12 May Getting the Most From Your Website Statistics
There are many ways to determine your website’s success. The unfortunate part in this is that most website owners are completely unaware of what numbers they should be looking at on both a weekly, monthly and yearly basis.
In a nutshell – the numbers tell the whole story.
First up, before you can begin to analysis your website’s success ratios you must determine exactly what it’s primary and then secondary objectives are.
EG. Is your website set up to take e-Commerce orders Online vs. Is it’s goal to generate leads for sales follow up.
As a final outcome, one of these two options will most likely be your final measuring stick. That’s easy to see and understand. However, there are also many other numbers you can and should look at to then help improve and increase your success ratios.
1. It begins with traffic. Next time you go into your website’s statistics data area take a look at how much over all traffic you are getting. Next, look more carefully at your traffic to see whether it is “targeted” to your website with a high level of interest in what you have to offer, or whether it is just general “run of the mill – I found you by accident” traffic.
How can you determine this? Easy. First look at what search engine phrases people used to find you. If you’re selling short stay accommodation packages for the north of Sydney and one of your top search phrases is “overnight accommodation north Sydney” then this is targeted. If one of the top search phrases is “family accommodation Sydney Australia” or “sandy beaches Sydney” then this is untargeted traffic.
Another key you can look at is the average time that your website visitors stay on individual pages, and also where they navigate through your website. As with most websites the highest pages views go to the main page – but where do they go after that? How long do they stay on pages? This allows you to determine if they are actually reading the content of your pages of just ‘browsing’. Targeted traffic visitors always read the majority of the content of your information pages.
Once you have determined the percentage of targeted traffic to your website, you can then compare that to actual “sales”. That could be either Bookings Online or Contact Forms submitted, depending on your goal and your set up.
2. Another area to look at which relates to long term success is how many of these people subscribe to either your free monthly e-Newsletter or your free email information pack. This is another very important number.
Calculate the percentage of visitors to your site vs. subscribers. If it’s under 5% then you’ve got some serious work to do. Your goal here should be to obtain at least a 10% conversion ration to ‘free contacts’ where your visitors give you permission to send them future information.
If you find that your actual ‘sales’ conversion ration is low (under 5%) you may want to give serious thought towards boosting the profile of your free information services.
Once you’ve received permission to send a prospective client information by email and you then make sure they get good quality information, you can then keep them as a “free customer” for many years – which will eventually convert them to a paying customer.
3. Finally, you should set aside the time to review these numbers at a minimum each month and then make changes to your website accordingly.
A website on it’s own it usually nothing more than a waste of time and money. Your site must be geared towards performance and results, not just free information. People love free stuff Online, and they will milk you for everything they can get.
My advice is that you capitalise on this ‘freebie’ mentality and use it to your advantage.
