While planning to create and develop a website for your organization, you must have read plenty of marketing journals and features in order to make sure that you are on the right path. On your venture to building an effective website, among various tips and pointers that you came across, what was the common advice that each piece of content you came across stressed upon?
If you answered, “follow and measure your website success and effectiveness regularly”, then you’re got it.
Sadly, many entrepreneurs believe that they and their businesses once they are done designing and launching their sites But that is far from the truth. Launching the website is merely the first step and there is a long way ahead, especially for those aiming to become the next online sensation in the business world. And there’s always a chance that they might have done something wrong along the way. But, they will never know if they do not measure their site’s success with respect to the goals they pre-defined.
If you don’t want to be one of these entrepreneurs, it is highly imperative that you, as a business owner or marketer, assess the performance of your site on a regular basis. Having established the significance of measuring success of your website, you need to come up with an effective metric that can portray an accurate result.
To help you with an otherwise tedious issue, we have compiled some of the major metrics that are fundamental to measuring a website’s success in the lines below.
Conversion Metrics
The primary purpose of a website revolves around achieving conversions. As many as you can and then some more. Total conversion is one of the most important metrics to measure overall marketing efforts and the profitability of a business. It also allows you to assess and estimate the effectiveness of your website. By simply tracking down conversions, you can determine if your website is successful. But the real question is how do you track conversions? Simple; you can track conversions with the help of tools like Google Analytics or you could take a more direct approach by tracking and measuring ‘Goal Conversions’.
A Goal Conversion is achieved when a visitor effectively completes your desired action by clicking onto the ‘Call to Action (CTA)’. Below is a list to give an idea on which conversions to track when calculating the conversion rate.
- A completed feedback form
- Number of email subscriptions to your blog or newsletter
- Number of sales made on website
- Amount of content downloaded (Many website owners today create downloadable content for their audience. As such, you can track how many site visitors actually downloaded your piece of content and calculate the conversion rate.)
Bear in mind that a low conversion rate is a bad sign for your business as it means that whatever you are offering on your site (content, product, services etc.) is not compelling enough and probably even downright poor. This situation needs to be remedied pronto which can only be done if you are aware of where the problem lies. You might want to review your site’s layout and content as well as do something to boost the conversion metrics that need improvement. Once you do so, you will most likely experience increasing conversions as more and more people complete the desired action.
Engagement Metrics
Even though achieving conversions is the primary goal of an effective website, it is not the only one. Engagement is equally as important as conversions, if not more. After all, it is only after you are able to engage customers that you can persuade them to take the final step, i.e. to convert.
Sometimes website owners only wish to communicate better with their visitors to create awareness of their brand and gain trust and legitimacy for their site and eventually their business. To achieve this, they focus their energy on engaging with their visitors by generating interaction. Thus, engagement metrics are equally important when trying to measure website success.
Here are a few of them:
Social Shares and Mentions
You can determine the success of your website by tracking down the number of social shares or mentions your website gets.
Bounce Rates
The bounce rate indicates the number of people who land on your website but then exit the site immediately without exploring it any further. Some reasons for this behavior are their inability to find their desired content and the lack of interesting materials on your site. But, what does it have to do with engagement, huh? Since visitors leave the site before you have a chance to engage them, you can safely say that bounce rates determine that you achieved zero engagement.
As such, if you are experiencing high bounce rates, you need to take measures to lower down the bounce rates. Having many visitors bounce means that your website is driving the traffic away before you can even engage them, affecting the conversion rate.
Average Time Spent on the Site and Individual Pages
As the heading itself suggests, this metric tells you the average time your visitors seem to spend browsing or navigating your website and individual pages. By carefully analyzing the tracking data, you can clearly see the pages visitors tend to spend most of their time on. If visitors are spending more time on your website, it is safe to say that they find the content interesting as well as engaging. Thus, it helps you know whether your website is a success based on the time individuals spend visiting your page.
