The great thing about a website is that you can easily measure performance.
There are free tools such as Google Analytics which can tell you:
- How visitors found your website, e.g. via search engines, social media, or links on other sites.
- If they are first-time visitors, or returning traffic.
- How visitors moved through the site, e.g. Did they stay a while and read? Did they click on different pages? Did they get bored and leave straight away?
- How they accessed the website in the first place, e.g. Were they on a mobile phone? Or were they doing some online shopping at their work desk when the boss wasn't looking?
- The success (or failure) of key conversion points on your site, i.e. the pages on your website, such as ‘newsletter sign up’ or ‘contact form’, where potential customers can ‘convert’ to a lead by entering their details. For e-commerce sites, it can track sales, Return on Investment, average order value etc.
In fact, the above is just a small portion of the metrics that Google Analytics allows you to track, and so can benefit your business by helping you:
- Gain invaluable insight into your customer's behaviour
- Examine facts rather than assumptions or guesses
- Confidently make educated decisions on how to improve your website
In the long term, this means more of the right website traffic, and therefore better sales and profit.
In addition, think about including other mechanisms to monitor your website, whether this is online booking, online competitions or data capture forms.
And, of course, always ask your customers where they heard about you!
