Measuring your website’s success can be a daunting task. Whether you aren’t sure what to track, how to gather the right data, or even what to do with your insights, it’s essential to outline a clear plan for your website to thrive.
Before you dive into analytics, start by thinking about your organisation. What are your goals? Maybe you want to increase your audience reach, or drive ticket sales. Or perhaps you’d like to reduce the amount of time it takes to build and update your content. Defining the specific outcomes you want from your website is the first step to creating a clear pathway to success.
Once you’ve defined your goals, you can consider how your website can efficiently and effectively achieve them. Measurement frameworks are a great tool to map this out – here are some of our favourite methods:
- ‘Finger in the air’: Observational temperature checks can guide your website strategy even when little data is available. For example, a noticeable spike in website traffic after an event may inform when or how you can feature new content for maximum reach.
- Rule of thumb: Looking for consistencies or averages within your available data can help you develop KPIs, which are critical to evaluate your website’s overall impact. For example, if you average two £20 sales for every 10 checkout page views, you may want to aim for 100 checkout page views based on the assumption that will convert to about £400 in sales.
- Analytics: Creating a customised dashboard or spreadsheet to track key metrics gives you a snapshot of data aligned with your KPIs, which can act as a resource for continual improvements towards your goals.
Another key aspect of any measurement strategy is calculating return on investment (ROI): quantifying resources you put in versus results you get out. Analysing ROI allows you to track the impacts of specific actions, and provides a valuable checkpoint to assess how well your analytics are working for you.
After you’ve solidified your goals and performance measurement strategies, it’s time to dive into the data.
Google Analytics is the most common tool for tracking website data. It starts with a small piece of code installed on your website, which allows Google to collect data when users consent to cookies. When opted in, Google anonymously tracks user interactions and stores the data for you to access through the GA4 platform.
When analysing your GA4 data, we recommend considering these four key areas:
- Audience reach: Not only the number of people visiting your website, but also who they are. These analytics give a snapshot of your user demographics, and the devices they’re using to visit your site.
- Audience behaviour: How users discover and navigate your website, tracking metrics like landing and exit pages, page popularity, peak traffic times, and referrals.
- Engagement: The actions users take on your website, including downloads, media plays and more to understand how users interact with your content.
- Conversions: Generally considered the most important metric, conversion analytics will typically consist of multiple ‘events’ (e.g. clicks or page navigation), with focus on a final action you want your users to take (e.g. completing a purchase or signing up to your newsletter).
But what do you actually do with all of that data? How do you turn the numbers into actions?
We like to follow a simple framework, asking ourselves three questions when measuring website analytics.
What happened?
Start by looking at a snapshot of your data and pulling out a summary of key metrics. Maybe you notice a page for an upcoming event you’re hosting received very little traffic, and users only spent an average of two seconds viewing it.
So what?
Think about why that result matters. If you’re trying to sell tickets and the booking link is on that event page, then you’ll want to figure out how to funnel more user traffic towards that conversion.
What next?
Determine the actions you can take to improve results based on the data you’ve observed. This could include featuring a path to the event page more prominently on your home page or other high-traffic pages, or making the ‘book tickets’ button larger and moving it to the top of the event page.
Now remember, your website is never truly a finished product – it’s a living tool that grows smarter every time you listen to what your data tells you.
Getting into the habit of tracking your website analytics frequently to discover what has changed and why allows you to confidently implement new ideas and test what works best for future improvements.
Want to learn more about measuring your website’s impact and actioning your analytics? Watch our webinar on this topic, or drop us a line at hello@wearehdk.com – we’d love to chat!