7 Important Data from Your Website to Watch
Keeping a website for your business is not a task without effort: from creation to redesign, including updates and improvements, it’s often difficult to objectively judge your site without getting too involved in too much detail techniques. However, the web offers the opportunity to measure very specific and generally interesting variables to analyze a website and its content and make the most of it. Still need to know the metrics available and use them well.
Metrics and KPIs: How to navigate?
The first confusion and especially the most common is the one that exists between metrics and KPIs. What is the difference between these two concepts and how to use them for your business?
- Metrics are analytical data that you can track directly on Google Analytics that gives you a purely mathematical view of the events and trends that govern your website. These data do not present any type of interpretation, they are simply variables calculated by Google Analytics.
- Conversely, KPIs can be data or even formulas used to study the evolution of one or more objectives previously fixed. These KPIs are therefore closely linked to the objectives that you have set upstream and will complete the analysis of your progress towards them. KPIs are therefore interpretive data and can of course group one or more metrics according to what we are trying to prove or compare.
It is therefore advisable to choose your own KPIs accordingly, in order to adapt your follow-ups and dashboards to the specific issues of your company. However, it can be difficult to find your way through all the metrics made available by Google Analytics, or even those available on social networks. Following are the seven key data you should watch for your website:
1. The time spent on your pages or the quality of your content
Content is king in the web world and it must of course be at the center of your analytical studies. For this, the time spent on your pages is a very good indicator of the quality of your content. In particular, you can check that the average time spent on your pages corresponds to the time required to read your articles and identify whether they are sufficiently attracting the interest of visitors.
In addition, you can very well consider conducting various tests regarding the presentation of your content on your website. Indeed, a more airy presentation or with more visuals to punctuate your texts could possibly increase the time spent on your pages. Do not hesitate to test several theories to find the compromise that will generate the best efficiency.
This data can also be linked to the scrolling depth metric, which gives a good indication of the behaviour of users on your pages. By configuring the metric correctly through Google Analytics, you’ll know if your visitors are using the scroll to view your entire page. So by considering the depth of scrolling with the time spent on your pages, you can more objectively judge the overall quality of your content on the site.
2. The bounce rate or ability of your site to keep visitors’ attention
The bounce rate is by definition the ratio of the total number of visits to a site to the number of visits that concern only one page of it. Concretely, the bounce rate is expressed as a percentage and can identify the rate of visitors who left your website after watching a single page.
If the bounce rate is a good indicator of the propensity of your site to keep its visitors and lead them further into your sales funnel, note that it is however frequent to raise high rebound rates including blogs . Indeed, visitors tend to consult a particular article without necessarily continuing their visit to the site, and without any relation to the time spent on it. Thus, it is very possible to propose qualitative content without this having an immediate effect on the interest of the visitor for your other pages.
On the other hand, if your website has been designed in one page, you will structurally have a very high overall bounce rate. It will then be necessary to program on Google Analytics events of virtual page views in order to have a more relevant analysis.
3. The scope of your publications or the relevance of your social presence
The quality of content can also be evaluated according to its popularity on the web, and especially on social networks. In this context, a very good indicator is the scope of your publications or the overall audience of them. This metric proposed by social networks and in particular by Facebook, allows you to gauge the audience affected during your publications, whether through your current messages or your sponsored communications.
It is a particularly interesting metric because it gives you useful information to identify your most effective publications and to identify the major trends that you can use to optimize your communication efforts on these networks. This will allow you to compare different published posts in order to draw practical conclusions for your overall marketing strategy.
In addition, do not hesitate to link this metric with analytical statistics such as the geography of your audience or the devices used by it for example. A more detailed analysis will allow you to better know your target and adapt your messages even more in the future.
4. The conversion rate or efficiency of your sales funnel
The conversion rate is the most known data in the field of web marketing. After all, the ultimate goal is ultimately to turn users into customers, subscribers, or new members of your community. That’s why the conversion rate is important for monitoring your site.
But it is a metric that can still prove dangerous in its interpretation, especially when one relies too much on this figure in a too general way. Indeed, even if Google Analytics shows you a very good conversion rate, it is possible that in detail you have not yet identified areas for improvement. That’s why you need to measure conversion rates more accurately to get the most out of your strategy.
In practice, you will need to create several goals within the Google Analytics platform based on your pages, but also according to your targets. Do not hesitate to create objectives adapted to your different sources of traffic and also why not, to the localization of these in order to obtain more relevant results, especially if your business focuses on a geographical area or a particular city. Similarly, identifying conversion rates based on traffic sources will help you identify exactly which parts of your sales funnel can be improved and which sources work best.
5. Mobile visitors or the importance of responsivity for your website
At present, more than half of web traffic is done through a mobile device, but what about your site? The number or share of mobile visitors in your general traffic is a very good indicator of its ability to provide a suitable environment and navigation for these new uses. Note that mobile search is a growing trend and it is crucial for web-based companies to offer mobile-friendly sites to increase efficiency and profitability.
In addition, Google Analytics offers several metrics allowing you to analyze the behaviour of mobile users on your site to identify areas of malfunction or difficulty for mobile users. For example, by filtering your results you will be able to analyze the bounce rates and the time spent on your pages for these specific uses.
6. The number of mentions to your mark or the weight of your notoriety
Beyond the purely content-oriented analysis, it can be very interesting for your site to determine the weight of its reputation on the web and on social networks. The reputation on the web indeed takes several forms: it can be materialized by the number of queries containing your brand name on the search engines, but also by the mentions of your company on other web sites or blogs and of course , on social networks. It is therefore relevant to be able to generate the number of mentions of your site on these various supports.
In Google Analytics it is rather easy to find the metrics of the number of searches related to your brand name but to go further in this analysis, you will most often need to use appropriate software, able to give you the number of global mentions on the web and the sources of these mentions. On social networks, you can simply search on your company name or personalized hashtags to find out the total number of results.
Note that notoriety also includes notices and testimonials posted on the web, so do not hesitate to refine your analysis taking into account specialized websites, comparators etc. Again, you can find many tools to get your information without any special effort on your part.
7. The return on investment or profitability of your marketing efforts
Finally, the last important thing to watch for your website, and not least, is your return on investment. The ROI is one of the most important data, because it is this calculation that will allow you to judge the financial relevance of your campaigns and your marketing efforts in general. To summarize, the return on investment is the ratio between the profits generated by an action and the costs incurred to carry it out. It is therefore the ultimate variable that should allow you to make choices relevant to your marketing and your sales strategy.
Again, it is better to have a detailed analysis if you do not want to get lost in too large numbers that cannot be interpreted easily. It is better to consider your ROI according to your objectives, but also types of media and considering the investment costs of certain actions to not distort the results. In addition, the return on investment is not necessarily a calculation expressed solely in terms of turnover. For example, you can calculate a return on investment based on a number of registrations or requests for quotes. In the end, everything depends on the objectives that we set ourselves at the beginning, which may be objectives of notoriety or long-term partnership, for example.
We must not forget that from one campaign to another we will not necessarily have the same return on investment, financial or in terms of resources (time, staff …), and some developments of your site can also have an impact on several campaigns or several other metrics over a longer period. It is therefore necessary to identify all these variables in order to have the most relevant analysis possible for your decision making.
Do not hesitate to take the time to put your strategy and objectives in order to have a more relevant analysis, and to surround yourself with tools that will make your day-to-day work easier, not only in the generation of statistics but also in the analysis or programming of alerts to gain reactivity.
