How to Measure Your Website’s Success
How to measure your website’s success is something every webmaster needs to know. The key performance indicators for your site are those factors that determine its success, i.e they indicate what percentage of your visitors do what you intend them to when they land on your site.
Conversion rate
The conversion rate is definitely an important one. This is the percentage of people that engaged with your target. For example, if you want them to buy something ,then making sales is your target Action. If you want people to fill in a form, then form submission is your target Action and the percentage of visitors that actually sent it is your conversion rate. Improving those indicators means establishing where your site is failing. You need to go back to your target Action, determine it (which needs to be done at the beginning of creating the site) and see if the website is built the right way to get people to that point. Tracking your conversion rate is one of the first things to consider when you measure your website success.
Bounce rate
Another important indicator is the bounce rate. This is the percentage of people that merely scanned the site and then left it. In some cases the bounce rate coming from banner ads could be very high (95%) which often does not mean that your site fails to engage visitors but that people are prone to leaving the sites they do not know previously. It is important to break down the Bounce rate by sources and then look deeper to evaluate your website performance. When you measure the success of your website, you need to know one thing – the most important thing this indicator points out, is the success of your landing page that is there to funnel people inside your site and get them to commit with your target action.
Committed visitors
Once someone commits to reading, stick around and returns, then he/she becomes a committed visitor. The higher this index, the better. However, every site needs to define for itself what percentage of visitors constitute its measurement of success. Sometimes long time spent on a site could mean that people find difficult what they look for. Examining where visitors highly engage in a content area, or which page is the last one visited before they leave, are signals of where you should update your content most regularly or where you have navigation problems.
Lead Generation
For every organization, the cost of acquiring new leads is greatly important and sometimes overlooked. You need to make sure you get return of your investment in advertising and not fall into the trap of investing your money in unnecessary advertising that only increase your bounce rate and generate no leads. Things that could be done to improve your response rates are updating your content regularly to keep the loyalty of your existing visitors, interacting with your new visitors by providing what they are looking for and running ads with separate landing pages to encourage more serious reading.
A good search engine ranking from unpaid advertising is one of the fundamental issues that website owners face. This process is time consuming but pays a vital role in boosting your brand awareness and reputation. Providing a worthwhile content is crucial. Together with your website construction they allow users to get a better handle of your website and search engines will able to read and recognize it in order to rank it appropriately.
When you measure the success of your website, you will see this is a quite subjective task as there are list of factors to consider and quantify appropriately. However, by comparing KPI numbers with your goals can get a sense of measuring up the usability and certain aspects of your site, from which the areas that need improving remains the overall purpose.
