As a routine task for one of our new clients, we had done a website health check. Although their site had been functional for couple of years, it wasn’t delivering any promising metrics or getting any measurable conversions. That instigated us to do a detailed Online Assessment on the Client’s web properties, namely Company website, LinkedIn, Mailchimp, YouTube and Facebook. The major takeaway from this study was series of broken connection between forms and goal conversions. No one had been tracking goals and reviewing numbers consistently to see a drop in conversion rates.
The importance of routine Website health checks cannot be emphasized enough – in fact, you should be closely monitoring your Website’s performance a bare minimum of once a week if not more frequently. But GA’s (Google Analytics) dashboard can be quite daunting, and you need an expert to fully understand its functionality.
Although there are endless data points available to you through GA – you may not need to know them all. There are five particular subsets hiding under each section that business owners and marketing professionals should examine more closely to uncover errors with website traffic, assess its performance and monitor engagement activity of the visitors.
1. Goal Conversion (Under Conversions)
If you have set goals correctly – they are specific, measurable and actionable – it is important to measure performance, otherwise you are defying the purpose of running a campaign. Your goals should be specific enough to track important tasks, in essence, and not something so basic as “general site visits” or “increased awareness.”
Some examples of specific goals include –
> Wishing to increase interaction with new and existing visitors – Setting a goal to measure ‘time spent’ on the website by new and old visitors)
> Improving leads and subscribers – Setting a goal for ‘form completion’ and recording it through a dedicated landing page
> Boosting brand engagement – Setting a goal to track ‘downloads, watching videos’ to identify the length of engagement of the users
> Increased sales – Setting goals to identify ‘cart completion’ and ‘cart abandonment’ to identify leaks and issues in customer journey.
2. Bounce Rate PERCENTAGE (Under Audience)
If someone is immediately dropping off your Website upon arrival (i.e. bouncing), that is a red flag. Firstly, it could mean they quickly realized your Website isn’t relevant to them; in that case, you need to work toward attracting the right type of Website users. Secondly, it could mean that something about your Website didn’t go down too well with them – this could be a design issue, user-experience issue or simply platform optimization issue.
Furthermore, you also need to compare this number with your Website’s page views. If the page views are a good number, chances are there are specific pages on your Website that are bumping the bounce rate up. Not all pages are the culprit, so do not penalize them all! Go skin deep, drill down and figure out which specific pages have higher bounce rates. Now you know where to begin.
Paying attention to your Website’s bounce rate will indicate what percentage of your visitors are leaving the site after visiting only one page. High bounce rates mean a higher CPC, which is bad news for paid search traffic and need addressing through ads, page descriptions and pages being in sync.
3. Search Console – Traffic Generating Keywords (Under Acquisition)
Taking a closer look at Website interactivity based on keywords used during a campaign will a) help you determine how effective your campaign is, b) whether your campaign needs any tweaking mid-way, and c) most importantly, checking the Search Console’s keyword ranking will open your eyes to which keywords are pulling in the most traffic.
Now, once you have information about “buzzwords” leading people to your site, you need to assess if those keywords are even in alignment with the content, products and services available on your site – if not, chances are you’ll have a high bounce rate. Or, you may need to rework your SEO so an alternative audience demographic discovers your content through the right keywords.
4. Geo Location (Under Audience)
It is important to know where the traffic is coming from, geographically. For example, two months back we discovered there was a huge spike in Pure Design Solution’s Website traffic. While this might seem like good news, when we took a closer look, we realized all the traffic was fake and coming from an undisclosed location. Monitoring unusual surges in traffic can help you detect fishy activity happening on your site. Alternatively, it could also indicate your site is being targeted incorrectly and needs re-addressing through SEO and content changes.
Another reason to monitor geolocation is to identify which markets your content/products/services is resonating with the most, and whether you need to re-identify your target audience based on this information. For example, if all your campaigns are targeting New York, Los Angeles and Austin, but your sales are actually coming through from Denver, Pittsburgh and Honolulu, that, too, organically, then you might want to take a step back and evaluate what your audience segment really looks like.
5. Site Content Performance (Under Behaviour)
Taking a look at which sections of your Website are performing well is a great way to assess what sort of audience you are attracting and what their areas of interest are, as well as their needs. For example, you can evaluate if certain types of topics are “hot” on your blog and worth exploring further. And, you can also evaluate which products and services are more appealing to your user base.
Similarly, you can also identify which content topics and/or products need an extra push through a social media campaign or emailer. Usually, evaluating site content performance in conjunction with traffic sources is a useful tactic to get a more holistic understanding of what needs to be tweaked/optimized.
Pure Design Solution’s team consists of seasoned professionals who have the expertise to not only analyze data fully, but to also draft strategies that result in improved ROI. For more information, contact us here.
