Continuing our discussion from yesterday, we will now move on to measuring the success of your website. There are a number of different items that are included in analytic reports, and it can get overwhelming. If you focus on these five items, it will give you an overall picture of how your site is doing with visitors, and make sure you are paying attention to the most important measurements of your site. As mentioned in the previous article, most of these statistics can be found by linking your site up with Google Analytics.
1. New vs Repeat Visitors
Knowing how many new visitors you got and how many repeat visitors keep coming back is a good indication of whether or not your site has something good to offer. If you notice that you are getting a lot of repeat visitors, this means you have something that keeps people coming back for more. The more people visit your site, the greater the chance they will finally take that next step and convert to a customer.
This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be making sure you have a high number of new visits as well. If your repeat visit number is more than 30% of your traffic, this may mean that your business is not branching out and growing to new customers. It is still very important to make sure that you are making efforts to drive new visits to the site.
2. Referring Sources
Knowing how people are getting to your site is important so you can organize your SEO priorities. Are people finding you organically through the search engines? Are they typing your web address in directly? Is there a directory or blog that is giving you a lot of traffic?
If you see that you are mostly getting traffic from the search engines only after someone types in your name, this will mean you need to work on the keyword content in your site to try and expand to those that may not know your company. If you notice you are getting a lot of traffic from a blog you are writing, this is a good indicator that you need to keep up the good work and keep posting. Knowing where your traffic is coming from will let you know what areas you need to work on improving to get traffic from additional sources.
3. Conversion Rate
Measuring how many visitors actually fill out a lead form or purchase something from your site is important because this is the whole reason you have a website in the first place! Measuring this weekly is a good idea, so you can keep track of what traffic sources are converting for you. If you notice a spike in leads after a seminar you attended, this will be a good indication that effort was successful.
4. Page Popularity
Knowing what type of content is viewed on your site the most will help you know what to replicate and how to format pages in the future. If you notice a page has a high bounce rate (people going on and leaving instantly) it will also let you know what formatting or content to stay away from. If you notice that a lot of people are viewing information about your staff members, this is a good indicator that people want to know about your experience and the people you have working for you. Rewriting bios to include experience and specialties could help potential clients feel more at ease knowing they are in experienced hands.
5. Traffic by Keywords
When people are finding you through the search engines, what keywords are they typing in? Finding out this information will help you discover popular products and also let you know if you need to rethink the keywords you are targeting in your content. If you notice that you are being found for keywords that aren’t relevant to your business, this will help you assess how to modify this so you can gain more relevant traffic to help ensure visitors convert to customers.
There are definitely some metrics that were left out that some of you rely on, but these are the ones that are the most important to pay attention to if you are looking for the least amount of reporting as possible. If you have a website metric you can’t live without tracking, please feel free to include your tips in the comments.
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