Posted March 11, 2020
There seems to be a misconception among businesses when it comes to websites – something along the lines of “if you build it, they will come.” While it’s true that online presence is a necessary way to generate exposure and inbound traffic, some businesses are shocked and disappointed when a new website doesn’t produce immediate revenue.
The truth is, building and maintaining a website that consistently converts takes research, customer awareness, and sometimes a bit of trial and error. By conducting frequent site audits and regularly monitoring your site analytics, you can increase both organic traffic and conversions.
A number of factors weigh into your website’s traffic and success, including:
These factors will all affect how visitors engage with your site; whether they spend time on your site, click through pages, convert on a landing page — or, just bounce.
When sales aren’t rolling in, it’s important to remember that revenue isn’t the only indicator of the success of your site. Your customers’ journey includes multiple touch points as they visit and engage with your website. In order to understand how and why visitors are (or are not) engaging with your site, you’ll want to know:
For this type of information, you’ll need to take a look “under the hood” of your website, performing site audits and reviewing analytics. Broadly, these terms can be defined as:
Google Analytics is our recommended platform for website analytics, and still prevails as the leading analytics tool, plus it is free and easy to use. Regardless of which analytics tool you choose, you will want to consider which statistics are meaningful to your goals. For example: is high traffic a priority simply to increase awareness? Or are conversions a priority because visitors are prequalified from a referring source? These stats will become your key performance indicators (KPIs).
While there are hundreds of possible web stats to look at, these basic KPIs will give you a handle on performance, and give you a good starting point when building reports:
It’s difficult to draw conclusions from KPIs seen in isolation. Website stats become more valuable and create actionable opportunities when compared together, and over time. Carefully monitoring your website analytics allows you to establish a baseline, create goals, and make modifications to your site — especially when paired with findings from a site audit.
Keep your eye out for our next post, where we’ll discuss site audits, and how information learned from audits can be used to improve site performance, visibility, navigation, content, and appearance. The result? A more successful website all around!
Not Sure Where To Start?
PixelPeople lives for analytics. We know where to find them, what they mean, and how to make meaningful, short and long term changes to your website that deliver real results. Contact us to request a quote; we’d love to hear from you!
Tags: web design, web development
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