There are many different ways to measure and track your website traffic, and numerous “metrics” that you can consider. If you are not careful, it can become a very time-consuming job. So here are a few quick tips to help you find the most important stats to measure the success of your business website.
Conversions
Conversion metrics are the most important metrics of all. You need to know what percentage of your website visitors are responding to your Call to Action or CTA. Your CTA could be an invitation to join your mailing list, or to click on ads, or to make a purchase, or you could have several different CTAs scattered across your site. Whatever your CTA is, make sure you are able to track responses and keep an eye on the percentage of visitors that are clicking your CTA links.
Traffic Source
You need to know where your traffic is coming from. You need to know what percentage of your traffic is coming from social media, organic search results, paid advertising and so on. Again, you need to be using a tracking service to help you monitor this data. Your traffic source data will tell you several important things. First, it will give you a better idea of what traffic generation tactics are the most successful. Second, if you track your organic results you will learn what terms or keywords the visitor used to find you. You can install Google Analytics on your website to do that for you.
New & Returning Visitors
Some websites, such as blogs, are designed specifically to get a lot of return visitors, while other websites such as single-product sales sites and sites exclusively given over to list-building are probably more focused on tracking how many new visitors they are attracting. If you are running a business blog, you want to see a good mix of both new and returning visitors. If nobody is returning, then you are failing to build your brand or a sense of online community. If you are attracting no new visitors, then your site traffic cannot grow.
Visitor Path & Clicks
You can gain a lot of insight by tracking the path that your visitors take through your website. If you notice that a particular page has a comparatively high exit rate, then that is a page you need to improve. Another option is to track your visitors’ clicks. There are a variety of heat map style scripts and plugins that tell you where your visitors are clicking on the page. The areas that get higher amounts of clicks should be optimized and utilized to boost conversions. There are a variety of other possible metrics you can use, but the four I have discussed in this article are really the most useful for online business owners.
Always bear in mind that while tracking the right metrics provides valuable information to help you improve your results, there is a point where over-analysis will provide diminishing returns on your time and effort.
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Tags: converting traffic, Listbuilding, online marketing, Working from Home
