WEBSITE GOALS MEASUREMENT
Number of visits/visitors/unique visitors (monthly average)
Needs to be benchmarked with Google Analytics against our competitors. As of right now, a realistic goal may be 10 visits a day; 300 a month if we are producing 2-3 blog posts a week and sharing them across social media networks Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pinterest. Social media and blog posts will help this number increase through promotion and content marketing and thus a Social Media plan should be launched at the same time or after launching of the website. After a year, 100 a day may be realistic with about 4,000 visits a month. Visits will be less than visitors as a visitor may view multiple pages. These numbers are estimates but will grow exponentially over time dependent on the amount of CONTENT PRODUCED through social media marketing and blogging. A good goal would be 20,000 visits a week in 5 years. If web traffic is low, write more blog articles 1-5 per week or interact and promote your blog articles on social media LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest. This will promote people to our website to draw more traffic for visits and visitors.
Bounce rate (Monthly average)
Defined as the percentage % of visitors who come to your site but shortly leave after arriving. It allows you to know where bad traffic is coming from. It’s a great qualifying metric to help you ask the right questions and see what is not working. A good bounce rate is between 40-60%. A way to lower our bounce rate is by improving usability for people on our website. Content should be clear, concise and paired with exciting graphics that point visitors to what they want. Take note in variations monthly. It needs to be measured at a site level, top entry pages, core acquisition strategies, and your landing pages if you spend money on Google AdWords. Keyword research should also be done every 6 months due to the ever-changing beast of the billions of searches on the Internet and how different keyword search traffic changes.
Time on site (Monthly average)
How long a visitor stays on your website is a key relative and indication measure of how successful that site is in attracting relevant visitors. The theory being that the longer someone spends on the site the more interested they are in what you have to offer. As time on site doesn’t account for the time spent reading (or ignoring) the last page in the session it can’t be said to be an accurate reflection of how visitors actually use the site. So leaving your browser open on a page doesn’t cause the average time on site to increase unless you click on another page. In this case, each web analytics tool will have its own rules about when to terminate a session and start a new one. In most cases, this is based on a gap of 30 minutes or more in the sequence of activities. So if you left your browser open on a page and went to lunch then returned in an hour to click on a link it would be counted as a new session or visit to the site.
An additional factor is that time on site should be assessed as the average number of pages viewed during the session. In some sites such as online banking, you are looking for lower time on site but the number of page views may be high depending on the tasks that are completed. In other sites like a newspaper, you would be looking for high time on site with high numbers of page views as an indication of success as the revenue is tied to page impressions.
| Page Views | |||
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H |
L |
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| Time | H |
A |
B |
| L |
C |
D |
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Selection of appropriate quadrant depends on the site and the business goals associated.
Quadrant A: High time on site, a high number of page views
| Positive: May indicate a high level of interest and involvement with the site. |
Negative: Could indicate a high level of frustrations with visitors really having difficulties on the site. |
| Good Indicator for Where a high level of involvement is a key performance indicator. E.g. advertising-based sites selling banners based on page impressions. | Poor Indicator for Where a site is supporting visitors who should be able to readily access information or perform a task in a short period of time. E.g. government and self-service websites like online banking. |
Quadrant B: High time on site, low number of page views
| Positive: May indicate a reading behavior pattern. |
Negative: The lower number of page impressions may be negative for advertising related websites |
| Good Indicator for Sites that require a lot of time to read and understand the contents of the site. E.g. a professional services company | Poor Indicator for Sites that sell advertising |
Quadrant C: Low time on site, a high number of page views
| Positive: May indicate success for sites that require visitors to complete tasks quickly |
Negative: Could indicate that visitors are lost in the site. |
| Good Indicator for Sites that require high involvement in short bursts. E.g. banking sites, online applications. | Poor Indicator for Complex websites such as those of government agencies. |
Quadrant D: Low time on site, low number of page views
| Positive: For sites that only provide a simple response or quick answers | Negative: Generally implies disinterest in the site |
| Good Indicator for Sites where visitors are seeking answers. E.g. search engines, directories, dictionaries, etc. In this case repeat, visitor behavior is a crucial contributing factor and must be assessed as well. | Poor Indicator for Most websites. |
Beyond this there are many other layers that need to be carefully interpreted to understand the value of time on site, however, in general, it is a good indicator of performance.
Site Speed
Does the platform have good deliverability site speed and up time
This is better for Bill to help us with since it deals more with Computer programming and coding. Here are a few things to point out:
–Leverage browser caching
–Enable Keep-Alive
–Enable gzip compression
–Make landing page redirects cacheable
–Use a CDN
–Reduce DNS lookups
–Specify CSS, JS and Images dimensions
–Optimize images
–Put CSS at the top and JS at the bottom
–Serve resources from a consistent URL
–Avoid bad requests
–Specify a character set
–Minify your codes
–Remove query strings from static resources
–Minimize redirects
Are URL’s structured and search engine friendly?
–Test monthly and track in a spreadsheet using tools screamingfrog.co.uk or xenus-link-sleuth.en.softonic.com to crawl all the pages, review all website pages and current site architecture.
–Note most viewed and shared content.
–Evaluate which content is worth keeping.
–Did you find duplicate content, and check pages for 404’s and list the most important pages as fixes.
