Every online project is unique. There is no one-fits-all rule on how to make your website a success. The approaches and techniques that are effective for one web resource may be lackluster for another one. Read this article to learn how to measure your website success, track its growth, and learn which metrics you should consider to keep growing.
While looking for the best tips and tricks to measure website success, you must first define the meaning of “success” for your website. Once you create a clear image of your goals and expectations, you can select online marketing metrics to measure your site’s performance.
How to Measure Website Success?
How to measure website success and reduce bounce rate and count the projected return on investment? Keep on reading to come up with a list of website success metrics that will help you reveal the real state of things on your web resource.
Before you start choosing the best website success metrics and track the growth of your website for your online resource, ask yourself about the primary purpose of your site. Do you aim to target a wider audience? Do you want to boost revenue or enhance your fundraising efforts?
Whatever your plans are, consider your website metrics and make sure your goals are clearly defined and if they match your website goals. Your goals need to be:
- Specific, i.e., answer the what/who/when/where questions.
- They need to be measurable, including numbers and figures.
- Time-bound, with a specific period within which you need to reach a goal.
- Relevant to your niche.
- A goal needs to be a challenge to achieve yet not be something impossible.
Consider Website Success Metrics
Although the goals of different websites vary, you can measure the performance of your web project using popular website success metrics.
Online projects, including those created with CMS website builders and e-commerce platforms, apply these tricks.
Data Consumption
Data consumption refers to those website success metrics that refer to the content people see and consume when they visit your site. It’s essential to keep an eye on the data consumption metrics. Otherwise, how can you learn if people read the pieces shared on your site? So, how can you track this?
- Average time on page is one of those online marketing metrics that reveal how much time a person spends on a particular page of your site.
- A number of pages that a person visits during one browsing session. Using these metrics, you can better understand people’s actions when they visit your site. And also the types of content that are most appealing to your audience.
- Entrance metrics, i.e., web pages from which people started their browsing sessions.
- Exit metrics, i.e., pages that were the last pages your visitors had access to before leaving our website.
- By means of bounce rate stats, you can discover how many people left your website after reading only one page. There are two variations of bounce rate metrics. Quick Bounce means that people a web page shortly after opening it. Long Bounce means that people spent a lot of time on your page and they found your content useful.
- By means of page views metrics, you can discover how many people saw the pages of your site.
- Video views metrics reveal how many people watched your videos.
- By means of downloads metrics, you can discover how many times people downloaded content from your site.
Audience Engagement
The aforementioned online marketing metrics let you know how many people come to your site and how much time they spend with your content. The next important thing is to get people to take certain actions on your website. Turn them into contributors and active participants on your webpage.
To measure audience engagement on your site, there are several online marketing metrics that you can take into consideration.
Recommendations
- Downloads of free data like ebooks, educational resources, free trials, and other data are important if you want to establish better relationships with your audience. To make a person download something from your site, they should be heavily interested in your products and services. So, the more times people download your data, the more they engage with your project.
- Giving your visitors a chance to comment on your content is great. This helps in measuring user engagement and customer retention rates. If your words evoke any emotions or ideas in your public, then it is worth it to make an effort and share your knowledge with the audience.
- If comments can show you how many people were moved by reading your post using social shares, you can discover how many of them would recommend your content to their followers. With the help of social share statistics, you can find out which parts of your website content are viral. And also, which pages on your site are the strongest in generating referral traffic.
- Backlinks are created whenever a different website links to yours. Such software as Google Analytics and Pingbacks can help you measure this wisely.
- Conversion rates are the number of unique site visitors measured against the number of conversions recorded on your site.
- Newsletter subscribers are one of the site’s success metrics. They allow you to measure how many people like your content and are ready to keep coming back.
Sales Metrics
If you sell any products or services on your site, you need to keep a close eye on the performance of your offers by means of sales metrics. To most effectively track sales metrics, ensure all trackable components on your website are exactly where they should be. For example, use prominent CTAs on a landing page, and include CTAs in your blog posts, newsletter, etc. This can provide you with a better understanding of what particular content of your site drives users to make purchases.
- Purchasing customers over total traffic reveals your buyers as a percentage of your overall traffic.
- Customers purchase metrics instead of subscribers, and leads measure the number of customers that start making purchases after taking any other action on your website (such as subscribing to your newsletter, for example).
Conclusion on Measure Website Success
Hopefully, with this article, you will learn how to measure the success of your website, track your growth, and know what metrics you should consider continuing to grow and engage with wider audiences. In addition, there are multiple touchpoints across email, social media, multimedia, and other channels that you can use to analyze your website data and turn passive observers into active buyers.