3 easy tips on measuring your way to online success

You’ve joined the wave of businesses going online and started a website. Now you need to figure out whether it’s attracting the kind of attention you’d like it to. And is that ‘shop’ link really working, or are viewers breezing right past your catalogue to hit the information section, or worse, leaving the site altogether? A key factor in the success of any business is measuring what’s working and what’s not. The same is true for your website.

It is crucial for you to measure the traffic your website gets, and if it’s contributing to your business goals. By using free tools like Google Analytics, you can see how visitors are discovering and interacting with your website. This can help your improve your customer experience and lead to great business success.

Here are a 3 things that every business should do to measure the effectiveness of their website with online measurement tools like Google Analytics:

1. Identify your objectives and track them correctly
When it comes to your website, one of the most important numbers to track is conversions -- which is when a visitor to your site completes an important task. The conversions that matter differ according to your goals, but every business should outline the primary objectives of their website (called macro-conversions). This can be completing a sale or filling out a "Get a Quote" form.

It's equally important to figure out what micro-conversions, or smaller actions, might lead someone to macro-conversion down the road -- like visiting the "Contact Us" page, spending more than 10 minutes on your site, viewing a certain number of videos, or signing up for an email newsletter. You can measure micro-conversions by setting up your analytics tools to track these actions just like you track macro-conversions.

2. Get to the bottom of your bounce rates
As you’re tracking your conversions, you also need to understand why people don't convert. A little metric called ‘bounce rate’ can help with that.

Bounce rate represents the people that visit one page on your website and leave immediately after viewing that page. A high bounce rate could mean that people are not finding what they need right away. Think about what information a visitor to your site may be seeking, like product details, contact information or the address of your brick and mortar store, and make sure it’s front and centre on your website.

Bounce rates can also show you how effective you marketing campaigns are. For example, if you’re running an email marketing campaign but find that they’re resulting in visits with high bounce rates, you might be directing people to the wrong page on your site. In short, it’s a metric that can help you optimize and troubleshoot your marketing activity.

3. Harness the data to make the most of your marketing efforts
Business spend a lot of resources getting potential customers to visit their website. So it’s essential to understand which efforts are generating valuable customers, and which are not. You can do this by using the Traffic Sources reports to view visitors coming from different sources, whether it’s search, social media or through marketing campaigns.

Maybe you'll find that the ad campaigns that you run at the beginning of the week are driving more conversions than those at the end of the week, so you can shift your marketing dollars accordingly.