10 ways to tell your website’s going south
When your website’s ability to generate leads starts to hurt the bottomline, understanding your web statistics can help get it back on track.
The signs are hidden in your web statistics. Learn to read the key metrics and you’ll be on your way towards driving website performance.
Unique Visitors
Refers to a unique Internet user who views your website, where that person is only counted once regardless of repeated visits in the future.
Number of visits
Usually refers to the total number of times your website has been visited. By comparing it with the number of unique visitors, this gives you an indication of the volume of repeat visits your website has been getting.
Page
Similar to the meaning when referred to a book, it is understood as one of the denominators of what constitutes a website. The website homepage is considered a page, but so are the other sections that you go to within the website that fall under different chapters or headings.
Visits duration
This refers to the time that people take to browse your website. It is useful as an indication of the relevance of your web content to your target users. If many users are going for the quick exit, that’s a sign your website may require an update such as stronger visual appeal, tighter editing of content or just more substantial information in general. This is where blogs and video files would be really helpful in retaining the user’s attention.
Hits
A hit has often been confused with a visit, but they’re far from the same. A hit corresponds with each file on a single webpage that is being brought up when viewed by someone. A particular page of a website may bring up 10 hits when it’s being viewed because of the numerous images on it, but never make the error of thinking it’s a reflection of the page’s popularity.
Clicks
It refers to the amount of actual clicks on your ad, whether it’s a banner ad, a PPC ad on a search engine or a link in an email campaign. For PPC ads, each click represents an associated cost from the search engine (such as Google) and results in a visit to your website from the search engine user.
Impressions
Impressions are the number of times your ad has been displayed to users. For PPC ads, in order for your ad to be displayed a user must have typed a term that related to one of the keyphrases in your PPC campaign.
Page impressions
Refers to the times each individual page on your website has been viewed. This is very helpful in determining relevance of content to your target users. Most people tend to eventually do away with pages where there are less impressions as it means that the content there isn’t engaging the user.
Click Through Rate (CTR)
The click through rate (CTR) is the percentage rate of users who clicked through after your PPC ad or web banner is displayed. This value is obtained by dividing the number of clicks by the number of impressions. The higher the CTR the more popular your ad or web banner is, resulting in a higher Quality Score. For PPC, a higher quality score can improve your ad position without increasing your bid amount for particular phrases. For email marketing, CTR can also refer to the rate that users are clicking on a link embedded in the email that takes them to a whitepaper download, an enquiry form or to the pages of a website.
Open rate
Only applicable for email marketing, open rate measures the percentage of people who receive an email and actually open up and view it in its entirety. Glancing over the subject line or taking a sneak peak into the email contents from the preview pane doesn’t count. This figure can give you an indication on the interest levels of the email recipients to your message. It can also give you an idea if the time that you’ve chosen to send your email is effective. To send an email campaign to accounting companies at the end of the month will clearly derive low open rates as that’s the time when they’re the busiest and would disregard your email.
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Talk to a Melbourne IT eBusiness Consultant on 1300 132 838.
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