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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:
- Site visibility
- Site load time
- Site appearance
- Site content
- Site navigation and layout
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.
Audits And Analytics: A Look Under The Hood
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:
- How many people are visiting your site
- What type of people are visiting your site
- What people are doing once they get to your site
- And of course – the “whys” to all of the above questions
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:
- Web Analytics: the collection, reporting, and analysis of website data.
- Web Audits: an examination of page performance prior to large-scale search engine optimization (SEO) or a website redesign.
Website Analytics: Key Performance Indicators To Consider
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:
- Bounce rate – indicates the percent of all users who viewed a page and left without taking any further action on your site
- User count – indicates the number of users who have visited your page over a given period
- Traffic Demographics – explores the characteristics of the people visiting your site
- Traffic Source/Medium – provides a breakdown of where your site visitors came from
It’s All Relative – Analytics Mean More Over Time
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!
