Conversion Matters

In today’s highly competitive world with tight profit margins it is important to know how successful your website is and to be able to identify ways to generate increased revenue. One of these ways is to measure your website’s success with an analytics package.

There are many different analytics packages available to use but I would personally recommend using Google Analytics – I’ve written a guide to setting up Google Analytics if you would like to implement it on your websites.

What metrics should you look at?

At first glance, analytics packages like Google Analytics can be totally overwhelming as they collect so much data about your website(s). Metrics to look at first should be:

• Unique visitors – can be used to work out how popular your site is and/or how much traffic is being driven to your site.
  N.B. this is not the same as ‘hits’ – hits are far more inaccurate as they massively inflate your traffic figures.
• Traffic sources - shows you where your traffic is coming from. Is all your traffic coming from paid referrals or is it mostly from organic search?
• Keywords - how are people finding your website? Are there some keywords you weren’t expecting or could you build more content around certain topics and keywords to better harness organic search?
• Bounce rates - pages on your site are causing your visitors to navigate away straight away? Bounce rates enable you to focus your energy on reorganising/designing/developing the pages that need it most. Once you have fixed these pages you should see an increase in revenue.
  N.B. this is not the same as exit rates and is generally more useful, as people could have been browsing around your site bought your products and then left on any random page.
• Conversion goals - if you have conversion goals or e-commerce tracking set up you can see exactly how your site is converting or how much money it is making. You can also see how valuable different traffic sources are. Perhaps that expensive advertising you have is not sending quality traffic and the visitors from natural search are of more value. These statistics are useful to be able to make educated decisions on what campaigns to push and which campaigns to ditch and where/how you should spend your marketing budget online.

Analytics applications can be daunting when you first start to use them; however, as you learn more about your website through the statistics provided you are able to gain invaluable insights into the success and potential of your site.