Measuring the number of visitors to your website isn’t just an advanced form of people watching, it is also important to the success of your business as it enables you to understand which of your marketing campaigns are working and which are not. There are a number of ways you can collect this information and to help you get started we’ve listed a few of the best below.
Google Analytics
This free tool tracks visitors from all sources, for example search engines or email marketing. It can show you which pages aren’t working well and can also track your sales activity and performance. The information you get can be basic or in depth depending on what you want to know. Google offers free analytics lessons to make sure you get the most out of it, so with a little bit of time spent on set up you can collect an enormous amount of information such as:
- Search phrase used to find your site
- Devices/resolutions your visitors are using
- Time spent on site
- Pages looked at
- Amount of visitor that leave without looking around
AdWords
AdWords enable you to measure your ad campaigns and see which phrases are converting to sales and how much you are spending/making. By measuring the success of your marketing campaigns you can optimise or cull adverts depending on how they are performing. If you use Google AdWord management effectively you’ll find sales increase as only targeted traffic will be driven to your website. In other words, only people who are looking for your product will find themselves on your website. This means your sales are boosted, and you’ll also appear higher on search engine results pages which will increase sales even more.
A/B testing
Put simply A/B testing is like a basic science experiment, you have version A (the control) and version B (the new design) and you measure their success. When it comes to website experiments you split your traffic between the two sites and measure their performance. The features you should test are:
- Call to action – words, size, colour and placement
- Headline/product description
- Form length and types of field
- Product pricing and promotional offers
- Images
- Amount of text – short vs. long
If you’re looking for a free and easy way to get started try Google Analytics Content Experiments and take the next step in website performance measurement.
So now you know how to measure your websites performance it’s important to get started as soon as possible. The information you gather can help you maximise your sales and make sure your marketing campaigns are as good as they can be. Everyone wants the best for their business so don’t delay, start measuring your websites performance today!
