There are currently over 1.8 billion websites online, and that number goes up every second. Not all of them are your competition, of course, but you know that you have a lot of competition in your market today. Thus, you need to understand your website metrics and how analyzing and managing them will help you build your business.
You need website metrics to help you measure your website performance. Without tracking your metrics, you can’t effectively manage your growth online. You need to know your metrics to convert those website visitors into leads and leads into paying customers.
Depending on the size of your business, metric tracking is a relatively painless and straightforward process. Companies can set up a spreadsheet and input data manually. If your business is more extensive, you can use automated services.
If you want to make sure your website is performing at its best, keep reading because we’re going to show you a few tips to help you get the maximum return on investment (ROI) when it comes to your digital marketing tactics.
And it all starts with web analytics.
Web analytics is crucial to growing your business online, and is used advantageously by the most successful businesses in the world. Google Analytics makes it easy to sign up for an account, add your website, and watch your metrics in real-time. With analytics, you can also track your advertising if you’re using Google Ads, track your Flash, track video, track social networking applications, and just about everything else Google has to offer for you and your website.
You do not have to use Google Ads to track your website performance. Analytics will show you how many users visited your website that day, how long those sessions lasted, what the bounce rate is, and you can even watch your stats in real-time.
This works for many businesses because they can see where the demographic area is of the largest number of visitors and track where in the world other visitors are visiting from. With this information, you can target your content, advertising, products, and services to the client base you are seeking. When following metrics for the long term, you’ll be able to see insights and trends.
If you’re posting blog content on your website, you can use analytics to measure each post’s performance. Things you can track:
This information will show you what posts drive traffic to your website to continue with that trend. You can see how long they’re staying to read so you know whether the length is an issue and what changes you need to make. You can even track your click-throughs to see if your call to action (CTA) is getting the clicks you need to convert those visitors into paying customers.
You can use analytics to measure your website performance, but you can use it to measure social media data such as Facebook likes.
There is so much you can do with website analytics that this doesn’t even scratch the surface, which is why it’s at the top of the list. It’s truly one of the most informational resources for measuring metrics to help build your business through your website.
With so many things a business could track, it’s easy to go down a metric wormhole. Your time is valuable so what you really want to focus on are these 8 metrics to give you the numbers you need to decide your ROI and help you build your business.
It is easy to get overwhelmed with web analytics and tracking metrics. Start small and pick a metric from an area that needs improvement and build up from there. Focusing on just one thing will help you get a feel for the numbers. From there, you can see your business build.
Just as there are things to track, there are a few things you shouldn’t bother tracking. It’s not that these things don’t provide any sort of value – they’re just not the top contenders when it comes to building your business.
Videos are a huge trend in digital marketing right now so it’s perfectly acceptable if you have a video or 5 on your website, or perhaps you’ve created and are linking to a company YouTube account. These views are important, especially if they are driving visitors to your website. Keep in mind that in social media, for a view to count, a user needs only to watch 3 seconds of your video to count as a view. On YouTube, it’s just over 30 seconds. If your video is longer than 4 minutes, these metrics aren’t telling you anything important so it’s not worth your time tracking these metrics.
It might seem like a great metric to track the rate your emails are being opened. You want people to open your email blasts and newsletters. It looks good when your open rate percentage is high. Sadly, this only tells you whether your email subject line was compelling enough to get someone to open your email, and those someones are already your email subscribers. Beyond that, it tells you nothing. You have no idea if they’ve read the entire email.
It’s worth noting – If your email service allows for you to track your email click-through rate, meaning it gives you the ability to track whether or not your anchor link in the email was clicked – track this. And if your email service doesn’t offer this to you – find one that does. It’s nice to know when your emails are being clicked through – especially if it lands visitors on your website.
As you can see, website metrics are essential to help you build your business.
You can use metrics to:
Are you ready to grow your business by tracking your website metrics and not sure where to start? You’ve come to the right place.
BHirst Media is a U.S. based digital agency that offers web design and development, and we’re here to help with your website metrics. Contact us today, and we’ll get you started — walking with you every step of the way, so you don’t have to get bogged down by the hard stuff.
