There are many ways to measure a website’s success. Every business has its unique goals, key performance indicators, and ideas of what success means for that business. If you have an ecommerce website, success is measured largely by the number of sales completed on the site. If your business is a wholesale supplier, you may measure website success by website inquiries and the number of PDF downloads. If you already have a thriving business, your most important goal could be hiring the right talent.
How Do You Track Website Success?
While the ways of measuring website success will be different depending on the business, every business needs to find a way of tracking its goals and conversions. How do you do this?
The best place to start is with Google’s free services. All websites should have Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager setup to benchmark where a website’s traffic, contacts, and other conversions are coming from.
What Does Google Analytics Do?
Google Analytics tracks any web traffic activity on your website. The most basic thing you should be doing using Google Analytics is tracking where your website’s traffic is coming from. There are different types of traffic: organic, direct, paid, social, and referral traffic. In order to target your ideal customer or audience, you need to know where these people are coming from, how they became aware of your website, and how to attract more of them. Other important types of information you can learn via Google Analytics are:
- How much time users spend on your website
- Which pages get the most entrances/exits
- Which devices people are using to access your website (computer, phone, or tablet)
Does your business have multiple locations? You can review where geographically your traffic is coming from as well.
Google Tag Manager also allows you to track phone calls, emails, contact forms, or any other action on your website that is deemed important to your success.
My Web Traffic Is Being Tracked – Now What?
Google Analytics offers you a plethora of free data about your website to parse, and that is wonderful, especially if you understand how to use it. Having goals set up to measure the success of all of these different numbers, however, is what is most important in your long term digital strategy. You need to determine what those goals are and how you will track them. Then over time you can determine if they are being met by what the data reveals and tweak your strategies for greater success.
Are you analyzing your website data regularly? Do you know how to translate it into an actionable plan to keep your website moving in the right trajectory? If all of this is new to you or you would like help monitoring your data or advice on how to create and sustain greater traffic, call Tom at 616-426-9303. We would love to help you discover and cultivate your customer base for more and better website success.
