Today, most business owners understand that having a website is vital to their survival and growth. Your website is your company’s virtual storefront, inviting current and potential customers to learn more about you and your products or services, place orders, schedule appointments, get directions, or even leave a review. It’s a multipurpose, multitasking, multifaceted marketing machine.
But when it comes to meeting your marketing goals, you can’t afford to ignore all the work your website is doing behind the scenes. While the lovely, friendly, feature-filled face of your website is warmly welcoming folks to interact, the brains in the back are busy following their every move, gathering data about who’s visiting, what they’re doing, and how well the site is working. And if you’re not paying attention to what the nerdy side of your site is trying to tell you, you’re overlooking an incredibly valuable opportunity.
If your website could talk …
The massive amount of data your website is constantly gathering is commonly referred to as analytics. Website analytics is the process of collecting, measuring, analyzing, and presenting the data from your site to help you understand its effectiveness — both from a technical performance perspective as well as a marketing tool. Understanding how to extract and evaluate the key metrics in these analytics can help you tweak, update, and constantly improve your site.
Here are just a few metrics that are well worth measuring … and why:
- Keyword Analysis: Analyzing how the keywords you’ve used in your site’s content rank in search result rankings and organic traffic will help you identify which words are really making a difference. You can measure your success by tracking keyword positions over time and monitoring increases in organic traffic from target keywords.
- Page Load Optimization: Checking your website’s loading times and ensuring that it loads quickly across different devices will help in reducing bounce rates, and improving overall user experience. Tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to gauge performance and measure success by achieving faster load times.
- Conversion Rate Tracking: A conversion in marketing jargon is an action you’d like for someone to take to get them closer to doing business with you. It may be submitting a form, making a purchase, or signing up for a newsletter. Monitoring conversion rates against your goals will tell you how you’re measuring up.
Website analysis is an ongoing process. You collect the data, analyze it, compare it to your goals (a.k.a. key performance indicators) and how it fits with your strategy, make adjustments, rinse, and repeat. OK, so the “rinse” part probably isn’t a good idea for your electronics, but you get the gist. Having an employee or partner dedicated to this process can be a game-changer for your business.
Where to start
There are literally dozens of metrics that could — and should — be measured and monitored to keep your company’s website in top-performing condition. In addition to keywords, page load time, and conversion rates, you should also know your site’s click-through rates, bounce rate, page views, unique visitors, impressions … The list goes on and on. Plus, data can come from all kinds of sources. It’s found within your website platform, attached to search engines, and can be extracted by hundreds of third-party tools. To be honest, the enormity of data and tools can be a bit overwhelming.
And that’s where Ad4! Group can help. Our expertise includes not only creating the attractive, inviting, and informative customer-facing side of your website — we can also be sure the behind-the-scenes structure is built to help you meet all of your key performance indicators. We can also help you keep an eye on the analytics on a weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis, and make the adjustments needed to keep your website in tip-top shape. Check us out at www.ad4group.com, email us at [email protected], or give us a ring at (256) 426-2718!