Website Performance: 4 Key Details to Focus on Each Month

Once you’ve launched a new website for your small business, how do you know if it’s generating any results? In order to really understand the impact of your digital marketing efforts, you need to measure and monitor the performance of your website and other digital advertising.

Just as a hub holds an entire wheel together, your website serves as the crucial central point that supports all of your other Digital Marketing activities. Regularly checking in on your website’s performance will make it easier to understand what your visitors want so you can get even better at providing that for them.

One of the easiest ways to check in on your website’s performance is by using Google Analytics. Free to use, Analytics is an incredibly powerful tool. Learn more about getting started with Google Analytics here.

With Analytics set up for your website, it’s time to start taking a look at performance. Here are a few key details to keep an eye on each month:

Key Detail | What Content is the Most Popular (and What Isn't)?

Beyond knowing how many people are visiting your website, it’s important to know what pages they are visiting. Using the “Site Content” reports under “Behavior” in Analytics, you can see how many users are visiting each page on your website:

• All Pages will show your top-performing content based on factors including pageviews, time on page, and more, giving you a quick summary of what content is performing best on your website.
• Content Drilldown is a great reporting tool if your website is structured into specific sections. For example, if you have sections such as example.com/services and example.com/products, with additional content within each section, you can use Content Drilldown to see which sections are performing best. You can also see the top content that appears within each of those sections.
• Landing Pages allows you to see visitor behavior based on the pages they arrived on when they entered your site. This data makes it possible to learn which specific pages on your website are more likely to generate results for your business.
• Exit Pages shows you the last pages that visitors viewed before exiting your site. You may want to review the content on these pages to see if there are improvements you can make to keep people engaged, such as an email signup or links to additional content.

Key Detail | Are Your Visitors Engaging with Your Content?

A lot of pageviews doesn’t necessarily mean that a specific page is your best content. Instead of focusing on the total of number of people who visit your website, you’ll want to take a closer look at what they are doing once they arrive. Within some of your Behavior reports, you’ll want to look at some key metrics such as:

• Bounce Rate will show you the percentage of single-page sessions in which there was no interaction with that specific page. A low bounce rate indicates that people are interested enough in your content to dive deeper into your website.
• Pages per Session is the average number of pages that were viewed during a session (including multiple views of a single page). If visitors are viewing multiple pages within a session, this can indicate that they are interested in your content.
  • Tip | Use internal links (links that send users to another page within your website) to drive visitors deeper into your site. Internal links can help users easily navigate to other content of interest, and it can also help your SEO.
• Average Session Duration will tell you the average amount of time visitors are spending, in total, on your website. If visitors aren’t spending very much time on your website, it may indicate that they aren’t finding what they are looking for, or simply aren’t interested in your content.

Key Detail | Are People Sharing or Commenting on Your Content?

Comments on your blog and social media content can help you learn a lot about how your audience is receiving your content. Make sure you are routinely monitoring and responding to comments on your blogs and any social media platforms on which you have a presence. You can also use the “Source/Medium” and “Channels” reports under “Acquisition” in Google Analytics to learn more about how visitors are arriving on your site.

Key Detail | Is Your Content Generating Results for Your Business?

Ultimately, you want your website visitors to do more than simply read your content. You also want them to take some sort of valuable action, such as downloading your eBook, signing up for your emails, filling out a contact form, or calling your business for a quote. Make sure your website is designed in a way that makes it easy for visitors to take action, and then make sure you are tracking those actions with goal tracking in Analytics. You can also assign a value to each of those actions, commonly referred to as “conversions,” which makes it easier for you to track the return on your investment.

You’ll want to pay close attention to metrics such as:

• Goal Completions will show you the total number of conversions that happened within the period of time you have selected. If you have multiple goals set up, they will all factor into this total
• Goal Value is the total value of the goal conversions that took place on your website. To calculate goal value, the number of goal conversions for each specific goal is multiplied by the value you assigned to that goal
• Goal Conversion Rate is calculated by adding up the conversion rates (the percentage of users who complete one of your goals) for each of your individual goals
• Total Abandonment Rate will show you the rate at which your goals were abandoned by users, helping you learn how many people start the conversion process but fail to complete it. If your abandonment rate seems unusually high, you may want to look at each of the steps toward conversion to make sure there aren’t any issues that are keeping visitors from converting (such as errors, confusing instructions, or pages that are slow to load).

Monitoring these metrics will help you develop a better understanding of how your site is performing and what changes you might need to make to your content strategy to get better results.

To learn more about what you can do to build a stronger digital presence for your business, contact our team for a free Digital Marketing Plan.