around their learned successes.
A bounce rate refers to the number of users who leave your webpage or website without browsing any further. Using Google Analytics you can track both the bounce rate of a webpage and the bounce rate of your entire website. The statistics provided through tracking bounce rates allow you to measure the quality of traffic on your pages as well as, the success of various pages/landing pages.
It is a key metric in understanding the success of your entrance pages, like your homepage. If your bounce rate is high that generally means that the content provided on the entrance page is not relevant to your audience. You can use the bounce rate metric to adjust your pages to better appeal to and function for your audience.
A clear summary of where your website traffic is coming from will tell you how your marketing efforts are working. Traffic sources range from search engines to social sites to other websites and blogs.
If you are seeing great referrals from certain sites this may be your key to reach out and forge a relationship with or design a targeted campaign for. Take advantage of this metric by tailoring content to your most successful sources, those that are drawing the most leads and could lend to potential revenue.
Your keywords (apart from your branded keywords) will tell you what wording and phrasing customers are typing into search engines in order to find your site. Using a CRM like Hubspot, provides you with a daily, monthly and yearly sources report, from this report you can see the top keywords that visitors have used to find your site. This is a great tool to help build out and strengthen your keyword strategy.
HubSpot will also tell you the strength of your keywords and where you land in terms of search results. From this ranking you can build out content on your website to help your improve your findability, ensuring that you're landing on the first page of search engine results.
Traffic sources can be segmented into three categories of places that send visitors to your website: direct traffic, organic traffic and referral traffic.
Organic search traffic refers to search engine referrals, and is a key indicator of the success of your keyword and SEO efforts. When monitoring your organic search traffic you must also take into account the conversion rate of this traffic. If your conversion rate is low that could tell you a couple of things. One you may not be providing quality, targeted content and two your call(s)-to-action are not clear or functioning.
You should be studying all sources and all conversion rates, so that you can tweak your website to lend to further success.
There are many metrics to monitor on your website and they are require consistency and understanding. Getting focused on the right website metrics will point you to your successes and this will help you to build out a successful website.
What web metrics do you currently use to track your business? Let us focus on the right metrics to lead your next data-driven marketing strategy. Contact us today to get started.