A website is a fantastic marketing tool. The importance of maintaining your website is vital to not only keeping the content and 'look and feel' up-to-date, to ensure your message is relevant to your target market; but it is also important in managing and monitoring the success your website achieves. By monitoring your website, you are able to measure the effectiveness of each page, and tweak your content accordingly.
We are given many options in measuring tools, such as Analytics Reports, but as our website developer, Pablo, writes, not all of it is good information. Rapidfire has outlined a way to ensure that you are gaining helpful insight into the performance of your website, by measuring the right data, rather than unimportant information.
One of the best ways to gather the right kind of data to measure your site is to use 'Metrics'. A metric is "an analytical measurement intended to quantify the state of a system. For example "population density" is a metric which may be used to describe a city." i
Which metrics best measure the success of your site?
Common metrics used to measure sites might be; Visits, Page Views or Average Time on Site and 99% of web analytic reports are based on these types of metrics. Business owners and marketing people often look at these types of metric data as a complete analysis of the activity on their site, which can be misleading and inaccurate to providing the full picture.
For example: People saw 8329 pages last month and 9032 this month. Sounds good, right? Traffic is on the up! But what does this information REALLY mean? How do we turn that information into valuable action points to ensure that the website continues to grow?
When analysing the visits on the website, people assume that "more" is always "better". Be careful when you analyse your data. Never make the inference that more is better. What you are looking for, are happy customers and success in your business. A website really is to not only represent your company's presence online, but to generate leads and ultimately, sales.
When you look at the Average time on Site, don't assume that the information is accurate and regarding to clients only. Sometimes, for example, a web developer might spend 4 to 5 hours per visit on the website, but a normal visitor could spend less than a minute. Then the Average time on website will return a wrong value like 3 or 4 minutes. This means that you will get a blown out average, for example 'On average Bill Gates and I earned US $3.9 Billion last year'.
Hits on websites can also be generated by Search Engine programs called 'Bots'. These bots trawl the internet and access the programming of each site to gather information to compile their Search Engine ranking (that SEO business we discussed last time).
Which metrics should be used?
Now that we've covered a few cons about website Analytics, let us move on the some information will be useful to your website analysis. It starts with setting goals. What is the goal of your website? To increase sales, receive donations, gather a database? Choose your web metrics based on the purpose of your website. If your business goal is to sell something, use metrics that actually tell you if your website is selling. Or, at least, measure if visitors find what they are looking for. Here are a few suggested metrics that might be useful to your business.
Bounce rate
When someone comes to your website and then leaves without visiting any other pages on your site, it is considered a "bounce". In other words, your bounce rate is the percentage of visits to your site where the visitor leaves immediately. So, it does not matter if you have millions and millions of visitors if your bounce rate is high, it means that your visitors do not find what they are looking for. This metric is really useful because it can help you identify content that is not performing properly and point you to areas of your website that need work.
Conversation Rate
When talking about Conversation Rate, we can associate it with social media. The most common errors when reporting social media campaigns are; measuring Followers, Likes and Posts. You should be measuring Conversation Rate. To be more specific, it means
- For blogs: number of reader comments per post.
- For Twitter: number of replies sent and received per day.
- For Facebook: % Feedback.
And these are just two of many useful metrics we use at Rapidfire for our reports.
Practical example (visits vs. bounce rate)
Let us compare metrics for July and August of the website example.com.
July Report
August Report
If we base our report on Visits, we will notice a decrease of 30%. Nevertheless if we focus on Bounce Rate, we can clearly identify that it moved from ¾ to ½ (approx.). In other words, it experienced an improvement of 25%. We can also notice that there are more returning visitors in August, which means that they found something on the website that made them come back.
When combining the number of visits with the bounce rate we can calculate a more accurate number of proper visits, as we are going to exclude the ones who leave the website immediately. From 562 visitors during July, just 131 of them are considered as proper visitors. Then, from 396 visitors during August, 189 are considered. In other words August is 44% better than July, when comparing the non-bounced visits.
If you would like to discuss measuring your website with relevant data to your business, please don't hesitate to contact Rapidfire at the Rapid Response Centre on 1800 779 296.
