Measuring Your Website's Success: The Basics
So you've got a website
So you've got a website. Great! But how do you know if your website is helping your business grow?
To the untrained eye, web metrics are a labyrinth of terminology and acronyms - bounce rate, TOS, CPV - it goes on and on. As confusing as they seem, these metrics provide meaningful and actionable information, but only if you take the time to understand them.
In this post, we'll break down some of the easiest ways to measure your website's success. Keep in mind that this is just the tip of the iceberg and we'll go into much more depth in later posts, but read on to make sure your site is on the right track:
1. Define success. Hopefully you've thought about this already, but before you can crunch numbers, you have to set goals. What is the point of your website - bringing in new business, informing current customers, saving your employees time, showing off your accomplishments? As one of the gurus of management, Edward Deming, wrote, "You can't manage what you can't measure," so set your goals first.
2. Install analytics. If your web administrator is worth his or her pay, you will already have some sort of analytics tool installed on your site. Google Analytics is free and provides all the standard data and reports. Other analytics tools such as Omniture and WebTrends provide more advanced features, but can be cost prohibitive. If you don't have an analytics tool installed, you're missing out on critical information that should be shaping your marketing strategy--and even your business plan.
3. Unique Visitors vs. Visits. For beginners, this can be confusing, but it's really quite simple. A unique visitor is one person--they can visit your site two or twenty times, yet they will only be counted once. Analytics tools such as Google Analytics display the percentage of visitors that are returning versus those that are new. A visit is one person's session on the site, incorporating all the pages they visited. Thus, your number of visits should be higher than your unique visitors if people are coming back more than once.
4. The Bounce Rate myth. Bounce rate is the percentage of visits in which the visitor leaves the site after viewing just one page. So if a visitor comes to your site, looks at your home page, and leaves, that's counted as a "bounce." While high bounce rates are sometimes viewed as a negative, they must be viewed in context. A high bounce rate could actually mean that visitors are coming to your site, finding exactly what they need, and moving on--not necessarily a bad thing. Ideally though, your site's visitors would find what they need, and then be curious enough to look at other pages. The bounce rate metric can be useful, but must be analyzed in context.
5. Time On Site. How long are people sticking around on your site? All analytics tools display general patterns and data for specific visits. A visitor might not be on your site for long if they're just looking for a phone number, but if they're reading multiple blog posts, they could linger for 10 or 15 minutes. Most websites garner time on site between 30 seconds and 2 minutes.
6. Pages Per Visit (PPV). Pages per visit tell you how many pages a visitor is viewing on each of their visits. Pretty basic. But what does it mean? As with bounce rate, there are two sides: if someone only looks at one page in a visit, they could have found what they wanted and left. Or, they could look at that one page, decide they don't like what they see, and leave. Don't freak out if your pages per visit number is low. If people are viewing on average of 2 or more pages per visit on your site, you're doing great. If they're looking at 5 to 10 pages, then they're really getting engaged.
7. Context, context, context! Don't isolate any one metric as the end-all be-all of your web success measurement strategy. If your bounce rate is awful, but your time on site is great, then you probably don't have to worry too much. Put everything in context, and consider all the factors going in to each metric.
8. Pay attention to the big picture. Always circle back and make sure your analysis is focused on your goals. Are your employees getting phone calls from people who can't find what they need on your website? Are visitors to your site contacting your salespeople? Are people linking to your site on their Facebook or LinkedIn pages? Do the analysis to make sure that your website is doing what you've intended.
by: Len Ostroff
Promotional items product guide Web Hosting - To Develop Your Dream Websites Building Website With Low Cost For You Giveaways For Improving The Traffic To Your Website Drive Visitors to Your Free Website with Facebook Too Much (Personal) Info on Your Free Website? Aesthetic Placement of Ads on a Website Looking For Trendy Korean Fashion Wholesale At Korean Fashion Jewelry Wholesale Website Use High Quality Web Themes To Boost Up Your Website What Is The Ashley Madison Site Basics and Prerequisites for Drafting a Compromise Agreement Why You Should Use Promotional Items Steps For Quality Website Design Services