Your business seems like it’s about data, and sales, and products, but more and more in a digital world, your business is about eyes—specifically how many eyes you can get to look at your products, stay on your websites, and continue interaction with your social media accounts. If your business is about finding and keeping those eyes of customers, knowing which posts, which pages, and which products are driving your ability to keep those eyes fixed upon you is an important key to your success as a businessperson. The art of keeping those eyes upon you involves tracking your website metrics, but there are a lot of different ways to look at and analyze those numbers. Which Website Metrics should you be paying attention to in order to grow your business?
Page Views
Page Views involves how many times your page has been accessed. For example, it’s useful to know whether the same five people are coming to your page two thousand times each a week, or if you have two thousand visitors weekly who each come back five times before purchase. This isn’t just a ticker tape of how many have accessed your site, though that’s involved, too. You can gauge your visits in comparison to the competition, and see what things you need for your website pages to become more engaging.
Bounce Rate
Your bounce rate is how fast visitors to your site leave after arriving. Think of your webpage as a brick and mortar store, preferably one throwing a welcome party. Your worst case scenario is someone walking into your store, and saying, “Yeah, this looked way cooler from the ad, but this is awful. Gotta bounce.” The space of time between when customers arrive, and when they leave, determines your bounce rate. Ideally your bounce rate is under 40%. If yours is higher on Google Analytics, there are ways to decrease those numbers.
Most Popular Pages
Knowing which ones of your pages have the greatest popularity can be a great boon to your business! First, because you want all of your pages to be popular, naturally. However, knowing which services you offer, or which products get the most eye-time, can give you the ability to produce more of those products, or offer more, similar services going forward. This can help you increase all of your other metrics as well.
Customer Interactions
Every one of your marketing dollars needs to be stretched as much as possible. You have to know how your page is maximizing customer interactions in order to do just that. Your goal as a marketer is somewhat evangelical in nature- you need to convert individual consumers into clients. Any interaction you have is towards this goal. Ideally, you want repeat customers. A website that fails to convert new customers is a waste of your marketing dollars.
Page Depth
A customer arriving at your website from an advertisement is a good thing. Clicking through to look at an individual product or two is good. However, if your customer arrives from a great ad, and then clicks on not one or two, but fifteen or twenty individual product pages on your site, that increases your chances that they are committed to purchasing something from your website. This number of pages which a client or consumer clicks is page depth. You can think of it as getting deeper into a good catalog, or even going down into a cave, with each page being another layer. You want customers to stay engaged with your site, and the greater their page depth, the better your odds are that they are engaged with both the site and products on it.
Session Duration
Along with page depth, you want those eyes to stay upon your products and sites as long as possible. This means they are more likely to interact with your page again, and also that they are interested more than if they “bounce” quickly. Site duration is different than page duration, because each page might be flipped through quickly, but overall, they might stay longer on the website itself. Often a recommendation for increasing session duration is to include fun videos and polls in your media.
Time on Page
You want your website to be engaging. Customers need to want to be there, and want to return as many times as it takes. Most of the time, average time on page is even more important than average session duration! This gets complicated to check, because google does keep counting time on page when your patrons forget to close out a tab, which can skew your analytics a bit!
Link Sharing
Your ultimate goal as a businessperson is to have an excellent product and to have excellent word of mouth. There’s nothing as good for a company as having a product that people talk about in a positive way and can’t wait to tell their friends to buy. Now that social media is also a factor in marketing, having a product that individuals share on social media is critical. This means that not only is your ad doing it’s good work to show off your products and services, but you get extra momentum from each advertising dollar, because each share leads to bonus eyes on your products. This is the best kind of word of mouth! You want to know which users generated the most link shares, and incentivize them for doing so, and knowing your metrics for link sharing can help you make sure they stay engaged in your page, so you get even more shares.
Your business is important, and metrics can see initially overwhelming. But, having so much data available to you is a gift, not a burden! It’s just a matter of learning how to figure out what individual pieces of it mean, and how they can work for you. Pretty soon, you’ll be able to get more of those eyes focused on your website, and more products out the door!
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