Measuring the Success of your Website
Websites are usually created to achieve specific purposes or to meet certain goals. Google Analytics is perhaps one of the greatest tools for measuring website success today. Certainly, it is important that you check to see if your website goals are being met. However, if your goals are not being met, you need to find out why such is the case. On the other hand, if your website goals are being achieved, maintaining the successes is necessary. Measuring the success of your website is dependent on the nature of your website.
If a website is created to sell products, measuring its success might be as simple as counting how much sales are being made. However, websites are often built to serve multiple purposes with their different features. For instance, the newsletter feature on a website is integrated for marketing purposes. Achieving an incremental subscription rate will mean that the newsletter implementation was done rightly. If there are no subscription however, that could mean that something needs to be done to improve the visibility or attractiveness of the subscription form.
Google Analytics
One great way to measure the success of a website has always been through Google Analytics. The platform is a robust tool for monitoring website success or performance. There are a lot of information that can be gotten regarding a website when integrated with Google analytics. Let us look at some of the useful data we could get when measuring with Google Analytics:
Website Unique Visitors
This is the umber of visitors on a website within a specific period of time. This is very accurately calculated by Google Analytics so much so because if a person visits a website multiple times his/her visits will only be counted as one. Except of course if the person uses different IP address – else, only the first visit will be counted and the visitor will be regarded as one unique visitor.
This is helpful because if what every website needs is to have many different visitors. Its okay to have one person visit many times but its better when one has many different visitors visiting at multiple times. Discovering therefore, that your website is having only a few visitors will motivate you to work at getting more people to visit. And if you really work at it and achieve it, Google Analytics will be there every step of the way to let you know as you make progress.
Website Page Views
This is the total number of website pages visited by users within a specific period of time. This in a way helps you know if users are able to navigate around your website easily. It also tells you how well the contents on your website are doing? If the contents are interesting enough and structured to encourage users to move around, definitely, the page views will be more. When users do not find your page interesting enough or when it takes so much time to load, they just might not go to other pages because they are already discouraged. Essentially, this report helps us investigate to see if our website loads well, if the links are not broken and if the contents are well inter-linked. This report might however not be very useful when a website has just one page.
Website Bounce Rates
This is the rate at which users leave your website’s home page or landing page without navigating to other pages. So, for instance, if your website has pages such as home, about-us, services, etc. But each time people visit the home page, they do not check other pages, instead, they just leave. If this is the case, then you will have a big bounce rate figure. If your website has just a page, your bounce rate will be 100%. This is because users can’t visit any other page apart from the one page that the website has.
It is a big problem, if your website has many pages but people still bounce off from the home page. The same factors that affect Page Views can also affect Bounce Rate. These factors include: slow page load, broken links, unattractive design, dissatisfaction with content and many others. So with Google Analytics, you can identify the Bounce Rate for your website. Also, you can identify the possible causes and then fix them.
There are still a couple of other data that can be gotten from Google Analytics. This data are all necessary in measuring the success of a website. In case Google Analytics has not been implemented for your website, you can Contact Us here and we will do that for you. What is most important is that you measure the success of your website from time to time. However, using the right tools and techniques is also important. This will allow you to improve your website for better successes.
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