There are so many metrics you can choose to track for your website - especially if you have Google Analytics set up. It can quickly get overwhelming and become such a big task that you can be forgiven for putting it off and failing to track anything!
In this blog I am sharing five things you should track on your website each month which will give you some great insights to act on. I’ll tell you how to do that as we go through each metric.
OK, on to the first website stat you should track every month
Number of website sessions
For this metric, I recommend you use Google Analytics. I know that some website providers have their own analytics tools built in, but they can be unreliable. Don’t bother with those - go straight for Google Analytics.
If you don’t have Google Analytics installed on your website you need to get it on there asap. That is your marketing priority for this week. Here’s a set of clear instructions on how to do that.
What is a website session?
A session is a period of time where someone is actively engaged on your website. That means this number includes repeat visits from the same person (It is not telling you how many individual people visited your website).
To find the number of website sessions for a monthly period, click on Audience, then Overview. Also change the date range, top right. Sessions is highlighted in a circle:
Record this number every month and pay attention to if it is going up or down. If you are adding content to your website on a regular basis, such as a blog. You’d expect to see this number increase.
If your website sessions level off or decrease, that is a prompt to give your website a marketing push. Create some new content to share with your audience on social media and with your email list.
Blogs are the obvious choice but you can also try creating other types of helpful content such as guides and templates. If you have a new offering, create a landing page to promote it and share it with your audience.
2. Most popular landing pages
Your home page is probably the most visited page on your website so in this metric, I’m saying you can ignore that for now and analyse the pages that you’ve built specifically to promote a particular thing or to generate leads (such as email list subscribers).
To find this data in Google Analytics, do the following:
On the left hand side, click on Behaviour
Click on Site Content
Click on All Pages
Make sure the date range (top right) is set to the last month
Scroll down and you will see your pages ordered by most page views at the top.
The page with the / is your home page.
These stats are for my website and you will see that after Home, the most popular pages are blog posts. This tells me which blog has been the most viewed in the last month which is good to know.
It also tells me that /about and /instagram are the most popular pages outside of the blog. I had better make sure those pages are up-to-date and if I have something to promote, it’s a good idea to add a link back to that offer on these pages.
If you’ve created landing pages that aren’t connected to your main navigation (such as my Instagram page), it’s worth recording every month how much traffic these pages are getting. If they are under-performing, you can do a marketing push and see if traffic increases.
If they are doing well, make sure you are optimising them to either send people on to the next page or get them to do something (e.g. subscribe to your mailing list) with a call to action.
3. Bounce rate
Bounce rate is calculated by the number of visitors who visit your site and then leave after only looking at the one page they landed on. They bounce right off!
It’s a key metric to track because you don’t want this number to get too high (above 80%). A high bounce rate is a warning signal that people are coming to your site and think they’ve made a big mistake when they’ve got there so they leave again.
You can get your bounce rate down by including more internal links on a page. Show your visitors where to go next! Link within the body text to other relevant pages and include a call to action on every page (here’s how to create strong calls to action on your website - this is a great example of an internal link!)
A note on when it might be OK for a bounce rate to be high: if you have a landing page where you are driving traffic for the purpose of converting visitors into form submissions (sometimes call a squeeze page), you may well have people leave as soon as they’ve filled in the form. An effective squeeze page might mean a higher bounce rate than normal overall. A way to overcome this is to send people to another page once they’ve filled out a form.
Bounce rate is really easy to find in Google Analytics. Simply click on Home (top left) and bounce rate is bang in the middle.
Be sure to change the date range by clicking on the drop down arrow under the graph.
4. Website form submissions
It’s time to step out of Google Analytics now and look at your website forms. Whatever platform you use, you should be checking every month to see how many form submissions you are getting.
If you have just one contact form on your website, that makes this task pretty easy. It’s likely you get an email notification when someone fills out your contact form on your website but I encourage you to look back over the month and make a note of how many genuine (clean out the spam) submissions you receive.
If you have multiple forms across your site (like I do!) for collecting email addresses etc, you need to report on these every month too and you need a figure for each form. Otherwise, how do you know which forms bring in the most leads? Well, you don’t.
For this metric, simply record how many people are submitting their details on each form. Then you will see which forms convert the best and copy those attributes to future forms.
If a form isn’t converting visitors to submissions, you need to take action and try something new.
5. Number of new contacts added to your database from your website
We are getting a bit fancy-pants with this metric now and if you can record this each month, I'm impressed! You’d be surprised at how many fairly big organisations I’ve seen that don’t record this figure. It’s crazy not to - but it can be a bit tricky.
Here’s what I want you to do: Look at all the contacts that are new to your database in the past month who have come in via a website form.
That’s it.
Now, depending what system you use for forms and how many forms you have, this can get quite complicated. You need to be able to filter out repeat visitors - they don’t count as new and will skew your figures.
Set filter parameters to look for contacts created in the past month. Easier said than done sometimes. Hopefully your CRM system is more intuitive than some of the systems I've had to work with in the past.
Conclusion
There’s a lot you can track on your website and sometimes it’s hard to know where to start. My advice is simple: create a report tracking these five things and do it once a month. Easy!
Google Analytics gives you so much power when it comes to analysing your website performance that it can mean you get overwhelmed before you even start. I’ve pulled out three things you can use Google Analytics to tell you:
Number of website sessions
Most popular landing pages
Bounce rate
You also need to go into the back end of your website forms and report on:
Number of website form submission
Number of new contacts added to your database from your website
Recording these figures every month and comparing stats over months will start to show trends as well as highlighting what’s going well on your website and what’s failing to make a difference.
If you see a page or form that’s doing better than others, have a look at why this might be and try to replicate it elsewhere. There’s a lot to be learned from within these five metrics.
Forms are obviously essential for growing your email marketing list. If you are working at growing your list, you need to be on top of your game with awesome email content. If you’d like a guide to help you with everything from creating subject lines to calls to action, you might like my Email Marketing Toolkit.
