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I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, your website is vital to your business. Plain and simple. We all strive for an effective, eye catching website, however, once you have your visually ideal website, how do you know if its having the impact you want? You might have a beautiful and stylish set of pages, but if they’re difficult to navigate and, more importantly, not converting, it may as well not exist.
To truly know how successful your website is, you need to dive into the statistics. These must be the foundation when judging the true success of your website. But, what statistics should you be checking? Let's dive in and take a look.
Watch For Traffic
One of the key stats to keep an eye on is the number of unique visitors your website gets on a monthly basis. This number will vary dramatically depending on the size of your company, your industry and, of course, the amount of content you’re producing.
Watch out for sudden spikes in traffic or sudden decreases. When you see a big increase, you'll want to know where it came from. If you see a big drop-off in visitors, you'll want to figure out as quickly as possible how or why it happened.
Also, take a look at where your visitors are coming from. Are they finding your website through a Google organic search, from social media channels, from paid ads or from a referral link?
Did They Bounce?
Your website's bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who come to your site and then immediately “bounce” or leave before clicking on any other pages. This could include visitors who:
- Clicked the browser ‘back’ button
- Typed another URL into the browser
- Left your site by clicking an external link on the web page
- Closed the window or tab
- Didn't interact with the page until their session timed out
You need to understand whether the leads you're driving are sticking around when they hit your site or are leaving straight away. A bounce rate of less than 40% is considered good. If it’s any higher, it may be an indication that visitors to your site don’t like what they see. If that’s the case, see if you can make a fix to solve the problem. However, you should take some care when analysing your bounce rate data, if visitors land on a ‘contact us’ page for example, they could be getting all the information they need. A bounce isn't always a bad thing.
Like before, take a look at the sources and determine which are sending visitors with the highest bounce rates. Understanding this data helps you to make improvements and focus more on sources that send quality traffic your way.
Time Spent On Pages
Simply put, how long are your visitors hanging out on your pages? Is it long enough for your message to get across? With the growing popularity of video, perhaps you have informative videos on your site and the goal is for your visitors to watch them to the end. If the videos are roughly five minutes long, does your average time on page reflect that your visitors are staying long enough to finish the videos?
Much like when looking at your bounce rate, take a look at which sources are sending you the most leads who spend the right amount of time on your pages. Take this with a pinch of salt however, if visitors only go to one page, Google cannot determine how long they were there for.
Gooooals!
The first question you always need to ask before kicking off any campaign is: What. Are. The. Goals? Tracking your progress toward those goals is also just as important. Remember, all of your goals should be SMART— specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely.
CTR Of Your CTA
The Click-Through-Rate (CTR) of your Call-To-Actions (CTAs) is a critical part of every webpage. You should always be directing your visitors to the next action you want them to take (Download Now, Learn More, Add To Cart). If your CTAs are not getting clicked, you need to make changes so your leads take the next step toward becoming customers.
CTAs offer a great opportunity for some A/B testing with placement, size, design and text to analyse what is driving users to click. Try to use colours that stand out but don't look out of place with your website design. Make your CTAs intriguing enough to click while still looking valuable and not like ads. It's a balancing act, but do some testing and you'll figure out the right way that works for you.
You’re Converting? Hallelujah!
This could be the statistic you're already most familiar with. If you have an e-commerce site, conversion rate probably means everything to you.
There are many different kinds of conversion rates however. Conversion rates can refer to a landing page conversion rate, email conversion rate, visitor-to-lead conversion rate, lead-to-customer conversion rate and so on. A benchmark should be about 20% for landing pages and 2-3% across the whole website.
Make sure you track the source of your conversions, the three primary sources are: paid visitors, search visitors and referral visitors. All three are important but have different levels of conversion, so be sure to calculate how much each source is converting and deal with them individually. It’s vital that you track visitors to leads and leads to customers. At the end of the day, it’s all well and good converting tons of leads but if none of them are turning into paying customers what’s the point?
Deeming your website a success is about more than just how it looks. Watching the right statistics alerts us to what we should replicate and what we should look to improve. Measuring your sites success requires an in-depth look at the statistics and data. Luckily, tons of vital data and resources are right at your fingertips. So don't waste anymore time on a website that isn’t having the impact you’re looking for and start digging into those stats today!
