Many business owners do not fully understand the features of a successful website. It is defined by its key performance indicators. As your online business begins to grow, you must determine which website metrics you should track and which ones you should ignore or focus less on.
If you're new to website development and management, here are things you should do to monitor the success of your website:
1. Set KPIs
A very effective method in monitoring the success of your website is through key performance indicators or KPIs. These goal metrics will determine if your website is achieving its goals or not. KPIs must follow the SMART goals format—specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely.
When it comes to website metrics, here are several things you need to monitor, check, and optimize:
Link Quality
You should frequently check your links' quality as it can affect your ranking on search engine results pages. As such, you might be wondering how to evaluate internal links in your site. Well, fret not as there are tools and software available for that task.
Link analysis is one of the most critical components of search engine optimization. A high-quality link analysis tool can provide a comprehensive list of relevant backlinks for your website, show an overview of those backlinking sources' underlying resources, and can even provide an estimate of the total links associated with your website.
Backlinks are essential for any website. They’re used to improve search engine rankings, increase traffic to a website, attract sales, etc. The well-managed backlinks account will boost your website's popularity and improve your order in search engines. Backlinks are links that point to another website. They are mainly used to increase the website's visibility by increasing the number of incoming links to it.
Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave your site within a short period after they’ve landed on your page. These visitors are often considered ‘spiders’ because they click on the advertisement or link, but then exit the site within a brief period, without making any purchases. They’re also referred to as non-customers, and it's essential to know and understand how to handle them so that you can convert your visitors into paying customers.
Conversion Rate
The conversion rate in a website is the percentage of the users or audience who take your desired action. This means that it's the number of people who purchased the products or availed of the services offered on your site.
Site Speed
A website’s load time is simply the time it takes for a person to view the content once they’ve hit on a web page. In today's world, visitors expect to be able to 'view' your site in a minimum of a second. Visitors are very impatient and don’t usually tolerate delays. In contrast, visitors to websites years ago would give up if it took them more than five seconds to download a page. They would go elsewhere and look for another site. If you find your site slowing down, you need to check what’s causing it. There are also tools you can use to check which aspects you should improve on to increase the speed of your website.
2. Use Web Analytics Tools
You can’t track all the metrics above alone. This is why investing in web analytics tools helps monitor the success of your website. Web analytics tools provide a simple and affordable means to learn everything about your site. They're invaluable for marketers, website owners, and anyone else who might need to know more about their clients' interests and behaviors.
Web-based tools are created to simplify the collection and analysis of data about the website, its visitors, and the site's visitors' activities. These tools provide a quick and easy way to understand everything about your area through the lens of a single data set.
For example, you have a site that promotes dog training. You want to understand why visitors aren't signing up for your dog training newsletter. By using web analytics tools, you'll quickly find out which article topics and/or blog posts are the most popular with dog lovers, and which ones aren't doing so well. You'll then examine the factors that led to the falling traffic and find ways to improve those areas so that you can draw in more visitors and keep them coming back.
3. Monitor Your Sales
Another way to check if your site is succeeding is to monitor your sales numbers. This is helpful, mainly when you solely depend on your website to get customers for your business or earn money through blogging.
Sales growth is a critical metric that measures your SEO or digital marketing campaigns' effectiveness to increase revenue over a fixed period. When you don't monitor your sales data, your business is at risk of being overtaken by your competitors. You will become stagnant. You won't also see if the SEO strategies or advertising campaigns are effective in gaining traffic.
4. Ask For Feedback From Site Visitors
There are several ways to obtain customer feedback, such as SMS, email, phone, and online forms. Today, customer feedback is getting more important because of the growing web usage and frequent website browsing by ordinary people. Besides, companies are also judging a business by its website.
Survey forms on websites are used to collect feedback from customers, and understand customer needs and wants. Online surveys can help businesses know what visitors want and how visitors perceive various aspects of the company. This enables business owners to lead their firms to a direction that best suits the interests of visitors. Business owners can use this feedback to enhance their website and business offerings.
Final Thoughts On Website Success Metrics
Your website's success can be measured and monitored through metrics, like bounce rate, conversion rate, site speed, and link quality. You can't monitor everything manually, so you need a web analytics tool to gather and analyze the data metrics.
You can also monitor the success of your website through sales. This is often times the most helpful metric, especially if you have an e-commerce website. Lastly, you can ask for feedback and suggestions from your audience. From their comments, you can improve customer experience, and also increase traffic and website authority.