–Review current website architecture.
–Develop a URL mapping document/301 redirect plan: Tracking Status, Due Date, Date completed, Owner
–Define a content plan and identify what call to actions need to be added.
The total amount of sales generated goals
These should be realistic goals for the website after being up for 6 months. We need to answer the 5 biggest questions people want to know about buying our service to close a sale. What information do we want for leads? Phone numbers, name, and email would be the simplest. Your website is a sales tool whether it is an effective one, is another question.
–Monthly sales goal: 10,000
–Average size of sale: 5,000
–Monthly visits: 2,000
–Number of sales needed to reach monthly sales goal: 2
–Monthly leads: 40
–Lead to customer conversion rate %: 20%
–Visits to lead conversion rate %: 1-2%
–How many web visitors are needed to meet your visits to lead conversion rate: 1,000
How to qualify and follow-up with website leads
When should you call web-generated leads for optimal contact and qualification ratios?
–Wednesday and Thursday are by far the best days to call for contact; Monday is worst
–4-6pm is the best time to call to make contact with a lead
–8-9am and 4-5pm is the best time to contact a lead to qualify over 11-12am
–What methods of communication will they prefer? Email? Phone?
–What is my system for handling new leads once they come in?
–Email Leads: Gathering email addresses for an email newsletter is one of the simplest and most effective ways to gather new leads. It provides a very low barrier to entry and will be utilized by many visitors. These leads typically include an email address and nothing more and require an email-marketing program.
–Contact Leads: Leads generated through a contact form, or ‘request a bid’ form usually come with the advantage of including a lot more information than just an email address, but can be far more difficult to gather. These leads are highly valuable though and certainly worth striving for. Leads generated this way are FAR more likely to actually turn into dollars over a simple email address.
–Plan to actively utilize leads with an email-marketing program or a customer management system that allows you to track customers and leads.
–There is a very steep drop off of response to calls after the 1hr mark and after 20 hr mark, each additional phone call may actually hurt your ability to make a contact to qualify a lead.
— The chances of reaching a new sales lead drop over 10-fold if you wait longer than the first hour of shown interest, and the odds of qualifying that lead decrease 6-fold after the first 60 minutes
–Need to develop lead response management practices: key is to reach the prospect as soon as possible; ideally within 1 hour, and in a perfect world, within 5 minutes.
–Need to look at lead qualification requirements.
–Search terms they used or the content they looked at can be great indicators to what their problem is and how you can help them. It is essential that the follow-up call not only reference the specific piece of content that they viewed but immediately direct the discussion to the reason for this search, and the broader needs and pains of their company.
— Integrating your marketing automation solution with your CRM can help achieve this.
— You must create a specific and robust nurture program to ensure that all responders who are not immediate leads are not discarded for the information phase
— The average overall response time to new leads is 42 hours. That’s almost 2 days. Combine with it the fact that over 75% of the time the deal goes to those who follow up first, even in B2B complex sales. By simply improving your response times and having an efficient process, you can win more business
— Some people prefer whitepapers, demo’s, trial offers, benchmarking studies, so we must be sure we have these ready as it will aid us in increasing our lead count and subsequent ROI.
–Average conversion rate for e-commerce is 2%.
How Do We Plan To Measure
First, hopefully reading this research has opened eyes to the time needed into the building, optimizing, and analyzing a website before you can expect to see results and achieve realistic goals. With this in mind, there needs to be a certain amount of time devoted to the website DAILY. A blog post could take 2 hours to write, social media could take an hour, and another hour just spent for analyzing website traffic and following up with leads. 4 HOURS NEEDED DAILY for web/digital marketing measurement and content production. If this is approved, you can expect to see good results for measuring the effectiveness of our website efforts for new business development.
Google Analytics provides powerful digital analytics for anyone with a web presence, large or small. It’s one of the most powerful digital analytics solutions available – and it’s free for anyone to use. This is hands down the best solution for us measuring the website but will take time for me to learn as well in the beginning. I am confident I can learn it and get great results with it. See the full list of benefits Analytics offers
Executives can learn:
- Which marketing initiatives are most effective
- Accurate website traffic patterns/trends
- Which customer and customer segments are most valuable
Marketing Professionals can learn:
- Where visitors come from and what do they do on the site
- How can the website convert more visitors into customers
- Which keywords resonate with prospects and lead to conversions
- Which online ad or creative is the most effective
Content & Developers can learn:
- Where people leave the site
- Which pages retain visitors the longest
- What search terms people use to find the site
VII Analyze: Make an Excel Spreadsheet for recording
Make a spreadsheet to record daily.
Sources:
http://www.panalysis.com/resources/articles/understanding-time-on-site.aspx
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2013967/5-ways-to-use-your-bounce-rate-to-improve-your-website.html
http://todaymade.com/blog/the-secret-to-using-your-website-to-generate-new-leads/
http://www.leveltendesign.com/blog/jon-webb/best-times-follow-website-leads#.UVWomehfeRs
http://www.inboundsales.net/blog/bid/52277/Stop-Dropping-the-Ball-on-Lead-Follow-Up
http://www.b2bmarketinginsider.com/demand-generation/7-tips-for-successful-lead-follow-up
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/15-tips-to-speed-up-your-website
http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1008065