How do you gauge the success of your website?
Analyzing your website’s performance can be confusing and challenging. Explore with the team at M1 Data and Analytics what data to look for in order to further your digital success.
You probably already know the importance of having a digital presence to build your business. With social media taking over major portions of marketing budgets, retailers closing their physical locations in favor of online storefronts, and Google only getting smarter, how do you boost your presence in a meaningful way? It starts with understanding some key data points about your website:
Key Data Points to Understand:
Visitors – Sometimes referred to as “guests”, visitors are the individuals who are navigating to your website.
Session – A Session refers to the total amount of time a visitor spends active on your website.
Traffic – Traffic refers to the amount of visitors navigate to your website in a given period of time.
Traffic by… – After determining the amount of traffic your website is generating it is important to understand where your visitors are finding your website. This can be determined by a couple of qualifiers:
- By Device – Traffic by Device determines on what devices your visitors are finding your website (mobile phone, desktop computer, tablet, etc…)
- By Channel – Traffic by Channel shows how your visitors are finding your website (email link, social media, QR code, etc…)
Bounce Rate – The Bounce Rate is a number, generally displayed as a percentage, which refers to the amount of visitors who visited your website and did not take any actions (clicking links, submitting forms, etc…) versus visitors who did take actions on the website.
Interactions per Visit – Utilizing similar data to the bounce rate, Interactions per Visit allows you to see how engaged a visitor to your website is by reporting how many actions that guest took while on your page.
New Traffic vs. Returning Traffic – A ratio which gauges how many new visitors your website is generating versus how many guests visit multiple times.
How These Data Points Help:
As with most things, the more data we have on a situation, the higher the potential for understanding is. When analyzing your website’s statistics, there are certain points you should look to increase and others you should look to decrease. For example, if your website has a high bounce rate, it indicates that your visitors are not engaging with the content displayed to them on the page. This can suggest that the content on your page needs a revamp to be more dynamic or informative in order to drive your bounce rate down.
How to Access This Data:
Most web hosting platforms do provide at least a cursory insight to these data points, sometimes hidden within menus which can feel tough to navigate. Typically there will be a menu item titled something to the effect of “Analytics”, “Insights”, or “Performance” which will lead to this data. The depth of these insights depends on your hosting platform and may be left up to you to digest and understand. Businesses with a marketing and development team should prioritize understanding these data points in order to best boost their website’s performance.
With M1 Data & Analytics, we not only gather insights, but report and help you understand them as well! As a Data as a Service company, we seek to grow your understanding of your web performance while drawing a better audience to your website. For more information about M1 and how we help you succeed, please contact us or take a look at our suite of services.
