Metrics

A good website must perform and produce, not just look good. By performance we mean produce traffic, engagement and leads – – the targeted leads that you need for your business to prosper. 

You can’t manage what you can’t measure. So how do you measure the performance of your website? The answer is server and application metrics. They allow you to measure the effectiveness of your content strategy, and tailor your approach accordingly. Here are the metrics that we find relevant.

Keyword Phrase Ranking – Monitoring keyword ranking performance allows you to adjust content so it successfully targets the Visitor’s concerns in Google search. If an important keyword phrase isn’t ranking, that is an opportunity to address it with relevant content. We use Rankinity, but there are other good programs you can use.

Visitor Traffic – Traffic metrics are useful for spotting trends. The recorded numbers by themselves are always inexact, because different programs use different methods. For example, server based programs such as Webalizer count non-human bots, and therefore overcount. And web based programs such as Google Analytics only count those visitors who have received their tracking cookies, so they undercount. Therefore, the value in the numbers lies in comparing them to themselves, to track change over time, trends, year over year. 

Visitor Engagement – A “visit” is of little value if the visitor does not engage with your content. You can measure engagement by the ratio of Visits to Pageviews. In Webalizer (server based) you can track how many pages the average visitor sees before leaving. If that ratio is 1:1, that is a very high “bounce” (leaving) rate, and you may conclude that your visitor is not engaging and adjust your content accordingly. Google Analytics offers additional ways of measuring engagement  – for instance, dwell time. Longer dwell time indicates that they found it relevant to their concerns, and are more likely to convert. Both methods offer useful insights to visitor behavior once they reach your website.

Website Referrals – Google Analytics uses cookies, so they know where your visitor is coming from, for example, how many referrals are you getting from Facebook vs Google? From third party websites? Knowing this can help you to better allocate marketing resources.

Leads that Call – There is even a way to measure phone number clicks, meaning actual leads that call. Google Analytics tracks those visits that are developed on a phone linked device and then acted upon by the visitor. Again, these numbers are necessarily incomplete, but valuable for tracking growth, in relation to themselves.

Each of these tools record different data, but complement each other to get a complete picture. Over time, you will be able to see which way the numbers are trending, and get the actionable information necessary to develop a website that produces leads.