A guide to understanding and improving your site’s performance over time.
If you run a real business then your numbers matter. Period.
That means your website too. It’s your digital storefront and platform to sell customers your products or services.
But what are you “tracking” when it comes to your site metrics? How do you know if it’s performing well? And how do you measure the success of your website over time?
We know that site metrics may not get you excited in the same way they do for us. So we’ve created a quick guide to help you understand how your website is performing and how to make improvements where needed.
Almighty Traffic
Let’s start with traffic.
Traffic means visitors.
Ultimately your traffic comes from external sources. But the engagement on your site plays a critical role in how much traffic your website will get from the search engines.
Google prioritizes its own user experience . . . which means that it ranks sites based on what it believes to be the best fit for a particular search inquiry.
By delivering a great user experience to your website visitors, you increase your chances of showing up in the top searches on Google, including Google My Business and Google Maps.
What Does “User Experience” Even Mean?
The user experience can be difficult to quantify because there’s not really one short answer. Instead, a cumulation of different metrics paints the picture of your website’s overall engagement and the experience it offers.
The user experience tells you how engaged your website visitors are, what content they are spending the most time on, and what they may not be that interested in at all.
Understanding your engagement metrics can help you optimize your website and turn it into a high-converting sales machine that’s working for you 24/7. But we’ll get to that in a minute.
In Google Analytics, you’ll get a clear picture of your website’s user experience by looking at:
- The “Bounce rate” tells you how many visitors left your website after visiting only one page.
- “Time spent on site” shows how much total time visitors are spending on your website.
- While “Pages per visit” lets you see how many pages were viewed during that time.
- “Top pages” tells you which pages are the most popular.
- And the “Returning visitors” stat shows how many site visitors came back more than once.
Delivering a great user experience is important because it helps drive organic traffic from the search engines and builds credibility with your brand.
It’s also important because if visitors aren’t converting on the first visit, then you need to understand what actions they ARE taking. And that leads us to our next topic which is website conversions.
Cashing In On Conversions
Your website is more than just an online brochure. It’s your digital storefront. All the traffic in the world won’t do you any good if your website is not converting.
So while offering a great user experience is important, that digital storefront needs to be bringing you new customers, leads, and sales for your business.
Now that you have a better understanding of your website’s traffic and engagement metrics, figuring out the conversion rate is actually pretty simple.
To calculate your websites conversion rate:
- Take the total amount of customers, leads, or sales generated, and divide that number by:
- The total amount of NEW traffic (not returning visitors) your site received.
Acceptable conversion rates can vary depending on your industry and where your traffic is coming from.
If your site has high engagement but you aren’t getting as many conversions as you’d like, then you may want to try adding more calls to action . . . or even simplifying your site by reducing the number of distractions.
Putting It All Together
Optimizing based on these key metrics can become a delicate dance of simplifying your website to drive conversions while maintaining a high level of engagement so that the search engines keep sending you more organic traffic.
Your website metrics tell the story of how well your site is performing. If you’re not tracking those metrics, or if you don’t know what they mean, then your marketing strategy is just a shot in the dark . . . and you might as well hand your customers over to the competition on a silver platter.
It can be a lot of work, but building a predictable pipeline of leads from your engaged audience is the most reliable way to grow your business online.
We hope this guide helps you understand your metrics a little better so you can start tracking the success of your website. If you’d like someone in your corner doing all the heavy lifting, then book a free 30-minute consultation with our team today.