Tips for Business Website Success

First Measure, Then Succeed | Tips for Business Website Success

As business owners we are often focussed on how many visits we get to our website but often forget there’s equally just as important measures to consider. If your end goal is more than just attracting visitors to your website but actually how many visitors end up buying something from you then you need to start digging a bit deeper into your website analytics for the real gems.

Here’s 5 key metrics using the free tool Google Analytics which give good insights into visitor behaviour.

Bounce Rate – is the percentage of single page visits to your site and generally is a guide as to whether people are interacting with your site.

If you have a lot of website content on other pages and your bounce rate is high (e.g. anything over 50% could be considered unhealthy) then you probably need to rework your webpage to engage your visitor to click on a navigation feature, click on a download or use a contact form.

Pageviews captures the number of times pages have been loaded by a browser and is a great indicator of traffic and engagement over time. If your pageviews are increasing while your overall traffic is not – then it would indicate your visitor engagement is improving.

Geo location – you can get good data on where your customers are located either in New Zealand or all around the world. This is handy if you are targeting specific regions and executing campaigns based on area. In this example the business is targeting Wellington and Auckland and the data shows this is where most traffic is coming from.

While Desktops still tend to be the dominant form of technology that people use to visit websites, Smartphones or Tablets have started to become more popular. If your business is starting to show one device type as dominant you need to consider how you can leverage this opportunity. One of our client’s offers accommodation and often rooms has been booked by Smartphone. So by having a Smartphone friendly site is often a necessity to avoid losing out on business to competitors who have already adjusted to this trend.

Visits by source – by understanding where your website is coming from helps you to better target your audience. Often Google provides a good chunk of traffic, however many businesses do get traffic from referral sites, email campaigns, smaller search engines (bing) and social media sources. If there’s a particular channel you are interested in (e.g.

Facebook referrals) you may wish to consider a strategy to boost quality traffic using a combination of content and campaigns.

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