How do you know if your website is serving you well?
Reading Statistics
A good website hosting company will provide you with useful statistics about your website traffic. There are questions you need answers to on a regular basis:
- Where are my visitors coming from?
- How long are they staying on the site?
- Are they coming back?
- What search engines are they using?
- What search phrases (keyword terms) are they using?
- What pages are they viewing?
- What products are they looking at?
- What page do they exit from the most?
- Where are my visitors located geographically?
- Add anything niche specific that your market needs to be tracking.
When you know a lot about your visitors you can make smart decisions about what you should add or what you should take away from it. You will learn things about your target market that you didn’t know previously.
A car parts seller created a website in order to expand his customer base but he limited shipping to US addresses only. After reviewing his website statistics over a period of six months he realized that he was receiving a large amount of traffic from overseas locations. He did some research and decided to offer international shipping for a trial period. Sales increased nearly 20% over the next month. He never would have considered an international market if it were not for what he learned from his stats.
If your hosting company doesn’t provide a useful stats program you can incorporate Google Analytics into your website. This is a free service and the stats you generate are top notch.
Determining your Conversion Rate
Since every website has a purpose, there must be something that you want your visitor to do when they come to your site.
- Buy your Product.
- Use your Services.
- Hire you as a Coach or Consultant.
- Join your Membership.
- Sign up for your Mailing List.
- Subscribe to your Podcast.
- Enter your Contest.
The percentage of your visitors who take the desired action is your conversion rate.
You have 1000 visitors in a month.
47 People Make a Purchase
47 divided by 1000
That is a .047 conversion rate – a little more than 4%.
(Not bad! 3% is considered about average for a product site.)
You have 500 visitors in a month to your newsletter opt in site.
149 Subscribe to your Newsletter
149 divided by 500
That’s a .298 conversion rate – 29%
(That’s great! A 30% conversion for an opt in ‘squeeze’ page is considered very good.)
When a website is new and doesn’t have a lot of steady traffic, it is difficult to determine how well it is really doing – but in general you want to see at least one purchase for every 100 visitors. If you’re not seeing this, you’ll want to evaluate and see if you can spot areas to improve.
