Want to pick up the gauntlet and succeed in your digital marketing battle?
You probably know that analysing performance, commonly referred to as Key Performance Indicators, is critical to the success of your website. Monitoring your stats can give you information on how to improve your website to get even better results. Since there are countless different KPIs, you do not have to consider them all. Instead, you need to ask yourself - Which metrics should you measure?
We will show you how to measure success using a variety of KPIs for website performance and how to choose the ones that best fit your website and business needs.
Selecting website KPIs
How do you understand website KPI?
Let us first review your knowledge of what KPIs exactly are before we get into the optimal KPIs for your business. A Key Performance Indicator (KPI) is an essential metric for evaluating the success and strategy of your website. Many KPIs evaluate business and programme effectiveness against its goals, such as revenue, engagement, and customer retention.
The truth is that there are plenty of KPIs to choose from to gauge your success, but few of them are like gold dust - it depends on your website’s goals and your business profile. The bottom line is that you should clearly define the Key Performance Indicators for your website and apply them with care. They need to align with business goals dynamically and measurably.
And if you get it right, KPIs not only boost your website’s performance but also draw your attention to potential areas of improvement. These are vital to your company’s success, such as overall strategy, spending, or new business initiatives.
KPI for website performance
“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”
– Albert Einstein
There are several aspects to consider when developing KPIs for your website. For example, for an e-commerce website, the main objective might be to increase direct sales, and tracking conversion rate and abandonment rate might be beneficial. However, if your website is a lead generation tool whose primary goal is to inform and pique customer interest, a better KPI would be to measure content downloads and monitor lead abandonment rates.
Below are our top picks for the most meaningful and useful metrics for various areas, including marketing, sales, IT or analytics.
Conversion Rate
Everyone wants to know how many users complete a purchase on their website. If you focus on your website’s transaction volume, the conversion rate is an indicator to keep an eye on. However, the conversion rate is not just about sales - visitors can also sign up for your newsletter, receive an electronic book, or register for a webinar through conversion rate. Visitors who fill out forms and download free content are the starting point for converting into buyers later. On the other hand, you should examine why some visitors are failing to convert. What’s driving them away, and what can you do to change that?
Bounce rate
Bounce rate refers to the number of users who leave the website after viewing a subpage instead of continuing to view other content. Monitoring your bounce rate will tell you how your website’s content and style generate further interest. Sometimes a high bounce rate can be a positive signal that visitors are only staying on blog article pages and diving into the content. However, when it comes to direct sales, several negative factors can play a role, such as technical errors like delayed loading or unclear design.
Time prior to shopping
If your site takes several visits before a user purchases from you, it’s not an immediate disaster. They may be learning about your site ahead of time via blog posts or visiting subpages to learn more about your company. The problem occurs when users decide not to buy because the marketing mix is ill-calibrated. It’s worth taking the time to analyse this metric by monitoring it with Google Analytics.
Usability
It’s essential to monitor this KPI for website performance because it’s tied to multiple business goals, from customer satisfaction to customer value. You can observe this metric, among many others, using the following variables: Time to Complete a Task, which is the time it takes users to complete necessary actions on the site, or System Usability Scale, which is based on surveys that assess customers’ views of usability. What’s more, you can determine if improvements to the site contribute to its overall usability by monitoring one or more of these variables.
Engagement
You should not design your website to meet minimal marketing needs. The website is your company’s flagship, so you should do your best to increase user engagement and brand awareness through dazzling but professional design, functionality, and content. By monitoring the following metrics, you can measure customer engagement, such as their first impressions after visiting the website for the first time or their interactions with your brand on social media. Customer engagement is closely related to overall profit growth, as engaged users are more likely to purchase and share the service with others.
UX satisfaction
As you know, customer satisfaction is a milestone for all online services. If users do not get the best experience, they will turn to your competitors. And this is where the shoe pinches because customer satisfaction is a very subjective metric for most people. It’s a pretty hard metric to track - and yet it’s doable. You can start with parameters like bounce rate analysis and the number of qualified leads - people who completed their purchase. But to improve customer satisfaction, get busy with surveys! Use a tool like SurveyMonkey to survey your customers so you can analyse their impressions of the site.
Is there more?
Embrace SMART metrics - To define and narrow down KPIs, embrace the SMAT acronym (Specific, Measurable, Relevant, Time-Bound). Your goals can be challenging, but with the right plan, they can be achieved. On the other hand, if your KPI cannot lead to an action or trigger a decision, you might want to write it off. So, avoid choosing vanity metrics as your most important KPIs. A vanity metric allows you to feel good about your site’s performance, but it does not show the actual value of your efforts.
They should not be your main priorities as they cannot reflect conversion. Examples of vanity metrics are - test users and page views, while their smarter equivalents should instead be converting users and bounce rate.
Set your goals for your website
Numbers alone will tell you nothing. You must first set your goals, and then the most critical measurements will emerge. All of your improvements should be aimed at keeping visitors on the site longer so that your marketing team can carry out its job better.
Try out the proper KPI for website performance and start documenting and reviewing your results in the long run. This method is your most reliable way to understand your position and create a more robust and thoughtful future for your website, and, in turn, solidify your business.
