When it comes to marketing your business online, simply having a website isn’t enough to make your brand successful.
You need a website that actually works at attracting and converting new customers.
But how do you ensure this?
By measuring your website performance metrics and refining your website based on those analytics. Even a few months is enough time for your website to become ineffective, meaning you could be losing out on conversions and potential customers.
There are several ways to measure your website marketing performance, all of which you should be analyzing on a monthly or bi-monthly basis.
1. Unique Visitor Traffic
The number of individual visitors to your site during a defined period
You should be seeing an upward trend in your unique visitor traffic, suggesting that your content is being successful at driving new visitors to your site. Look out for rises that happen in conjunction with marketing campaigns.
2. Repeat Visitors
The percentage of visitors who return to your site
A higher percentage of repeat visitors suggest that prospects are finding your content interesting and informational enough to come back for more. A healthy rate is around 15 percent—if you have less than 10 percent, visitors are probably failing to find what they looking for, more than 30 percent suggests you are struggling to drive enough new traffic to you site.
3. Bounce Rate
The percentage of visitors who leave your site quickly having no interactions
A high bounce rate suggests that, although you are succeeding in driving visitors to your site, your audience is likely finding nothing of value and has no reason to stay. Alternate explanations for a high bounce rate include unclear calls to action or poor site architecture.
4. Direct Traffic
The audience who accesses your website directly by typing your URL into their browser, using a bookmark, or clicking on an untagged link in an email or document
A large amount of direct traffic generally means you are quite effective at creating content such as email, newsletters, or other downloadable material that contains your URL. Direct traffic can also be attributed to your repeat visitors.
5. Organic Traffic
Traffic arriving through search results in a search engine
Ideally, you want 40 to 50 percent of your total traffic to be organic, implying that you are using effective SEO techniques.
6. Organic Search Conversion Rates
The percentage of prospects who arrive at your website through an organic search and convert by taking a desired action
Monitoring different types of conversions, including visitor to lead, lead to customer, and visitor to customer, will give you a better idea about any adjustments you need to make to your marketing funnel. You should aim to convert between 11 and 20 percent of organic traffic.
7. Landing Page Conversion
The percentage of prospects who arrive at a landing page and convert
This refers to the number of people who reach a landing page and actually fill out a form to become a lead. Again, you should be measuring all types of conversions (visitor to lead, lead to customer, and visitor to customer) for a clearer idea about any problems or bottlenecks in your marketing funnel.
8. Keyword Performance
The keywords that are bringing organic traffic to your site
This is one of the most important metrics for website marketing and requires evaluation on a regular basis to enable you to adapt campaigns and content accordingly. Using a keyword tool can be helpful in generating specific content that your customers are searching for.
9. Inbound Links
Links from sources other than search engines that lead directly to your site
Inbound links not only boost the number of new visitors to your site, they also increase your ranking in search engines. Inbound links should grow at a steady rate as more people share your content. You should track this metric monthly to determine what the type of content others are linking and produce more in the same vein in order to generate further inbound links.
Your website is more than just a tool for generating business, it is your best tool for analyzing customer behavior. In order for your business to be effective, it is necessary to constantly measure your website marketing performance to ensure that you are driving traffic to your website and converting visitors into leads and customers.
This article was originally published by SyneCore
Published: August 11, 2014
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