Websites - how to start measuring and monitoring success

Getting up close and intimate with your website

Websites need looking after, maintaining, nurturing and above effort.

If you want them to produce the goods you can’t just accept your website as a finished product from the designer or agency that created it and then leave it to get on with things on its own.  It just won’t produce the goods, any more than leaving the brand new brochure in the stationery cupboard will work.

So the first thing to focus on is what is the purpose of the website, hopefully you already know this because it was part of the spec when the site was built.

It might be to transact online but much more likely it is to generate leads and to provide back up to offline sales.  If the answer is that because every one else has one, then ask yourself why do they bother.

So let’s look at the commonest type of site, the one whose purpose is to generate leads  Well we have our first KPI, (key performance indicator).  Did the site produce more leads this month than last and were they better quality in that did they convert into sales?

 

The headline KPI

So for most sites, that is the headline KPI, the most important metric of the lot.  Ah I hear you say, but when the phone rings I can’t always find out where the prospect got our number from.  There are ways around that but you can either simply record the number of enquiry forms received from the site or you can define visiting the contact page as the goal of the site.  So long as the metric is directly related to what you are trying to achieve, then that’s fine.  If you got 10 visitors to your contact page last month and 100 this month, it is likely you got more enquiries this month than last.  Obviously if you have a dedicated phone number that is only available from the website that is a much better way of measuring success, and added to returned enquiry forms is the best solution of all.

But the key is to make the most of what is available and remember with a website that is much better than any other sales or marketing medium can supply.

I’m not putting traffic as my most important metric.  Unless I have a site that generates income through selling advertising, then traffic is important but only up to a point.  Valuable relevant engaged traffic is important, the rest is just taking up bandwidth.

So now we need to measure what proportion of traffic is valuable relevant and engaged.  There are several issues to separate out here.  Is the traffic coming to our site looking for the product or service we offer?  That’s the first thing.  The next is when they arrive, do they like what they see?  Is it immediately clear to the visitor whether indeed the site does offer what he is looking for and if it does, how does he go about achieving his goal?

 

Bounce rate KPIs

Bounce rate will certainly give a clue to both these questions.  Bounce rate is the proportion of visitors who do not navigate beyond their entry page.  Even if the visitor decides to telephone and the number is on every page, he will almost certainly have had a good look around the site before he makes that call.

So we now have a second KPI, bounce rate and I would suggest we split that into two.  The bounce rate for the site as a whole and for the home page.

Now the bounce rate is a result of how relevant the traffic was in the first place and how much they liked the site when they got there.  So how do we distinguish the two.  Well we can start by looking at what keywords visitors are using to find the site.  Are they the ones that are likely to result in enquiries?  Don’t assume they are.  You can separate out the keywords used in natural (organic) search and those used in PPC campaigns. 

 

Sites off focus for natural search

Some sites can end up off focus from a natural search point of view.  For example, say your company sells coffee making machines to small companies.  Googlebot works simply on the words used on the site and in the links to it from other sites and it would be quite easy for the site to unintentionally attract visitors looking for home coffee making machines.  Your keywords will make this very clear and once you know what the problem is you can start to fix it.  The bounce rate will be high if this is happening because you visitors looking for home coffee machines will simply bounce of the site.

If you look at the keywords used by visitors and they are exactly right, and the bounce rate is high then the chances are there is something wrong with the site design or navigation.  Again, it might not be welcome news, but now you know where the problem lies, you can begin to fix it. 

So we now have the following KPIs

1. conversions (enquiries)
2. site bounce rate
3. home page bounce rate
4. top keywords (organic search)

There are two more KPIs that I would put in the ‘must have’ category and they are search engine (organic) traffic and traffic from referring sites.  The first indicates my site’s search engine visibility and the second gives information on the incoming links to the site.  Incoming links are vital for both traffic generation and search engine visibility so the quality and quantity of other sites sending traffic to me is very much a Key Performance Indicator.

 

Must have list of website KPIs

So my final list is

1. conversions (enquiries)
2. site bounce rate
3. home page bounce rate
4. top keywords (organic search)
5. organic search engine traffic
6. referred traffic

 

PPC campaigns

If you are running PPC campaigns then you need to monitor the results very carefully.  Which keywords are sending traffic, which are converting, which have the lowest bounce rates, which creatives (ie ads) are the most effective?  Remember you have complete control over traffic from a PPC campaign.  You control the keywords, the message and the landing page so you should be aiming at a bounce rate for your PPC traffic of no more than 25%.  An exception is if you are operating in a very competitive market and visitors are comparing different suppliers but if you are in this sort of market you need to be doing some very sophisticated analysis anyway.

So my recommendation is that once a week or once a month depending on your site and the market you are in, you compile a report with those six metrics.  Make it pretty with coloured arrows showing what is improving and what is in decline.  And most important of all, take some actions based on what the metrics show.  If organic traffic is static, put some effort into search engine optimisation.  If your home page bounce rate is high, say over 55%, think about some changes.  If there is no referred traffic, get some links (but make sure they are from quality sites). 

 

Getting web analytics data

And finally, if you are wondering how to get all this lovely information, there are several ways.  Google Analytics is free and simply requires that a little bit of code is added to every page on your site – it is vital that it is added to every page even the pages you don’t think are important.  Or most hosting providers supply access to analysed log files.  The quality of the data depends on the hosting provider and generally I would recommend the Google Analytics route but the most important thing is to use something.  There are lots of paid for analytics solutions but GA takes a lot of beating - unless you have specific reporting requirements not covered by GA, or you feel very strongly about giving access to all your website data to Google, albeit anonymously.

This is a very brief overview of how to start the process of looking at your website, for a more detailed discussion of how we can help please go to the Atracks contact page (we’ll keep a record of how many do that of course).  We offer both training on web analytics and on search engine optimisation.  We also offer a web analytics service to clients as well as a search engine mentoring service.