Measuring Website Success

If you are a marketing or communications professional, eventually your team will ask you, “Is our website working? Is it doing what it should be doing?”

There’s only one way to know, and that’s to actually measure your website’s effectiveness.

Tools of the Trade

The first thing you can do to test the effectiveness of your site is by evaluating the analytics data you have at your disposal.

Google Analytics is a free and extremely helpful tool that we install on all of our clients’ websites and tracks information such as:

• Who is coming to your website?
• How are users getting to your website?
• What specific pages are users visiting the most?
• How are users engaging with your content?

Data Doesn’t Analyze Itself

The key to Google Analytics is not simply installing the software – you need to actually look at the data, analyze the trends and use what you’ve found to your advantage.

Some of our clients already have an understanding of what to look for in their data, but others prefer to have us educate them further. To help our clients with their analytics processes, we’ve created a standardized report that we run every 30 days, pulling top-level information out for further analysis and recommendations.

What Questions Should I Ask?

Google Analytics provides a wide range of data from your site, so it’s important to focus on the data that is most important to your business and make decisions from there. For example:

• What is the most viewed content on your site?
• What pages are people engaging with the most?
• Where are your highest points of conversion?

Make Data Analysis A Routine

If one of your key business products isn’t falling into that most-viewed content report, you need to think about how to make it easier for people to get to that specific page.

Looking at this data on a regular basis, and making decisions based on the findings, will help you continually improve the effectiveness of your website.

Heat Map For Success

Beyond Google Analytics, you can also install a heat mapping tool like HotJar. HotJar visually displays where users are clicking on your various pages and how they are interacting with your content. By using this tool, you can improve, in real time, the layout and design of your individual pages to get more out of your website.

A Holistic Approach to Analytics

Having a full ecosystem of data to draw conclusions from should be your end-goal. By utilizing multiple tools you’ll be able to get a full picture of how your website is currently serving your organization and identify places for improvement. After going through this exercise a few times, you’ll be able to map traffic and conversion goals as well.

Following your new routines and using the tools means the next time leadership asks you, “Is our website working?” you’ll be able to provide them with the revenue and organizational impact your website is driving.

We Can Help!

Having a problem sorting through and understanding your analytics data? Reach out to us – we can perform an analytics audit and make recommendations that will set you up for long-term success.