How to tell if your website is working

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The first step in any marketing campaign is to define what success looks like and begin measuring it. Here are a few of the common metrics you may want to use in measuring your website’s effectiveness:

  • Traffic
    Plain and simple, how many visitors are coming to your site on a daily, weekly and monthly basis? How many of them are unique, and how many of them are returning visitors? Do they come on weekends, weekdays, early morning or late at night?
  • Sales
    For many businesses, this is the most obvious metric. How many sales are coming through your website? Are they returning customers who are coming directly to make a transaction, or are they net new customers? Is there anything that can be done to increase conversion rate?
  • Phone calls
    For businesses that sell high ticket items or services, the purchase decision isn’t always made through the website alone. Thanks to call tracking technology, there are ways to see how many phone calls your website is generating.
  • Downloads
    How many times was a whitepaper or brochure downloaded? Or how often is a particular resource accessed, and does it need to be made more prominent so more people can find it or does it need to be buried a bit because it’s taking up valuable real estate?
  • Subscriptions
    Preliminary to any purchase decision, you may want to use your website to sign up email or RSS subscribers so that you can drip market to them and move them towards a transaction. How many of these subscriptions is your website currently generating?
  • Rankings
    Related to traffic, rankings tell us where you are on Google for a particular keyword. We can track strategic keywords that you want to rank for, and we can show data over time to see how rankings are improving. A #1 ranking gets as much as 40% of the traffic for a given keyword, so it pays to know where you rank.
  • Responses
    How many people are talking about you through social media channels? Is the content of their comments positive or negative? How does the web react when you post a news article, press release or other content?
  • Loyalty
    Are your site visitors new or returning? How many times do they typically return before making a purchase decision? How long do they stay on site, and how many pages do they typically view before leaving? What is the last page they typically see before they go?
  • Cost per action
    Take all of the money you are spending on marketing and divide it by one of these metrics (traffic, sales, phone calls) to get your CPA or “cost-per-action” number. How much are you paying for these metrics to go up? Is it profitable? and how does that compare to other marketing options you have?

When you work with an Skyhook Interactive as your Arizona web design company, we’ll help you decide which metrics are important to your business, and we’ll help you set up a system that will measure them.