Are You Monitoring the Best Website KPIs?
Making website improvements, based on your website’s data is key to better results. There are quite a few commonly watched metrics, but getting beyond the basics will accelerate your results. Here are three website KPIs to help you better understand how to further improve your website’s results.
First, let’s address what makes a good website goal.
Website KPIs and Goal Setting
A great way to begin setting website goals is with the SMART goals structure:
- Specific. Your goal should be clear and specific. A goal that is too vague just doesn’t give you much direction.
- Measurable. A goal must be measurable to be able to track your successes or need for adjustments.
- Attainable. Your goal must be attainable. A goal that is set up for failure will provide you with just that.
- Relevant. This seems obvious, but your goal must be pertinent to your business at hand.
- Time-bound. Setting a timeframe is important to help quantify your goal and keep you on track.
Examples of website B2B goals might be to boost your brand awareness, improve qualified lead generation, customer conversion, or even become an industry leader.
Many website statistics are monitored through custom Google Analytic reports, which can be set up to send weekly or monthly. To catch small issues before they become big problems, Keystone monitors reports weekly. We also have monthly reporting to spot trends that might not be noticeable within weekly reports.
2021 will bring many opportunities for small businesses. If maximizing online business opportunities is one of your goals this year, knowing which key performance indicators (KPIs) to watch is critical.
Following are beyond the basics KPIs to watch. These website KPIs will provide better guidance for improving your marketing efforts.
#1 Website KPI: Call to Actions (CTAs)
Are Your Website’s Call-to-Actions (CTAs) Working?
While understanding how many people are visiting your website seems important, far more important is whether or not your website visitors are converting to your desired actions. These more advanced metrics will help you to better understand your market target’s interest in your business services or solutions. Many in B2B want to track downloads of whitepaper, PDF, or ebook. Some businesses have demo videos, and want to know how long people are viewing the videos.
Event tracking offers an excellent way to measure these specific types of CTAs success.
Event tracking code can be used for:
- Tracking PDFs and other media downloads
- Tracking exactly where visitors drop off when filling out forms
- Monitoring clicks on unique elements of a page: Call to actions
- Monitoring click-to-call phone numbers
- Time spent watching a video
With event tracking you can collect data on interactions that don’t necessarily load another page. Added this code is fairly simple using the free version of Google Analytics javascript tracking code. Once your code is in place, you’ll want to track events metrics for a month before you start making improvement changes. If you’re the impatient type, you could use a week of data, but a month is a more sure bet to best understand trends.
Improving Conversions with A/B or Multivariate Testing
There are many options to try when improving your CTAs. You can use A/B or multivariate testing to fine-tune your offers.
Testing options include:
- Exploring button colors. Maybe red works better than blue? Only a test will tell.
- Try out different call to action wording. Click here is not a wide choice. Try using ‘Explore Leadership Webinar Selections’ instead. This wording has the added benefit of better SEO by using potential hot keywords.
- Change placement of your offer to above the fold, if it is not already. A best practice is to put important information before your website visitors have to scroll.
- Change out imagery. Typically imagery with people has a better CTR. Using custom graphics and photography has been known to improve brand reputation.
#2 Website KPI: Lead Sources
Understand Your Lead Sources and Their Efficacy
Most businesses expend effort towards driving traffic to their website. The next step is to know which traffic source is best at converting leads. With this, you’ll be in a great place to direct more of your marketing funds towards the efforts that are actually providing leads, which directly helps your sales and marketing teams’ efforts.
Potential Lead Sources / Channels
- Organic traffic
- Direct traffic
- Emails
- Paid search
- Videos
- Podcasts
- Webinars
- Social media
- Referral traffic
To best understand which channels are more successful at converting your website visitors into customers, you need to add snippets of tagging code to web pages. An easy way is to create and insert tracking code on a ‘Thank you’ page, or use the Google Tag Manager.
With your goal tracking code in place you’ll be able to better understand which of your efforts are working, which need more resources, or which efforts you may want to simply abandon. For example, if your paid search traffic is low, but that traffic has an excellent conversion ratio, you’ll want to analyze and improve your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts.
Understanding which of your channels are actually providing good solid leads is a key to your marketing success.
#3 Website KPI: Backlinks
Your website’s backlinks, AKA inbound links, remains one of the most important SEO, off-site metric. (A backlink is when your website is linked from another source.) Your business’s efforts to improve the number and quality of backlinks is one of the best methods for achieving better search engine optimization (SEO), which in turn drives increased qualified traffic to your website. You should be tracking this effort.
You can improve the number of backlinks to your website by creating quality content that your target market will find of value enough to want to read and share with others. Your goal should be for your content to be link-worthy.
To be very clear, improving the number and quality of your backlinks is an important key for improved SEO. Improved SEO provides more qualified traffic to your website. Qualified traffic directly leads to more business.
To calculate your website’s backlinks, you can use some free online SEO tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs.
For an in-depth analysis of your website and its potential, contact Keystone Media today.