The Success of Your Website
Is your website providing you the value you would expect from any of your other investments? Tracking these 6 Key Metrics can really help you to see the value of your marketing strategy and the success of your website.
“The best marketers are the best storytellers–those who blend art and science, passion and personality; individuals who grab an audience’s attention with a tale that fascinates and resonates.” — Hank Ostholthoff, CEO of Mabbly, a Chicago digital marketing agency.
If you truly want to grab your audience’s attention, here are some metrics you should be tracking.
1. Website Visitors
Do you know how many visitors you are getting to your site? If you don’t know how many are being driven there by organic searches or paid searches then you cannot gauge how successful either your SEO or your ad campaigns have been.
You also need to know whether your traffic is uptrending, stagnant, or downtrending overall. Are you getting more unique visits or repeat viewings? Knowing this helps you judge whether you are actually generating new interest or retaining your existing customers or both. It can also help you see which days are pulling in most people.
2. Website Referrals
You need to drill down and find out exactly where each of your visitors is coming from. Are people coming from the place you expected them to?
Is your paid campaign the driving force? Is organic search engine traffic the reason you are doing so well? Maybe your social media is attracting more attention from a recent post. All of these things can be tracked.
3. Bounce Rate
How long do people stay on your pages? How long do they stay on your site? If they aren’t hanging around there may be a number of things that need fixing.
How easy is it to find things on your site? Is the content holding their attention? If people are coming to read and it’s cookie-cutter they’ll bounce. If they can’t find what they want they’ll bounce. If it is slow to load, they will bounce.
4. Website Exit Pages
If someone stays on your site and then exits through an exit page, are they leaving from the page you want them to? Namely, are the exit pages the pages where visitors are converted into buyers?
If the exit pages are somewhere else in the process you are using to drive people to complete a goal, you may need to consider lessening the steps in the process. There are ways to also track where people were looking at on the page before they left.
5. Conversion Rate
Your conversion rate is the true sign of success. It is great having unique visitors, and it is great having a low bounce rate. People are coming and they are reading the content on your site, but why do you want them there?
If you are a magazine you want readers. If you are a plumber you want to be hired. If you sell backpacks, you want them to buy a backpack. If they don’t perform one of these actions you need to change something.
6. Top 10 Pages
With this data, you can see which pages are generating the most interest. Looked at in connection with bounce rate and conversion rate you can see whether these pages while holding attention, are actually getting people to do what you want, and to convert into subscribers or buyers, or whatever action you are wanting them to perform.
Are they popular because a paid campaign is driving traffic to them, or are people finding them organically? Once there do they bounce or convert? Maybe your calls to action need to be recalibrated.
In Conclusion
Tracking these metrics will allow you to see both what you are doing right with your website, and any campaigns attached to it, and where you have room for improvement. By capitalizing on this data you can increase your ROI on the website and start turning those visitors into clients.
