Understanding Key Performance Indicators

 

Most people feel that once the website is built and is live then all they need to is maybe throw some advertising to it and that’s it. Unfortunately it’s not that easy. Once your site is up and you have traffic going to it you need to monitor your site to see what is working for you and what isn’t. Lets go over some key performance indicators that you can use to understand how well your website is working.

 

Bounce Rate

 

Watching your bounce rate is important as this is basically the percentage of how long people are spending on your site. Google watches to see if people are leaving your site and are only viewing one page or are leaving immediately. Your audience could “bounce” from the site by clicking a link that opens in the same window but goes off your site, typing in a new url, or having their session timeout.

 

Page Views

 

Page views are pretty self explanatory. This tells you on average how many pages each visitor looks at when they come to your site. The average viewer looks at 2.5 pages of a website. This gives you an idea of how quickly they are finding the information they are looking for.

 

Acquisition

 

Acquisition shows you where your viewers are coming from. You are able to see if they are doing a search for your company, coming from social media, or coming from paid advertising. This lets you know where you need to focus your marketing budget.

 

Keywords

 

Your keywords are determined by what your company offers and what words or phrases people would use to search and find you. Make sure you designate keywords for each page of your website. Each page needs to have unique, individual keywords. Copying and pasting the same keywords to each page will not count as Google will only count the set of keywords once. However your keywords can be a variation of the same set of keywords. Like “white sneaker yellow laces” and “white sneaker red laces.”

 

Social Media Insights

 

Social media insights let you know who is following you on social media and what posts people are responding to. This will allow you to focus on getting as many viewers following and sharing your posts as well as giving you insight to which ads they may respond better to. Knowing what your audience likes will help in growing a big following.

 

Conversion Rate

 

This is great information to know. This tells you what percentage of the viewers to your site did your call to action. Whether they signed up for a newsletter, purchased something, or filled out a contact form, they did what you set out to achieve with your website.

 

Paid Traffic vs. Organic Traffic

 

There are two main types of traffic that comes to your site. Paid traffic and organic traffic. Organic traffic is the viewers that searched your industry and found you, searched for your product or service, or typed your URL in directly. Paid traffic is the viewers that are coming to you because they clicked on an ad that was placed, be it in social media or Google AdWords. This ties in with knowing where your traffic is coming from.

 

Trends

 

Like with the fashion industry, websites have trends too. Keep an eye on what trends are happening as this is what is currently appealing to customers. It could mean pop-ups or other web design aspects.

 

Knowing how well your website is working is valuable information. It allows you to understand where your marketing dollars are better spent. It also tells you what things you need to fix in order to get more customers. Use your key performance indicators or hire a company like us to monitor and interpret the information for you.