Top 3 Metrics for Measuring the Effectiveness of Your Website

How’s your website doing? Is it providing value for your business? Building a high-quality website requires a good amount of time, effort, and sometimes a sizable investment, so you should never “set it and forget it.” If you want to see a return on your investment, it’s important to understand how your site is performing and continually analyze areas that may need some improvement.

With all the data available today, there are many different website key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure. The trouble is, there are so many different metrics that it can be hard to track them month to month and try to make sense of it all. That brings us to step one in measuring the effectiveness of your website: Outline your objectives. You must have specific goals for your website in order to choose the KPIs that are most relevant and useful for your business.

For most businesses, the main goal for the company website is to generate revenue. However, there isn’t a single, universal metric every business can use to measure the success of this goal because the conversion process is unique to each organization. Once you have a clear understanding of your company’s conversion process and goals for your website, you can use that information to choose metrics that best illustrate success.

All that said, there are some metrics and web performance indicators every organization should pay attention to. Let’s talk about heat maps, goal conversion rate, and site visitors.

Heat Maps

Have you ever wanted to know more about how users are interacting with your website? Heat maps are innovative software that allows you to see what people do on your website pages, from where they click and how far they scroll, to what content they pay attention to or ignore.

When you see a color-coded representation of what your website visitors are clicking on, scrolling through, or ignoring on individual pages, you gain a deeper understanding of what elements of your site you should change or A/B test to improve. Sometimes just a small tweak to the design layout or web copy on a landing page can give your users a better experience that encourages them to convert.

Conversion Rate

It feels great when your SEO efforts are working, and your company’s website ranks on the first page of Google. However, showing up at the top of a search page is only beneficial if customers are taking action once they click through to your site. To find out if they are, you’ll need a Google Analytics account. After installing a tracking code, you can set up goals in your Analytics account and track how many conversions take place on your site.

A goal conversion happens when a website visitor completes a specific action you are tracking. For example: make a purchase, add a product to cart, or sign up for email newsletters. By tracking how many people are completing your goals (and how many are not), you can calculate your goal conversion rate. Take the number of goal conversions and divide it by the number of sessions, then multiply by 100. So if you have 200 sessions and five successful purchases, the goal conversion rate is 5/200 = .025 x 100 = 2.5%.

Tracking conversion rates for different goals within your sales funnel will help you paint a picture of what’s working – and isn’t working – on your website. Because conversion rates vary greatly from one industry to the next and are influenced by many other factors, it’s best to focus on beating your current goal conversion rate, rather than comparing it to stats you’ve seen online.

Site Visitors

Every business owner wants to see more traffic on their website, but measuring overall traffic doesn’t give you enough details. Instead, you want to look at visits, page views, and unique visitors.

1. Visits: the number of times your website has been visited within a reporting period. A single person can make multiple visits.
2. Pageviews: the total number of times the pages of your website were viewed or refreshed within a reporting period. Pageviews are not unique, meaning if one person views the same page twice, it will count as two page views.
3. Unique Visitors: the actual number of people who visited your website at least once during a reporting period (Google Analytics uses cookies to determine whether a user has visited your site before, or whether they are a new visitor). A person visiting the site multiple times during a reporting period is only counted once.

Breaking down your site visitors into more focused metrics and looking at them together will help you better understand your web traffic over time. It will provide insight into how your customers are interacting with your site and how frequently they are doing so.

Once you’ve identified what specific results you’re looking for from your website, it becomes much easier to refine your strategy to generate even better performance. If you need help measuring the effectiveness of your website, contact Triton Commerce today! We can design a custom, high-quality website for your business with trackable results and transparent reporting.