Turning website visitors into cash.
With the free availability of Google Analytics, there has never been a better time to get a firm grip on your website statistics, and to understand exactly what your site visitors are up to when they arrive. This is a very powerful tool that can track many different aspects of your website, although it can be a bit overwhelming to decide what you want to measure and for what reasons.
There is so much potential information on offer, whether you want to track lead conversion or ecommerce transaction conversion, you will be able to uncover the most meaningful statistics that will reflect progress against your business strategy and online objectives.
If you are responsible for a website, you will want to know everything about it, from page views through to keywords searched on to which type of browser your visitors are using, but for other stakeholders within the company this may be too much uninteresting or incidental information.
In order to get all staff behind your website efforts, you should choose one or two key metrics that can be regularly communicated – and they should be metrics that directly affect your bottom line. If you have an online store, the most understandable metric is a conversion rate, and this can be as generic or as specific as you think your colleagues can understand.
A macro-conversion rate of number of visitors followed through to number of sales is a good top line number, although a more granular funnel-type micro-conversion of how far customers get through your shopping process and at which points they drop out of the process will be invaluable to you as you cross-reference this to the site customer experience and determine how this can be improved.
Having a number or a series of numbers that can be regularly shared across the company will give a shared sense of achievement and progress, and will allow everyone to align behind commonly-shared expectations for progress that demonstrate your progress towards clearly-defined business goals.
How do you measure your website? Are you making the most of your metrics and using them to gain buy-in to your website development? If you are then I would love to hear about this in the comments; if you feel you could do with some help on this, please get in touch.
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