Your business website is crucial to maximizing your company’s marketing potential. When you send out a postcard marketing campaign, about 90% of your prospects will visit your website before they call your office. If your website isn’t performing up to its potential, you will miss out on a huge amount of prospects that could be growing your business. Google Analytics is a fantastic online resource that tracks your website’s performance across dozens of metrics, which can help show you where your site needs improvement.

Let’s take a look at the top 7 business website performance metrics…

1. Unique Visits:

This metric shows you how many new visitors your site attracts. It tracks every visit that originates from a different internet connection. This gives you an idea, as accurately as possible, of how many prospects visit your website. It won’t count several views from the same internet connection, so it is not how many VIEWS your site gets, but how many different PROSPECTS interact with your site. This can tell you how well your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is working, or tell you that you could use a postcard campaign to increase online traffic. It’s a good baseline to show you how many prospects you are encountering online. 

2. Average Duration of Visit:

This statistic gives you insight into how engaging your site is in both DESIGN and CONTENT. For example, if a prospect visits your site and clicks on the “Back” button seconds later, your site probably lacks an attractive, organized, and engaging design. You want to capture prospect’s attention with your design, then engage them with interesting and relevant content. A low average duration of visit means that at best, your site is visually unappealing or unclear in its message. At worst, it appears chaotic and unprofessional, which means the visitor is unlikely to return. This metric helps you judge how engaging your site is, and increasing engagement will increase conversions. 

3. Bounce Rate:

The “Bounce Rate” is similar to the average duration of visit, but has different implications. At its core, a bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who enter your site on any given page, but leave without visiting any of your other pages. They bounce off your site like a trampoline. This means that people are not finding what they are looking for on your site, and don’t think it is worth spending time looking around for it. Instead of a trampoline, you want your
site to be like a net. It should capture visitors’ attention and prompt further exploration. A high bounce rate could also mean your website’s navigation is confusing. Navigation buttons should be in clear view and allow visitors to get where they want to go quickly and easily. This will lead them through your online marketing process naturally and effortlessly.

4. Percentage of New / Return Visits

Are your website visitors coming back to your site or are they looking elsewhere? The quality of your site’s content will determine whether or not you are seen as an expert in your field. It is also critical to regularly add engaging new content to your website (A blog is great for this!), so your prospects have a reason to visit regularly. The more return visits you can develop the more likely you are to convert a prospect, because in marketing, REPETITION is key.

5. Blog Traffic

A blog is an incredible asset to a business website. It helps you build trust with prospects by letting them get to know you, and by showing your expertise in your industry. If you have a blog, it is vital to keep up with its performance as well. In Google Analytics there is a way to view metrics for your blog alone. You can see how many visitors you get, how many interactions you generate, how long a post is read before moving on, etc. This information is very helpful in your quest to make your content as engaging and effective as possible.

6. Paid vs. Non-paid search traffic

If your company uses online marketing tools like Pay Per Click or Google Remarketing — which I highly recommend — you’ll want to differentiate which prospects are coming via those paid avenues and which are coming through a more organic, non-paid process. Paid traffic is simply visitors who arrive at your site via a PPC link or a Remarketing ad. Non-paid traffic is the visitors who find your site via postcard referral, word-of-mouth referral, or by entering relevant keywords in a search engine. If you find your visitors are coming primarily from paid avenues, you may want to focus more on SEO (Search Engine Optimization) or postcard referrals to drive more organic traffic to your site. More organic traffic means a higher ROI when you convert these organic prospects.

7. Visits with Transactions/Conversion Rate

This metric is, quite literally, the money-maker. It shows you how many of your visitors you are turning into customers, or at least incorporating into your marketing reach. It can tell you how many visitors fill out your contact form, download a free report, set up an appointment, and, of course, how many complete a transaction. This tells you exactly how much your site is worth to your company. Growing a business is about lead generation and lead conversion. If your website isn’t bringing enough prospects into your marketing reach, or isn’t converting them once they are leads, then your website isn’t reaching its marketing potential.

Google Analytics gives you all this statistical information AND MORE. It tracks all the activity on your site across dozens of these analytical metrics, synthesizes the information, and puts it into useful and easy to understand graphs, so you can quickly see how your site is performing.

Start tracking with Google Analytics today with this report.