Are You Measuring Your Website’s Success?

We know our business objective.  We know how our website will help us accomplish that business objective. How are we going to measure them? This is where we get the power of marketing through our website.

This is part of a presentation I gave in Atlanta at their 2019 WordCamp. You can watch the entire presentation on WordPress TV: Get the Most Out of Your Website: Measure Everything.

We should be able to measure everything. There’s any number of ways to measure data about our website:

• Jetpack has their own. If you have a wordpress.com site, you’re using Jetpack data.
• There’s other things, like, Facebook data, that you could use.
• I think everyone really has no excuse not to have Google Analytics on their site. It’s easy to setup, it is a treasure trove of data. Once you have Google Analytics on your site you’re not done. You need to connect the thing that your website’s helping you do to get to your business objective to Google Analytics.

Problem is there’s a lot of data in there. How do we filter through this? How do we figure out what we should be looking at?

Are You Measuring Your Sales?

If you’re selling something on your site, that means you need to send the e-commerce data into Google Analytics. There’re ways to set up your system to simply send the transaction data, send the number of dollars that someone has paid. Like, you want all that data to go into your Google Analytics account, because that is the macro goal which you wanna accomplish.

Are You Measuring Your Leads?

If you’re trying to get leads, you need to set up a Google Analytics goal. Whenever someone submits a lead from your website, you need it tracked, and Google Analytics will handle that event in a different fashion. I recommend using a lead form on your website. Because if everyone will come to your website, they have to use the form to contact you, and it’s very easy to track a form submission in Google Analytics, speciallly if we set up the form to go to a confirmation page. All you need to do is say, “Hey, Google Analytics, this is the URL for the confirmation page. Anytime someone visits the confirmation page, the only way they got there is by submitting the form, therefore I know I got a lead.”

You can use any number of form plug ins, but I always recommend using a confirmation page. I think it’s a better user experience because it confirms to the user that you did get their lead. There’s nothing more frustrating to me when I fill out a form on a website and the form resets. Did I waste my time? Did they get it? Then I’m anxious, and I’m like, “Yeah, I’m done, I’m out of here.” So, setup your form so it goes to confirmation page.

Are You Measuring People Coming to Your Business?

If your website is trying to get people into the door and that’s your business objective, it’s more challenging, but you can still track it in Google Analytics. What if you have a page on your site on directions to get to your store? Your customers can use Google MyBusiness but have a page on your site. And you measure how many people are getting to that page as a way of saying, “People are interested enough in my business that they want to get directions to my store.” So, now you know you have successfully interested people in coming to your store.

If you want to get a little more sophisticated, you have a web-only coupon that they have to give you their email address to receive. Now, when they give you that coupon, the only way they got it was because they went to your website.

Are You Measuring the Ads Your Visitors Respond to?

If you’re a publisher, you’re informing people, you are trying to sell affiliate links, or you’re selling advertising on your site to make money, we need to know things like, how many pages per visit? The more pages per visit, the more ads people saw, the more you can charge for people that are advertising on your site.

Some data is primarily connected to what your website does to accomplish a business goal, that’s your primary data. Was a lead collected? Did someone make a purchase? Did someone download the coupon? That’s your primary goal, and you need to make sure you’re able to track that in Google Analytics.

If it’s a piece of data that helps you understand how people are getting to there, that’s a secondary piece of data.

Sometimes SEO clients will come to me and ask, “What do I rank, David?” Who cares? Ranking doesn’t make you money. I can think of dozens of keywords for which you rank number one that don’t bring any traffic to you. So, keyword ranking, if you’re doing organic efforts, really is a secondary metric that leads to traffic. Because you don’t really want to rank, you want rank that generates traffic.

But you don’t really want traffic. We could get you traffic for all kinds of crazy phrases. You want traffic that produces a sale. That’s your primary goal. Sales from the secondary goal, traffic, as a result of a tertiary goal, rank.

Consider Facebook. You got a million impressions for your promoted post.  That’s awesome. Did any of those people come to your site? We’ve got a secondary metric called “Impressions,” that leads to clicks. Of the clicks, because you’ve installed Google Analytics, now you know how many clicks became traffic (it’s not always the same because they’re calculated differently). More importantly, how much of that traffic from your Facebook ads accomplished your primary goal of your website? This is where Facebook ads become misleading in their data. They give you all this really cool data, but it doesn’t necessarily translate into the bottom line.

However, when we understand our business objective, how our website’s accomplishing that business objective, and what we’re tracking as far as our business objective goes it changes how we see this data. We’re able to determine, which is a primary metric and which is a secondary metric. Secondary metrics are good: you need impressions of your Facebook ad, if anybody’s gonna click on them. But that’s not an end in itself. If people click on an ad, great but it’s just an expense to you unless that traffic from clicks become traffic. Traffic doesn’t really do anything for you unless it accomplishes the primary goal (a lead, or a sale, or someone in the doorway of your store, or seeing a lot of ads on your side, or whatever your primary metric that you’re tracking is).