Do you have analytics integrated into your website? Do you ever measure your website’s performance? Do you integrate into your marketing efforts any key performance indicators to measure your campaign’s success?
I’ve raised these questions because the role of websites has come a long way over recent years and became more complex. Websites used to be a mere source of information about a business, now they have become a channel to get leads, sell goods and services and engage with customers.
It is not surprising to note that many businesses are relying heavily on their websites for financial stability. However, one factor that is paid little attention to and is instrumental in the success of a business is performance indicators.
Why should you examine your website statistics in detail and how can this help improve your business?
Performance Indicators that Identify Areas for Improvement
There are many basic key indicators like number of visitors, bounce rate, exit rate, time-on-site, time-on-page and conversion. These indicators do not only help in identifying website pages that need improvement, they also tell you whether your keywords and content are relevant and will generate the right traffic.
Number of Visitors
Another is number of visitors. Though this is not a good indicator of relevant traffic, this allows you to know whether your lead and traffic generating efforts are working or not. This should be read together with other indicators so that you can zero in on your target traffic.
Time-on-Site and Time-on-Page
Time-on-site tells you how long a visitor spends time on your website and time-on-page, on the other hand, on a particular page. It shows you which pages are most relevant to your visitors.
This indicator is useful because it tells you how long you are holding your visitors’ attention for. It also helps you identify pages that you need to optimise or change the content on.
Bounce Rate
Do you see your visitors spending time on one page and exiting or bouncing from another immediately?
This tells you the percentage of visitors landing on a page and exiting without visiting any other pages. This is relevant because firstly, Google penalises websites with a high bounce rate and secondly, it tells you if your keywords are relevant for that page. If your keywords aren’t then it means that you should change the content because it’s getting you irrelevant traffic.
Conversion
This is one of the hardest to measure because you really won’t know what indicators push your visitors to convert or whether they would reach the stage of closing the sale anyway. This is not discounting the fact that the integration of keywords, the right website design, engaging content and a conversion plan plays a relevant role when visitors reach that decision making point.
Performance indicators tell you whether your marketing campaigns are successful. More importantly, they help you make informed and educated decisions regarding your business goals.
