If you want your website to be successful, you’ll need to know how to measure its performance. When we talk about website success, it all comes down to the goals you set – such as bringing in lots of traffic, converting visitors into sales or driving brand awareness.
If you’re considering re-designing your website or you’ve just invested in a brand new site, it’s important to learn how to keep an eye on its performance. Otherwise, your website may look great, but it may not be delivering on your key objectives.
Here are some essential tips to help you get started with website analysis…
Define your goals
Analytics tools and software can produce virtual reams of stats, metrics and data. Most of this will be useful unless it helps you to track progress towards particular goals.
So, before you do anything, think carefully about what you want your website to achieve. Set a handful of realistic, achievable and crucially, measurable objectives. These should be linked to your goals as a business – such as driving sales, building lists of leads for your marketing and sales teams, bringing in new customers and reaching new demographics.
Understand what’s happening on your site right now
To start off with, you’ll want to understand how your website is performing right now. If it’s important to you to improve traffic to your site, a good starting point is to gather data on visitor numbers, sources of traffic, popular landing pages, time spent on pages, bounce rates and other related statistics. There’s a handy guide to analytics terminology here, a great resource for complete beginners.
How will you measure your progress?
While setting your goals, think carefully about the information you’ll need in order to track your progress. Some are obvious, such as using stats on pages per session, popularly visited pages and time spent on pages to track the visitor’s journey through your website. This information can be used to carefully shape the user experience and journey on your site, to deliberately push users towards a point where they interact – such as to make a purchase, enquiry or sign up to a mailing list.
Choosing analytics tools
There are many tools you can use to analyse your website, but Google Analytics is one of the most widely used. It’s user-friendly and very customisable, so you can tailor your reports to see as much or as little data as you need.
Create a plan to take action
It’s very useful to gain an insight into your website’s performance and customer behaviour using analytics data. However, you need to do something with the data once you have it. This links back to your original objectives. The analytics data will highlight an issue (for example, a high bounce rate) and it’s now your turn to take action to resolve it. You don’t want to be collecting information for the sake of it – you need to be able to use the data to improve your site and help it become a valuable asset for your business.
Website analysis can be difficult to get to grips with, as well as time-consuming. If you’re short on time, why not take advantage of the expertise of the Ambos Digital website and digital strategy experts? Contact us on 0800 774 7025 or email [email protected].