Moreover, it helps you improve your web content, further fueling engagement and eventually leading to effective conversions. How, you ask? By tracking the number of views each page gets, you can get insights into y what type of content your visitors find appealing and relevant. You can then use these valuable insights to create content that is designed keeping your audience’s interests in mind.
Pages Per Visit
Though you may think this point is almost similar to the previous one, it differs in the sense that it shows how many pages a visitor browses in a single visit. If the number of pages per visit is high, it means that visitors find your website quite engaging. Thus, if your goal is to engage visitors through your website, you are well on your way towards achieving it.
Referral Traffic
Referral traffic is basically visitors who were referred to your website through an outside source – search engine or social media sites like Facebook, Google+ etc. Essentially it shows how visitors were able to find you and portrays the data regarding where the traffic to your site is actually coming from. Tracking referral traffic is useful as you get to know which outside source is getting your website more referrals. For instance, if your site is getting more referrals because its URL has been shared on Facebook, you can then target your marketing campaign (in this case, your web content) towards Facebook audience. Thus, by knowing the referral pathway, you are more likely to know about the audience seeing your content. Thus, you can create content that is specially targeted to them in order to boost engagement.
Top Keywords and Top Internal Searched Keywords
This metric tells you the top keywords visitors typed into the search engine bar to get to your website. As a result, you can tailor your content around the most popular keywords. Moreover, it lets you know the most popularly content searched by visitors on your website through the internal search box on the site. Again, it is an immensely important engagement metric as it helps you determine the type of content visitors are looking for. Once you are aware of the content type your visitors prefer, you can then create such content and boost engagement.
Now you should know better than to depend on conversion metrics solely to determine the success of your website. After all, not everyone visiting your website is looking to make a purchase. Rather, they might want to research your products and services before they make any payments. In such an instance, the conversion rate can be greatly misleading. On the other hand, engagement metrics are more likely to be useful in order to accurately analyze your website’s effectiveness.
Acquisition Metrics
Acquisition data is especially important for businesses seeking to get their potential customers to visit the website. The idea is to create brand awareness as well as get your targeted customers and the wider community to support and promote your organization.
The following are some of the most widely-used acquisition metrics to measure your website’s success.
Total Number of Visits
This metric shows how many people are visiting your website. If your focus is creating as much awareness regarding your organization as possible, you may find this metric to be extraordinarily useful. It offers a ‘bigger picture’ by explaining how well your marketing campaign is coming along. For instance, if the total number of website visits drop (greatly) compared to the preceding months, you will know that something t must be wrong and should be remedied quickly. Thus, prompt action is required to figure out what went wrong.
Number of Unique Visits
Slightly more focused than gross visits, this metric lets you know the number of individuals who visited the site during a particular time. However, if the individual visits your site receives are more than one during a specific time period, bear in mind that it will be only counted as one visit. Thus, you will have a more accurate measure in comparison with metrics like total visits or page views.
New vs. Repeat Visitors
This is an even better metric to measure acquisition since the central idea around gaining acquisition is to create brand awareness. New vs. Repeat Visitors lets you know how many new people are visiting your site and how many are actually repeat visitors. When measuring website success with the help of this metric, you will find two things:
- Is your site engaging enough for the visitors to visit it repeatedly?
- Is your site (as well as marketing campaign) effective enough to attract new visitors?
If the answer to the above question is a resounding ‘Yes’, then your site is an absolute success. On the other hand, if the ratio of repeat visitors to recurring ones drops, your website is losing out on its effectiveness.
Even though website success is more about getting conversion rates and boosting engagement, you cannot discount the importance of acquisition metrics. After all, it is through acquisition that you can guarantee a boost in engagement and conversions.
There are plenty of ways through which businesses can choose to measure website success today, many of which you have just discovered. However, no particular way or metric is superior to the other. Each organization varies, which is why their goals and priorities will differ. As such, it is best that you use all of the above metrics simultaneously and cross examine (and compare) their results rather than taking each result in its entirety in order to get a complete picture on where your website stands.
If you think you can’t keep up with this, you can always hire professionals to track your site’s performance. To learn more on what this entails, contact us immediately.
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