Measuring your Website's Success

Is your website delivering the results you want? If you’re like most website owners, your first answer is probably an emphatic “No!”. After all, everyone always wants more from their website, right?

However, if we rephrase the question to be “How well is your website actually doing?”, the answer is usually a lot less clear, mainly because most business owners aren’t using the tools available to measure how successful their website actually is.

For most websites, Google Analytics is the best tool to start with. It’s free and easy to install on your website, and your web developer should be able to set it up in under 30 minutes.

Google Analytics offers a wealth of information, but it can be daunting. Turning that data into actionable observations requires some work on your part. The good news is that this work will pay off. It will also put you in a better position to answer the question of how successful your website is.

Key Website Metrics

Here are some key metrics you can measure in Google Analytics. Each of these is available in the main Dashboard.

Visits.

This refers to the number of times your website was visited in the last month. More is good, but if people are leaving the website without converting (enquiring, calling, buying something) then you should focus on increasing your website’s conversion rate first.

Bounce Rate.

A “bounce” happens when someone lands on your website, and then leaves straight away. If this is very high, it’s a sign that visitors probably aren’t finding what they wanted from your website, and more investigation is needed to figure out why.

Traffic Sources.

People find your website using a variety of methods, including search engines, referrals from other sites, and by typing the URL directly. In most cases Search Engines will be the largest source of visitors. If not, then once again, more investigation is needed.

Digging Deeper - More Metrics

The Dashboard is a good start, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. Here are some additional reports I recommend you dig in to find.

Keywords

This report is dynamite. You can see the keywords that visitors to your site used in the search that brought them to your website. Are they what you expected? If not, you may need to revise your website’s content.

Top Landing Pages

This report shows which pages visitors enter your website through. It also shows the bounce rate for each landing page so you can see how many people leave again straight away, and take steps to reduce the bounce rate for each page individually.

Advanced Segments

Advanced Segments allow you to filter the Google Analytics data. You might want to view only data relating to visitors from New Zealand. Or, you might decide to look at what non-bouncing visitors did while on your site. Advanced Segments lets you do this, and much more.

Tracking Conversions

True website success can only be determined by measuring conversions. Google Analytics lets you track conversions in several ways:

• Goals let you track when an conversion takes place, such as completing a contact form.
• Ecommerce tracking reports when sales are made, and the value of each sale. Combine with Advanced Segments for detailed insights into purchase behaviour.
• Linking with Google Adwords lets you track clicks from paid search separate to organic search traffic. Use this with ecommerce tracking to calculate the ROI on your Adwords spend.

Each of these are advanced topics, and worthy of separate articles. For now, I hope you have enough to start making Google Analytics work for you, and to derive some insights into useful improvements you can make to your website.

29th of July, 2011, By David Parrott.