5 Informative Measures of Your Website"s Performance
If you're still tracking hits as your indicator of choice for your small business's website performance, then your website probably isn't performing.
Gone are the days of the online brochure.
A good website is a lead capturing system.
The bottom line is that visitors give you their contact details so you can begin a relationship with them, and ultimately help them via your products and services.
How your website captures leads (that is, what your call to action is) might be to sign up to your newsletter, or to purchase a product, or to call you to book a coaching session, or even to participate in your online forum.
Website performance then, is about how well your website attracts your ideal leads, engages them and gets them to answer your call to action.
And that's why hits is not a useful measure.
Here are 5 measures that do a much better job of tracking your website performance: 1.
Visitors This is the number of unique people that visit your website in the given time period (usually it's a week or a month).
It tells you how many potential leads you have far more accurately that hits ever can.
With some web analytics packages, you can also track New Visitors, people who have never before visited your site - or new potential leads.
You want to grow your Visitors and your New Visitors! 2.
Pageviews When you track website hits, you're counting every file that is requested when someone views a page of your website.
One page might require several graphics, and other files, so a single page view can be many hits.
It's not an accurate measure of anything, really.
But pageviews, that's a different story.
Particularly when you compare it to the number of Visits (or Sessions), you get a sense of how much people are using your website.
You want to grow your Pageviews! 3.
Bounce Rate You want people to interact with your website, and that usually means they visit a few pages.
It could be that they land on your ezine sign up page, they sign up and then go to your thanks page, which gives them a link to look at a product or service, and they then go look at that.
You don't want people landing on a page of your website and then clicking away altogether.
That's why Bounce Rate is valuable: it tells you want proportion of visits to your website were single-page visits.
You want to reduce your Bounce Rate! 4.
Average Time on Site If you have boring or irrelevant website content to your visitors, they'll likely click away very quickly and never answer your call to action.
The more engaging your website content is, the longer people will stay there, the more connected they will feel with you and your offerings, and the more likely they will be to answer your call to action.
Average Time on Site is a great measure of how engaging your website is to visitors.
You want to grow your Average Time on Site! 5.
Goals Achieved This final indicator measures the proportion of visitors to your site who answered your call to action, the thing you want your visitors to do on your website.
They may have purchased a product or signed up to your ezine or contributed to an online discussion.
As long as you can define that call to action (and you may have more than one), you can track it.
It's an indicator of how well your website is capturing your ideal leads.
You want to grow your Goals Achieved! TAKE ACTION: What's the purpose of your website? What is your call to action for visitors to your website? Are you measuring and tracking your website's success adequately?
Gone are the days of the online brochure.
A good website is a lead capturing system.
The bottom line is that visitors give you their contact details so you can begin a relationship with them, and ultimately help them via your products and services.
How your website captures leads (that is, what your call to action is) might be to sign up to your newsletter, or to purchase a product, or to call you to book a coaching session, or even to participate in your online forum.
Website performance then, is about how well your website attracts your ideal leads, engages them and gets them to answer your call to action.
And that's why hits is not a useful measure.
Here are 5 measures that do a much better job of tracking your website performance: 1.
Visitors This is the number of unique people that visit your website in the given time period (usually it's a week or a month).
It tells you how many potential leads you have far more accurately that hits ever can.
With some web analytics packages, you can also track New Visitors, people who have never before visited your site - or new potential leads.
You want to grow your Visitors and your New Visitors! 2.
Pageviews When you track website hits, you're counting every file that is requested when someone views a page of your website.
One page might require several graphics, and other files, so a single page view can be many hits.
It's not an accurate measure of anything, really.
But pageviews, that's a different story.
Particularly when you compare it to the number of Visits (or Sessions), you get a sense of how much people are using your website.
You want to grow your Pageviews! 3.
Bounce Rate You want people to interact with your website, and that usually means they visit a few pages.
It could be that they land on your ezine sign up page, they sign up and then go to your thanks page, which gives them a link to look at a product or service, and they then go look at that.
You don't want people landing on a page of your website and then clicking away altogether.
That's why Bounce Rate is valuable: it tells you want proportion of visits to your website were single-page visits.
You want to reduce your Bounce Rate! 4.
Average Time on Site If you have boring or irrelevant website content to your visitors, they'll likely click away very quickly and never answer your call to action.
The more engaging your website content is, the longer people will stay there, the more connected they will feel with you and your offerings, and the more likely they will be to answer your call to action.
Average Time on Site is a great measure of how engaging your website is to visitors.
You want to grow your Average Time on Site! 5.
Goals Achieved This final indicator measures the proportion of visitors to your site who answered your call to action, the thing you want your visitors to do on your website.
They may have purchased a product or signed up to your ezine or contributed to an online discussion.
As long as you can define that call to action (and you may have more than one), you can track it.
It's an indicator of how well your website is capturing your ideal leads.
You want to grow your Goals Achieved! TAKE ACTION: What's the purpose of your website? What is your call to action for visitors to your website? Are you measuring and tracking your website's success adequately?
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