Part II: Website Metrics
This is the second in a 2-part series about what metrics to measure in marketing, Lets turn to website visitor metrics. These are the 5 most important metrics I like to look at when specifically investigating website visitors (the very top part of the sales and marketing funnel).
1) New vs. Repeat visitors – Not only should you look at the total number of visitors, but look at the portion of visitors that are repeat visitors. Is your site “sticky”? Are people coming back more frequently and in higher numbers? If more of your visitors are repeat visitors, it means they found something compelling on the site and came back to find more.
The balance here is you need a healthy ratio of new visitors as well, because if too many of your visitors are repeat, you’re not growing your business. Most websites get the vast majority of traffic from new visitors, maybe 5% are repeat visitors.
2) Referring sources – Where is your traffic coming from? Did you get a new link from a big website? Is your traffic from SEO or organic search increasing? Most websites get about 20% of their traffic from search engines, but most of that is based on searches for your company name in most cases. A healthy site gets 40% or more of traffic from organic search, and that extra 20% comes from words that are not your company name. Knowing where you stand is important so you can decide how much to prioritize SEO.
3) Conversion rate – How many visitors are becoming a lead (or customer)? Monitoring the overall rate at which your website visitors complete your desired outcome (buying something or filling out a lead form) is really important, because that is the central reason you have a website. View this data weekly, and compare it to what marketing events you have been running and major sources of traffic for the week. It can give you a great sense of if the traffic from PC Magazine or the Wall Street Journal Online converts better into leads or customers and pints you in the right direction for future PR and advertising.
4) Page popularity – What is the most popular content on my site? knowing what people like to look at on your site can help you produce more content that people enjoy and find engaging and remove the content they do not enjoy.
5) Traffic by keywords – This can refer to a number of different metrics, but what you are trying to understand is what terms and phrases people are searching on to find your site, and how much traffic you are generating from organic search. To investigate this, look at a couple things. First, the number of people coming to your site using search keywords. Second, this portion of site traffic as a percentage of total traffic. Finally, all of the search terms that people have used to find your website. This isn’t really a “metric”, but it can be fascinating and it can provide insight into how your company is viewed on the web and if you have built your website to generate the right kind of traffic (qualified visitors).
