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Website Marketing Analytics To Track For Business Growth

Website Marketing Analytics

Your website is your largest marketing asset and one of your most expensive. A website created specifically for business growth can be a powerful marketing tool. In order to know if this marketing tool is working to drive business, you need to track and review key metrics.

There are so many website marketing analytics data points that can be viewed and tracked which can be overwhelming if you don’t know how the data affects your marketing or your business. The main data points to track for a business growth driven website are the following:

  • Google My Business insights
  • Events identified as leads or sales (calls, schedule an appointment, purchase)
  • Unique Users To Your Site
  • Referral Source of where the users are coming from
  • Total page views
  • Bounce rate

Below we will review these data points in detail plus cover others that will help you understand better if you are meeting your marketing goals. We will review additional data points based on whether you have a service or product-based business. These insights into data will help you make better marketing decisions for your business and build better relationships with your customers.

Why Website Marketing Analytics Is Important

The ultimate purpose of your business is to help your customers with your services or products. In order to do this, you need to generate leads to your website which helps people understand your business and decide if you are a good fit for them.

Using your website as a primary marketing vehicle to attract and inspire potential customers is a great marketing objective. All marketing objectives need to be tracked and measured to better understand if you are meeting your business goals. Tracking the right data points allows you to see if your website is really supporting your business goals.

Understanding what is working on your website to help your customers is just as important as knowing what may not be working so you can figure out how to change it to work better for your customers and potential customers. This is why website marketing analytics is so important for your business. It helps you create a better experience that encourages leads to becoming customers and it gives you the information you need to make better decisions and choices when it comes to marketing.

Data Points To Track For All Businesses

Regardless if you are a service-based business or a product-based business there are a core set of website marketing analytics data points you need to collect every month and take a look at to see how well your website is supporting your customers and your leads to get what they need from you. If you track nothing else these primary data points will be able to help you understand if your website is helping your business grow

Google My Business Insights

Google My Business is a free tool that is shown in google search to help people connect with a business that they need. It is free to you and to those using the search engine which makes it a very popular tool. So much so that users have started using the Google My Business listing panel as a mini-website for the business. It is a great way for users to decide if they want to learn more about a business or not.

Tracking the Insights data along with your website data helps you see the full picture of the people engaging with your website. Many users will click on the telephone number or scroll through product images in your Google My Business listing without ever getting to your website.

Events

Every single one of your customers started as a lead to your business. Website marketing analytics tracking of your leads is important to understanding the way that your customers like to interact with you. These are known as your calls to action. Examples of calls to action are

  • call us
  • schedule an appointment
  • buy buttons
  • sign up for a newsletter

Keeping track of which of these calls to action have been used gives you a total of how many people are opening a conversation with you as well as their primary method of communication.

Reviewing and using this data can help you change the placement of calls to action on your website and help you decide what calls to action to use with other marketing campaigns.

An example of this is if your most-used call to action on your website is clicking on the telephone number to call you can run a google ad that includes your telephone number allowing people to call you from the ad rather than just clicking through to the website.

Unique Users To Your Site

A great way to see if your outbound marketing campaigns are getting people to your website is by using the website marketing analytics data point of unique users. A unique user is a visitor to your website who counts as 1 person. That person may come to your site many times in a given time frame but this metric counts them only once.

Watch this metric over time to understand how visitors ebb and flow each month. When you see a greater increase over a time period you can investigate and look at other data points to see why this is happening or if you are running specific marketing campaigns on your website you can see the impact of those campaigns by viewing this website marketing analytics data.

If you are not seeing the users or traffic to the website you expected from a specific campaign then you can test alternatives for that campaign to improve the outcomes of the campaign and track the change with the same data points.

Referral Source of where the users are coming from

Knowing where the users of the website are coming from is just as important as how many are coming to your website. You may be running multiple types of marketing campaigns in order to get more leads to your website. Understanding where everyone is coming from can help you decide where to put more money or time into your marketing campaigns.

For example, if you see that in any given month the majority of your traffic is coming from your social media channels and specifically from LinkedIn vs Facebook you can modify your content creation to focus on the LinkedIn community rather than Facebook to see if that increases the LinkedIn referral source count.

Total page views

The journey that someone takes to become a lead for your business is predictable. They come to your website through a page, and look at usually 2 -3 more pages before deciding to taking action which is either a primary action to purchase or engage in services or a secondary action such as signing up for a newsletter or downloading informational material.

Tracking your total number of page views and your average page views per session is a great way to understand what people are doing once they come to your website.

