How do you know that your website is actually working for you?

Your website is one of the most powerful sales tools you have at your disposal. Websites can be many things; a means of generating leads, a way for customers to get in touch or somewhere to sell your products or services. Because of this, you need to continually optimize your website to align to your sales strategy, growing the funnel that will guide visitors to take action. To achieve the best results, you need to continue working on improving your website, growing the channel over time with fresh content, a better user experience and through analysis of analytics.

Measuring success

Tracking key metrics over time will allow you to capitalize on opportunities, identify improvements and also give you valuable insight into how your users behave. These metrics provide a comprehensive overview of the health of your website from engagement to functionality. Website technology and user behaviour are constantly evolving, therefore, it’s important to use these metrics to dictate what changes or improvements may be needed over time. Some of these useful metrics are:

1. Overall traffic – Determining the overall effectiveness of your site is the first place to start. Incoming traffic (such as referred traffic) will determine how effective your overall marketing campaigns as an example. Whether users read multiple pages or stay in pages a long time (session length) is also a great way to see whether your content is relevant
2. Organic traffic – Allows you to see how effective your SEO efforts are. This traffic is not only essentially free but means that your site is ranking well in the search engines which generally indicates that your site is healthy.
3. Bounce rate or engagement rate – Depending on whether you are using Google Analytics 4 or not, you might have access to bounce rate or engagement rate. Both are good indicators of the overall user experience. A high bounce rate means your content is not relevant for example. Engagement rate on the other hand, is a new mixed metric available in Google Analytics 4 that covers time on page, bounce rate and sessions into a comprehensive score.

Connect your data

Even after your ads and keywords start to generate clicks and sales, you’ll need a conversion tracking tool and/or web analytics to see how many of those clicks are resulting in sales. There are various options, but popular ones include: 

• Google Analytics – Connects directly to various ad platforms which lets you identify how well your ad campaign is generating sales, leads, downloads, and email sign-ups. 
• Pixels – These are little pieces of code that track actions on your website for social media platforms.
• Call on-site – If you want customers to call the phone number on your site.

These are only one of several examples of tools that can help you see and analyse your website, there are many more! Once you start collecting data, you can pull them into your own platforms like CRM, or use them to track leads.

Set up conversion action to track leads

Conversions can be set up in platforms like Google Analytics to track actions taken, especially those that extend beyond sales. Typical conversions range from, click-to-chat options, to form completions, to even email sign-ups. Every business is different; therefore, you’ll want to know which conversions matter most to your company’s bottom line. Some conversions may not directly impact revenue but they do mark an important step in the customer journey. Setting up conversions can be quite technical and we’d recommend finding a partner to assist you with implementation.

A/B test

A/B testing is the process of comparing two versions of a webpage against each other to determine which one performs better. A/B testing allows individuals to make careful changes to their user experiences while collecting data on the results. It can maximize your profits long term as continuous testing allows you to remove friction from the conversion process which leads to better results. A/B testing can be done in many ways; tools like Google Optimize are free to use and offer many forms of tests. Most ad platforms like Facebook and Google Ads also offer A/B testing capabilities.

Create a dashboard

You’ve now collected all this data, ran tests, tracked conversions – now it’s time to visualise all this data. Dashboards come in handy when making business decisions and evaluating performance. It organizes the most crucial pieces of information or data in an easy-to-read overview. This means seeing metrics from web analytics, product performance, sales target, leads, average purchase value etc. in one place. This data can also be visualised in an integrated manner allowing you to, as an example, see whether your Facebook Ads are impacting your performance on Google Ads.

Consult with professionals

Getting analytics and dashboards up and running isn’t easy, especially if you are not a tech-centric business. We always recommend finding a professional team to work with to ensure you lay solid foundations for your small businesses’ digital strategy. At Helio Digital we offer digital services of all kind, and we would love to help you.

Through client interviews and in-depth research, our team of experts find the best solutions possible and spot unexplored opportunities to effectively execute on projects. When developing strategies, we will consider aspects like your competition, business model, audience, needs, and goals. We approach projects with a problem-solving attitude and are responsible for the actual execution of the project, making sure it meets the projects’ specifications and clients’ requirements. They monitor your project from start to finish by helping you measure success.