If you are seeing a 1:1 ratio 1-page view per user along with a high bounce rate (usually 70% or more) then people are not connecting with your messaging or your offerings. They don’t feel like it’s something that is right for them.

In this case, take a look at the language you are using on your home page. Your home page is typically the first page users come to the majority of the time. Are you empathizing with them about the problem they have regarding your product or service? If not change your language to acknowledge their problems and fears and how your business can help them. People tend to engage more with businesses they feel like “get them” and want to support them as a person not just get the sale.

The other things to look at are the images you are using on your website. Do they visually support the message you are conveying with your text? We are visual people and we get more from images and videos faster than we do with reading text.

Once you make these changes keep an eye on your page views and see if the total number increases. If you see an increase then you know that your changes were effective. A good next step is to repeat that process on the other pages that people usually get to first.

Bounce rate

Bounce rate is how long a person stays on your site before they leave. This along with page views gives you a full picture of how people are using your website. Knowing how long they stay or how quickly they leave can give you a better understanding of what to change or not change on your website.

If a user comes to your website via an article you wrote they may stay on your site for 5 – 6 mins but not click on too many pages. They may finish the article and sign up for your newsletter. This is a good event, it means they liked the content enough to get more from you in the future. Another scenario may be that they come to a product page, then quickly click on one more product, and then leave your site after 1 min. This indicates they did not find what they were looking for.

Don’t look at this at an individual level but rather look at the data holistically for a period of time and review your averages. Your averages may tell you there are no issues because your page views and bounce rate are normal for your industry.

You can also use this data to improve your averages by making tweaks to images, copy, and videos to improve page views and reduce bounce rates.

For additional information, inspiration, and help with understanding website marketing analytics we recommend reading Cult Of Analytics written by Steve Jackson. This book is specifically for marketing data analytics and has real-world examples and case studies to help you interpret your data better.

Specific Service-Based Business Website Data Points To Track

There are additional website marketing analytics metrics you can track that are specific to service-based businesses. Since customers don’t purchase directly from your website it’s important to track leads and how they come to you.

Specific events serviced based businesses should track are

  • Calls from the website and google my business listing
  • Contact Form submissions
  • Appointment scheduling link clicks
  • Chat Bot engagement

If you create landing pages for your campaigns make sure you are tracking all the website marketing analytic metrics specifically for those pages.

If you use video on your website to demonstrate your services or have clients give you video testimonials then you should also track your view views on your website to see how effective the videos are. If you only get a 1 – 5% completion rate of your videos then the video is not giving users what they need.

Specific eCommerce and Product Based Business Website Data Points To Track

eCommerce and product-based websites have additional metrics from the website marketing analytics that should be tracked. People may not purchase from you on the first visit but they may add to the cart to save for later or download additional support materials that you offer. Additional metrics to track are:

  • Abandoned cart rates
  • Abandon cart recovery
  • Behavior Flow

Behavior flow lets you see what page they started from and what they clicked on next for the time frame. This allows you to group logical items together from the point of view of your customer. You can use this data to create a better user experience by recommending the next logical item they would want.

Behavior flow data can also be used in email marketing or digital ad campaigns to show multiple items together to increase the total number of items per sale.

Website Marketing Analytics Made Easy With Google Data Studio

As a whole website marketing analytics metrics can be found in Google Analytics. But oftentimes you have other sources of data that you need to review as well. Search data, purchase data from Shopify, social media, and Digital Ad data. Looking at all of this data in one report rather than in separate reports can be extremely beneficial to you.

Having all of your key metrics data on one report allows you to see how the data points relate to each other quickly. For example, if you see a lot of website usage coming from Facebook you can look at your Facebook posts to see which post drove that click through, was it a video post or a call to action post? You can then create more content to try to replicate these results.

Google Data Studio
Supermetrics

We build dashboard reports for our clients and review them with them every month. We utilize Google Data Studio as the report creation platform and aggregate the data from all these different sources with Supermetrics.

We have found that for the price Supermetrics is very affordable, its data connections are consistent and connect to over 70 data sources.

I hope you found this article helpful to understand your website marketing analytics better so you can focus on your growth goal and serve your customer community better. Feel free to reach out via chat if you have any questions. We are always happy to answer questions. If you want our content delivered to your inbox Sign up for our newsletter. You get great content and exclusive offers by being a member.

If you like this article, consider sharing it with other business owners you know.  Use the sharing links below. We also recommend reading our higher-level article Data Analytics Is Necessary In Marketing Led Business Growth where we share additional metrics to track your marketing campaigns as well.

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